By Ernie McCray
Not too long ago I shared thoughts on Facebook regarding “The Good Old Days” being a sham and how I’d like there to be such days some day for my grandson, Lyric, and my mind stayed in the same kind of groove which led to the following:
Photo by HeadOvMetal / Flickr
As Lyric, bypassed the slides
and the swings,
deciding against those things
to shake and rock
the purple dinosaur,
my mind soared to a day
back around ’43 or ’44,
when my buddies and I made our way
to a park to play.
And, no sooner than we
reached our destination,
music began to play:
snappy drum and bugle corps
kinds of tunes
to help Americans keep
a stiff upper lip
with its sons off to war
on foot, and in tanks, and on ships.
So we decided to “git jiggy wit it,”
or whatever we did back then.
But before we could join the fun
a man close to where the music was coming from
snatched a microphone
off a stand and began a rap
about people he called “Japs!”
and all around him, as he spat
about Japs doing this and Japs doing that
and Japs being lower than rats,
there were colorful posters of Japs
all yellow and buck-toothed
and slant-eyed and jeopardized,
with messages like:
“Smack the Japs!”
“Whack the Jap on the Back of His Lap!”
“Salvage Scrap to Blast the Jap!”
“We don’t want any Japs!”
“Get those Japs!”
It was some kind of scene
and we kids joined in
running around frantically
with cocked fingers
blowing the offspring
of Japan to smithereens,
not knowing any Japanese
because, unknown to us, people of such ancestry
were in custody in camps as internees
due to imagined and contrived disloyalties.
And for days
and weeks
and months
and years
it was our routine
to make
“Pa-Pa-Pow-Pow-Rat-a-Tat-Tat” noises,
as we dropped Japs (and Indians) in their tracks,
on the run,
for fun,
in the Tucson sun.
And, oh, when the day was done,
such war games were number one
on the list of shoot-em up games we would play
in the course of a day,
living illustrations
of how easy it is to learn to hate,
to be caught up in a frightful social disease
that, like cancer,
can metastasize wildly and freely
and eat away at a society’s
reasoning capabilities
and it dies ever so slowly,
hatred does,
like hurricanes
refusing to let their winds
relax into a breeze –
like it has with some
long in the tooth and close to the bone
folks “going home,”
still nurturing animosities
towards the Japanese.
So for Lyric and his generation
I wish with a “Pretty please”
that we find a cure
for the loathing we now see
for believers in Islam, generally,
because of what we think they believe.
And when I hear talk about
Muslims carrying a special religious ID
and being surveilled
in this, the Land of the Free,
my memory
goes back to a day
in a park in the early 40’s:
A “Good Old Days” day.
That’s scary to me.
Ernie McCray
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sadly were seeing replay of that hate and fear today
Sadly were seeing a replay of that hate and fear today
So sad to see.
Would that we could learn from past mistakes.
HI ERNIE: Well My Man; you’ve done it again! Just another sensational scribe. As I read this piece, my mind went back to a similar situation I observed growing up in San Diego during the 1940’s. On Saturday afternoons, my folks would drop my brother (Oliver) and I off at the VIctory Theater (on Imperial Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets), where a full house of neighborhood kids would always cheer the cowboys while they murdered one Native American after another. We would then go home and play “Cowboys and Indians,” repeating the same violence we viewed the weekend before. And guess what? None of the cowboys looked like us!
As such events were evolving in San Diego, I am sure the same things were happening in Tucson too. And as I completed reading your current post, my mind shifted to a more positive place, but still reeking with disgust as we chat today. The fact of the matter is, our childhood communities were thriving with businesses with ebon hued owners. I can remember
“the good old days” of Imperial Avenue when it was lined with such things as barber shops, beauty salons, restaurants, grocery stores, night spots, card rooms, liquor stores, churches, professional offices, drug stores, a funeral home and the “Light House” newspaper, which had as its motto: “So the people might find their way.” Now here is the the deep and heavy irony of it all; what do our once thriving neighborhoods look like today? And to add even greater sadness to the madness, a large slice of certain Americans are seeking return to “the good old days” prior to the pre-Civil Rights era!!! Oh yes, once more “Thank You” for your remarks in an earlier post, in support of my recent literary endeavor.
Oh, how I remember the “Cowboys and Indians” days, on Saturdays, after watching Hopalong Cassidy or Johnny Mack Brown or Whip Wilson or Red Ryder, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger… A whole lot of shooting, at play, everyday…
“Hitler is jerk,
Mussolini is a meany,
and all the Japs are worse!”
I learned that tune about seventy-five years ago. Hatred can become our fairy tales, our culture. Thank the gods that we are fast friends with the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese. There are Muslims in almost every nation. The bourgeois/burger king wants to mark the Muslims and keep them out…out where? They belong everywhere.