Mountain Views News          Saturday, July 24, 2010

8

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, July 24, 2010 

STUART TOLCHIN ..........On LIFE

HAIL Hamilton

My Turn

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High School Never Ends

Is The American Dream For Sale?

Over the past 
couple of nights 
I have become 
addicted to Mad 
Men, a series about 
the advertising 
firms of Madison 
Avenue. I know 
I’m a little late, in 
that the show begins its fourth season 
right about the time this paper hits the 
stands. Yes, I know it has already won 
awards and Emmys, but I had never 
seen the show. I take it back. I saw 
one episode a few years ago and hated 
it. There did not seem to be any good 
guys. Everyone was corrupt, smoking 
like chimneys, drinking like fish, and 
acting like permanent high-school 
sophomores. Who needs to watch 
television for this; I see it every day 
around me in Court.

 Now I have watched almost the 
full first three seasons ands I have a 
different picture. The series is about 
the late 1950’s and early 1960’s; times 
of transition in America. It is a time 
of a new prosperity as the days of 
scarcity disappear and people find 
money in their pockets and are 
looking for new ways to spend it. 
New technology appears. Televisions 
are bringing entertainment right into 
the home. Furthermore, the rules are 
changing. Women are obtaining jobs 
that were formerly reserved only for 
men. People are confused about what 
the new rules are and what their goals 
should be. The change is so drastic 
that the generations can no longer talk 
to one another. The overall feeling 
is that the good life, the American 
dream, is out there somewhere and it 
can be purchased. Material wealth is 
all important and one needs more and 
more stuff to be happy.

 All important in this new dream 
is the power of advertising. A special 
feature attached to one of the first 
year’s discs informs us that the average 
person comes into contact with 4,000 
advertisements per day. Who knows—
but who’s counting? The series is 
about the power of advertising and 
how advertising plants seeds in our 
vulnerable minds, creating cravings 
for items we never even knew existed 
a couple of weeks ago. Of course, 
marriages break up and no one 
seems committed to anything but 
maintaining their own lies.

 I believe the series is intended to 
be compared to our own times, but 
in reverse. Now is not a period of 
new abundance, but is rather a time 
of increasing and seemingly never 
ending scarcity. Are we prepared for 
these new lives? Instead of children 
being off on their own, more and more 
families find their twenty-five year 
old children still living with them. 
Respect between the generations is 
even more difficult as the older people 
have trouble clinging to their own jobs 
and job opportunities for the young 
remain scarce. Times are tough even 
for the young professional as they 
emerge from graduate schools with 
incredible loan burdens. Unlike the 
present, the wars in Mad Men have 
ended but with the Cuban missile 
crisis and the presence of “advisors” 
in Viet Nam, new wars are just around 
the corner. 

 The great similarity in the periods is 
that in both periods we have become 
our own worst enemies. We felt 
then, and we feel now, that we are 
inadequate. We need more. Then, the 
message was to buy more stuff. The 
Dream could be bought. Well, today 
our pockets are pretty empty. We all 
recognize, or should recognize, that 
as a nation and as individuals we 
have made mistakes. We have over-
spent and squandered our prestige, 
power, and wealth. Furthermore, 
looking back on it, things were not 
that great even we had money in our 
pockets and could make the mortgage 
payments. We still wanted more.

 Just a short time ago many of us 
were overjoyed with the election 
of our new President who together 
with his wonderful wife and family 
should really make us all proud. Still 
it is reminiscent of the 1960s when a 
handsome President and his beautiful 
family entered the White House. Soon 
great changes occurred in the area 
of Civil Rights but the safety of the 
world was imperiled and we suffered 
through periods of great national 
embarrassment as the war continued.

 Who knows where we are heading 
right now, but it feels like we really 
have to walk fast to stay in the same 
place. Technology keeps moving 
right along and the impossible soon 
seems commonplace. My major fear 
is that we don’t have enough time to 
notice what is personally important 
and are being manipulated into a 
pursuit of disaster. Maybe the major 
contribution of the twentieth century 
is the rise of advertising. After all, the 
father of modern advertising was the 
brother-in-law of Sigmund Freud. (I 
wonder if you knew that.) My hope 
is that we manage to maintain some 
clarity in our busy lives and stay 
free of the duplicitous messages that 
surround us. Yes, each of us must 
try and steer clear of the Mad Men 
who war against our most vulnerable 
place-our hopefully individual minds.

 Recently I attended 
a high 
school reunion 
dinner at the 
Balboa Bay Club 
of my graduating 
class from John 
Muir High School. It was the first time I had 
seen most of my Mustang classmates in more 
than 40 years. When I entered the banquet 
room all my old high school memories surfaced. 
I was reminded of the lyrics from the 
Bowling for Soup hit, “High School Never 
Ends.” 

Four years, you think for sure

That’s all you’ve got to endure

All the total dicks, all the stuck-up chicks

So superficial, so immature

And then when you graduate

You take a look around and you say, “Hey, 
wait!”

This is the same as where I just came from

I thought it was over, oh, that’s just great

The whole damned world is just as obsessed

With who’s the best dressed and who’s having 
sex

Who’s got the money, who gets the honeys

Who’s kinda cute and who’s just a mess...

And the only thing that matters

Is climbing up that social ladder

Still care about your hair and the car you 
drive

Doesn’t matter if you’re sixty or thirty-five... 

 I was pleasantly surprised however. A 
few of the old “jocks” and social elites were 
there but the old “clicks” we used to belong 
to were conspicuously absent. Everyone had 
mellowed with time and seemed genuinely 
interested in getting reacquainted with each 
other and reminiscing about old times. 
What struck me most was the level of 
accomplishment and contributions my class 
had made during a time of so much dramatic 
social change.

 Of the thirty or so who attended, all 
had gone to college, many had graduated 
with honors, and some had gone on to 
graduate school to become doctors, lawyers, 
accountants, scientists, engineers, executives, 
and entrepreneurs of various kinds. Four 
were decorated combat veterans, three had 
been professional athletes, and two were 
renowned filmmakers. One was a high 
school teacher who writes a column in a local 
weekly newspaper.

 Talking with my old classmates I learned 
how different yet similar our lives had 
become. Some of us were conservative 
Republicans, others were liberal Democrats, 
and still others considered themselves 
unreformed ‘60s radicals. We were a diverse 
group--socially, politically, and racially--
to be sure. But whatever our differences we 
all shared the same core values of honesty, 
respect and loyalty we had learned from 
our parents and teachers. We also talked 
about many of the memorable experiences 
and common characteristics we shared as a 
generation.

• Memorable experiences: 
assassination of JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, and 
Martin Luther King Jr., walk on the moon, 
risk of the draft, the Vietnam War, credibility 
gap, anti-war protests, riots, Watergate, 
social experimentation, sexual freedom, 
Roe v. Wade, Stonewall Riots, civil rights 
movement, environmental movement, 
women’s movement, Woodstock and similar 
music festivals, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, 
the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the 
Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, Chicago, 
Santana, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi 
Hendrix, experimentation with marijuana, 
LSD and various other intoxicating 
recreational substances; we were the White 
Rabbit and we were all ten feet tall!

• Common characteristics: curious, 
experimental, free spirited, individualism, 
social cause oriented, egalitarian; it was 
the dawn of Aquarius and we believed our 
generation would change the world forever 
for the better.

 I was disappointed that no tea-baggers, 
birthers, or born again Christians had 
decided to attend. I’d heard rumors for years 
that some of my classmates had joined the 
political and religious right. I would have 
liked to have talked to them and maybe 
gained some insight into their beliefs and 
ideology. But that was not to be.

 One subject I noticed was curiously 
avoided--our demise. Although everybody 
knew a classmate who had died, there was no 
talk of our own mortality. It was as though we 
were all in a state of denial regarding our own 
aging and death. Although there was much 
talk about retirement, healthy lifestyles, and 
leisure, there was none about old age and 
death.

 As I drove home that night I couldn’t help 
thinking back to the summer I graduated 
from high school. It was a simpler, carefree 
time when my whole life was still a head 
of me and anything was possible. Life was 
an adventure and I lived in the now. The 
future would take care of itself. I remember 
the three most important things to me were 
surfing, the opposite sex and, what plans my 
friends and I had for Saturday night? Now 
I spend my Saturday nights with my wife; 
everything else is pretty much the same.

And I still don’t have the right look

And I still have the same three friends

And I’m pretty much the same 

as I was back then

High school never ends

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Left Turn/Right Turn

GREG Welborn

RACISM IN AMERICA

HOWARD Hays 

As I See It

 I can imagine the typical 
family discussion around 
the kitchen table:

 

 “Dad, are we going to get 
something to eat tonight?”

 

“No, but someday your own 
kids are going to thank Senate Republicans for 
having blocked extension of unemployment 
benefits, thereby not risking an increase in the 
national debt they’d have to deal with.”

 

“Gee Dad, that’s swell.   Those Senate 
Republicans are always looking out for us!”

 

 Actually, that discussion is not going to 
take place - now that the sixty Senate votes 
have been acquired to resume payments, 
retroactive to last June.

   Listening to Republicans tell it, though, 
their attempts to block the extension was, in 
fact, an employment program in itself.   As 
Sen. John Kyle (R-AZ) said,”continuing to 
pay people unemployment compensation is a 
disincentive for them to seek new work.”   Why 
get a job, when you can live a life of leisure off 
your $300 weekly check from the government 
(about 74% of poverty level for a family of 
four)?     Media personality and former Nixon 
speechwriter Ben Stein has a different take on 
the unemployed; “The people who have been 
laid off and cannot find work are generally 
people with poor work habits and poor 
personalities.”   I’m not sure if Mr. Stein has 
anybody specific in mind, or if he’s applying 
this characterization collectively to the 15 
million Americans currently unemployed.   If 
so, a whole bunch of people somehow came 
down with “poor personalities” from the time 
of 6% unemployment before the recession to 
the almost 10% today.

   As mentioned in my column last week, 
Republicans insisted that the $33 billion 
in extended unemployment benefits be 
“paid for”, but not to worry about the $678 
billion cost of extending the Bush tax cuts 
for wealthy Americans for another ten years. 
  
When asked about this dichotomy, Sen. John 
Barrasso (R-WY) helpfully suggested we 
could tap into the “unallocated” money from 
the stimulus fund.   One problem is that the 
not-really-unallocated portion the Senator 
refers to amounts to $362 billion, or only a 
bit more than half of what’s needed for the 
tax cut extension.   Another problem is that 
a third of that has already been “dedicated” 
- to tax cuts for the poor and middle class. 
  
I suppose that might make sense to some 
people - sacrificing middle class tax cuts in 
order to ease the burden on those already 
pulling in over $250,000 a year.

   There’s also the matter of miserly reticence in 
bailing out American families trying to keep 
their homes and feed their kids, but not when 
it comes to a no-questions-asked bailout of 
AIG  - which, at $180 billion, was almost six 
times the cost of the unemployment benefits 
extension.   Unless I missed something, there 
was no such Republican grandstanding when 
the Federal Reserve shelled out $1.2 trillion 
for the “toxic” assets the banks sought to 
unload.

   Many of us on the “left” have complained 
that while Republicans approach issues 
with an in-your-face conviction, sometimes 
Democrats are too tempered by notions 
of civility and compromise.   It’s refreshing 
to occasionally hear the likes of Rep. Alan 
Grayson (D-FL), Harvard Law School 
grad and telecommunications millionaire 
who, before entering Congress, worked on 
exposing corrupt private contractors in Iraq. 
  
These are comments he made in the House 
Chamber earlier this week:

   “Thank you.   My grandfather, in the 
1930’s, spent several years of his life, every 
single day, went to the dump, looking for 
things there that he could sell.   Looking for 
things he could take to the market and sell 
because there was no other way he could 
survive the 1930’s in the Great Depression. 
  
There was no unemployment insurance back 
then, there were no state benefits back then. 
  
There was no help for the people that had no 
jobs.   All they could do, like my grandfather, 
in desperate straits, supporting a family of 
seven, was to go to the dump and desperately 
try to find something that he could sell.   

   “And that, my friends, is the America that 
the Republicans are trying to revive.   The 
America of desperate straits, and for them, 
cheap labor.   The America where people 
have nothing, hope for nothing, and are 
desperate to live for the next day.   That is 
what the Republicans are trying to resurrect 
by blocking unemployment insurance day 
after day, week after week, and now month 
after month.

   “I’ve got news for my Republican friends; 
every single person who’s going to receive 
unemployment insurance under this bill 
- is unemployed.   Every single one of them 
doesn’t have a job - and that’s why they 
need this money.   Now, I know what the 
Republicans are thinking; they’re thinking, 
why don’t they just sell some stock?   If they’re 
in really dire straits, maybe they could take 
some of their art collection and send it off 
to the auctioneer.   And if they’re in deep, 
deep trouble, maybe those unemployed 
can sell one of their yachts.   That’s what the 
Republicans are thinking right now.

   “But that’s not the life of ordinary people, 
the 99% of America that actually have to work 
for a living; that doesn’t just clip coupons and 
live off of interest and dividends, like my 
Republican friends do.

   “That’s why we need this bill to pass, 
because of the 99% of America that deals 
with reality every day; the people who will 
lose their homes if this doesn’t pass, the 
people who will be living in their cars if this 
doesn’t pass.

   “That’s why we need this to pass.   And I 
will say this to Republicans who have blocked 
this bill now for months, and kept food out 
the mouths of children; I will say to them 
now, May God have mercy on your souls.   I 
yield back.”   

 
We have a lot to learn about racism in this country, about 
where it is really found and where it isn’t found. Two of the 
most recent compelling lessons come out of the NAACP. The 
first involves the speech that Shirley Sherrod, an official with 
the Agriculture Department, gave to an NAACP conference. 
The second involves the NAACP’s official policy toward the 
Tea Party movement. What both painfully illustrate is just how 
racist many black leaders have become.

 The Shirley Sherrod story is an evolving one but, as is usually 
the case, the media focus is in the wrong place. A tape recently surfaced showing 
Ms. Sherrod telling an NAACP audience about how she didn’t want to help a white 
farmer. She described him as acting superior, told the audience she wanted to put 
him in his place, admitted to not helping him as much as she could have, and then 
ultimately referring him to “one of his own” for help. To Ms. Sherrod’s credit, she 
was using her experience with this white farmer to illustrate how she battled racism 
and how she ultimately overcame her own prejudices to eventually work with this 
man and save his farm. The media has focused on Ms. Sherrod’s firing and now on 
the efforts by the administration to apologize for that same termination. But that’s 
not the real story.

 The real story is found in the NAACP audience’s reaction to Ms. Sherrod’s initial 
comments. As she is telling her story, it is not clear at all where she’s going to end. 
Nobody in the audience knows she’s going to say that her feelings were wrong. She’s 
setting them up to learn a lesson, but one can’t help but wonder why they haven’t 
already learned this lesson. As she tells her tale, the audience can be seen nodding 
and heard intoning agreement as she accuses the white farmer of acting superior, 
admits to not helping him as much as she could and ultimately sends him to “one of 
his own” rather than do the job she was paid to do. 

 I, like many other conservative writers, had hoped that the election of Barak 
Obama as President would put to rest the lie that America is a racist nation. No other 
country, empire, kingdom or superpower has ever willingly elected a member of its 
minority to its highest position of power – and especially not by the huge margin 
that we did. Most Americans realize that America is the least racist country in the 
world. Among those who know this to be true are the blacks who have willingly 
immigrated to this country from Africa in search of freedom and opportunity. As if 
further proof were needed, consider that one of the most popular female celebrities 
(and richest woman in America) is Oprah Winfrey, that one of the most esteemed 
supreme court justices is Clarence Thomas, and that two Secretaries of State (Collin 
Powell and Condoleezza Rice) were black. 

 The NAACP’s leadership recently branded the Tea Party movement as racist. This 
is despite, in my opinion, the absence of any substantive evidence of racism on the 
part of the Tea Party organization, its leaders or its members. I personally have 
been to several Tea Party events, and I have never met a more open and inviting 
group of people. Americans who simply want to reduce the size of government 
and the burden of taxation are willingly accepted without any regard whatsoever 
for ethnicity, origin, race, color or any other physical characteristic. Tea Party 
members are simply concerned for the fate of their country and the size of the 
debt that will be placed onto the backs of their children. Yes, they stand against the 
policies of Barak Obama, but they would do so if John Kerry, Al Gore, Harry Reid 
or Nancy Pelosi were president. Race has nothing to do with this.

 Within one of our local churches here in the San Gabriel Valley, a black pastor 
accused me of being a racist simply because I didn’t see him as a black man and 
didn’t properly allow for the celebration of his “blackness”. I had made the mistake 
of telling him and others in the congregation that when I thought of him, I didn’t 
think of a black man, that I don’t think of people in terms of their color or origin, 
that I simply think of them in terms of their character and quality. I had told him 
that I thought of him as an amazingly gifted preacher with a heart for ministry and 
a blessing to the church. In his view, and in the view of so many other black leaders, 
that makes me racist.

 It is truly heartbreaking to realize that racism is in fact alive and well, and 
that today’s racism is being nurtured and grown, among those who should know 
better, as a cure and counter to yesterday’s racism. What Americans need to know 
is that racism of any type is a cancer in our culture. When one ascribes feelings, 
characteristics or beliefs to another group simply because of their race, that person 
is a racist. It doesn’t matter whether that person is black or white, the descendant of 
a slave or slave owner, or a leader or an average Joe. 

 I’ll close by loosely quoting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “the way to 
stop racial discrimination is to stop using race in decision making.” That seems like 
pretty obvious common sense to me, and I think that most Americans would agree. 
I am saddened and shocked to see that racism is now domiciled among so many 
of the very groups that should oppose it in all its forms and incantations. As for 
me, I will continue to judge people, pastors and politicians by the content of their 
character, not by the color of their skin.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a freelance writer and has spoken to 
several civic and religious organizations on cultural and moral issues. He lives in 
the Los Angeles area with his wife and 3 children and is active in the community. 
He can be reached at gregwelborn@earthlink.net.

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