Blindness

Without exception, every course I studied at schools and colleges I attended has been helpful. Even or perhaps especially C-51 and C-52 my freshman or sophomore years at Florida, two courses in Humanities, where I first heard of folkways and mores. Folkways obviously change over years and generations. I don’t remember learning that mores also change, but they do, albeit far more slowly. Couples living together before marriage is an example. At least, openly.

I remember being scandalized at one of my last Navy duty stations, that a lieutenant commander in our command was living openly with his fiancée, including bringing her to command social functions. The admiral was even more appalled than the rest of us. That was two generations ago, and times have changed. More specifically, mores have shifted. Are shifting.

I am thinking sadly of the SAE chapter at Oklahoma where, beyond mores, serious taboos were broken, and defiantly. Things said, sung, that my lifetime ago would have been laughed off because it never occurred how hurtful they were to others. And frankly wouldn’t have bothered to even care. Words, thoughts, attitudes that today make one a pariah in decent society. Shift from routine to reprehensible.

The captain of my last Navy ship issued an order forbidding any officer to describe a sailor by the color of his skin. It created a challenge to one’s thinking about others.

I don’t remember the songs we sang in the KA house when I was at Florida. What has come to be called “the N-word” was never spoken in respectable company even then, sixty years ago. But there was, as at all KA houses across the land, an enormous Confederate battle flag hanging over the front door. A portrait of General Lee over the fireplace in the living room. The Plantation Ball or Old South Ball every spring, when we dressed proudly and grandly in the uniforms of Confederate army officers. In splendid gray, I was probably a lieutenant or captain, I don’t remember. There were no African American students at the university, or at Florida State, only at Florida A&M. It was our way of life. Separation of races was a social more. We knew no better. We were no better or different from the white cab driver I saw on TV in 1962 during the riot about integrating the University of Mississippi. “We’ll close Ole Miss down ’fore we let the n-----s in,” he vowed. And going on to prove the uselessness of so much education anyway, he added, “I only went through third grade and it ain’t never hurt me none.”

God in heaven deliver us.

Alive and well throughout America, he is morally indefensible in decent society. It remains to be seen whether OU president Boren in his moral indignation is more than self-righteous and has the guts to expel the sorority girls on the bus who were joining in the singing. The fit will hit.

The incident brings to mind my KA roadtrip the spring of 1954. Roadtrip before we pledges were initiated as Brothers. Groups of three pledges assembled on a Saturday morning. Each group was given a slip of paper. “Go to Sarasota,” ours instructed, “and bring back a pound of pachyderm excretion from Ringling Brothers.” Each allowed to carry five dollars, we were told to be back at the fraternity house by dinner time Sunday evening. I have written about the roadtrip here before, in other contexts. As we headed down the highway with our thumbs out, there was plenty of time for talk and argument. Conversation was beginning to stir throughout the state about integrating the all-white universities, and this came up. One of the other boys in our group of three said, “I don’t mind n-----s as long as they stay in their place.” I said, “They don’t have ‘a place.’” He responded sharply, “You and I will never agree on that. Change the subject.”

Today, KA national headquarters forbid display of the Confederate flag. The Old South Ball is banned. I read a year or so ago that my old KA chapter at Gainesville had elected an African American brother as “Number One,” which is the title of the chapter president. I believe it was colorblind because he's the right Brother for that leadership, not just a politically correct social statement. If your eye offends you, tear it out, and and I pray that they have and can see more clearly now.

Things change. Contrary to what I think now and then, about wishing to have lived in an earlier day and age, I am thankful that my life has been through such an era of change in so many ways. We are better than we were. I wonder what we regard as a norm, what 21st century more that we give no thought to, will appall my descendants a hundred years from today.

Just sayin’