Mizzou and Me
Racial issues again, ongoing, still and always in Missouri as students arise and the president of the state’s main university system is forced to resign, followed according to this morning’s news by the chancellor of the main campus where the instant racial unrest has broken out. I don’t understand. They seem still behind where we were in the South of my childhood three quarters of a century ago, a terrible place to have been from which we have broken free and escaped, at least in my observation and perception. I don’t understand.
In business years ago, meeting an Australian client, I used to stay at an inn, Marriott as I recall, across from the Arch in St. Louis in front and on the side next to a stadium where, from my favorite room's window, I could watch the Cardinals playing. I loved going to Missouri for that reason. Long years before that, at Navy OCS in Newport, I made a close Navy friend who came from Missouri. Raised in a Polish ethnicity in St. Louis. That was 1957, and Americans were working our way through major racial issues in our culture, including integration of public schools in the South, seating on public transportation, and such as segregated facilities, restrooms, cafes, water fountains, universities, movie theater entrances and seating areas, neighborhoods where people lived, churches we attended, and every aspect of actuality. From growing up in the segregated South, I know that racial certitudes are as set in concrete as religious certainties, or even worse and more vehement and more difficult to face and change.
Our friendship blossomed when Ron and I discovered we were assigned the same Navy specialty, and more so when my Navy commission was delayed while I spent November and December as a day patient in the U.S. Naval Hospital, Newport, Rhode Island for examination of my heart murmur, and we gave Ron and Lena the apartment that was waiting for us at our next school together. And later when we arrived and were next door neighbors at that school, and then even more so when we were both assigned to destroyers home-ported in Norfolk, Virginia. We were not in the same four ship DesDiv, but our ships may even have been in the same eight ship destroyer squadron, I don’t recall for sure. Throughout the years of our friendship, I remember noticing and being aware and surprised at Ron’s views and attitudes on race seeming more ingrained than I had seen and known as a native of north Florida that in those days was part and parcel of the deepest South. Everyone is different and even later when we fall from the tree and decay and are raked up to be burned, we are still and always a leaf from the tree that sprouted and grew us, we don't fall far; but I remember my early dis-ease about my cultural heritage and working mentally and attitudinally during my years at the University of Florida, through the doubtful morality of my southernness and that of my fraternity brothers. And, again, being surprised at our age 22 that Ron, from a particular ethnic Catholic background always seemed even more racist in ways than what I had been accustomed to, and had resolved to shed in myself. [I mean, there is no honesty in denying where one came from, and was raised “knowing,” and my realizations and struggle in overcoming all that it meant I was and needed to escape]. He seemed more certain that I ever had been, and it was from his background, what he grew up and was raised to "know".
Still today, I am surprised at and do not understand the seeming cultural unchangingness of Missouri. It seems as though there is a hidden evil, a darkness. At least, from what the media give us. Unlike Mississippi where there’s no secret about it, this dark side of Missouri seems so unlikely. I don't understand. And then I read* that “in the American Civil War, Missouri was a border state that sent men, armies, generals, and supplies to both opposing sides, had its star on both flags, had separate governments representing each side, and endured a neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national war,” and I wonder if the state is somehow culturally schizophrenic. And a state is its people.
All of it drives me back into my own examen of wondering what I am and have escaped or have simply closed a door and locked, or left ajar like the garage with those two old cars out in the back alley of my Being. Who or what am I? Denial masks lies. More, a touch of mentally disturbedness, even illness, attaches to unwillingness to know oneself as one is, as I myself judge and throw stones. Is there a moral, mental, ethical statute of limitations on Personality and Being? I don’t know. I know nothing, am certain of nothing.
Thos+
* Wikipedia