All niceties are tossed out the window. Nothing about this article is safe for work.
December 1. My 56th birthday. How did I start my morning? By doing children’s laundry. Damn school uniforms. School uniforms don’t make a damn bit of sense for children who are growing so fucking fast that you can barely keep them in underwear. What parent has the money to keep buying and replacing the same clothes over and over and over and over throughout the year? We don’t. So, their pants are either a bit too long or are riding at their ankles. We just ignore the scuffs on the knees.
It’s my birthday and I’m doing laundry at 4:00 AM so that the little ones will have fresh, warm clothes to wear to school. No one ever did that for me. Probably because the washer and dryer were out in the garage. Oh, and Poppa didn’t start getting up at 4 himself until after we were out of the house. If we wanted warm clothes on cold mornings, we had to set our clothes over the heat register the night before. Don’t give me funny looks over that. I know we weren’t the only ones who did it.
Of course, over the years I’ve heard of others trying to warm up their clothes by putting them on or close to space heaters. The results were not pleasant. At the very least, it’s a good way to lose your best set of jeans.
I sometimes look back at my childhood and wonder how the hell we didn’t die. We took risks—lots of them. Many of them with our parents’ blessing, the rest without their knowledge. If I had ever seen one of my boys trying to tight-rope-walk a barbed-wire fence, I’d have thrown a fit. Yet, we did it. More than once. We didn’t stop until I ripped the seam from a pair of jeans. There were dangerous makeshift bicycle ramps, tree houses that were not safe for occupancy, and daring feats of, “do you think that’s safe to eat?” It’s a wonder any of us made it to our 18th birthday. Yet, here I am at 56. Rather frightening.
A good age to die
Actually, it turns out that 56 is a fairly common age for people to start dying. Heartwarming thought, isn’t it? On one hand, there were all the news stories about the world’s oldest woman celebrating her 117th birthday earlier this week. Things like that didn’t happen when I was a kid. We should all be encouraged about our prospects for living a long life. At the same time, however, the list of notable people who died at 56 is a bit too long and too impressive. Death waits for no one, I suppose. Look at these names:
- Alexander Pope, 1744
- Abraham Lincoln, 1865
- Ian Fleming, 1964
- Charles Mingus, 1979
- Betty Grable, 1973
- Steve Jobs, 2011
- Ludwig von Beethoven, 1827
- John Hancock, 1793
- King George VI (The Queen’s father), 1952
Looking at that list is daunting. Consider all that those people accomplished before they died. Here I am, having never been president during a civil war, never written a great spy novel, never composed thousands of musical masterpieces, never acted in any movies, never built a high-tech empire, haven’t signed a declaration of independence (yet), and am not even close to guiding Britain through a war. When I look at what I’ve done compared to all these people had achieved by the time they died at my age, I feel just a bit like a failure.
There is one name I intentionally left off that list. Adolf Hitler was 56 when he died. I guess that’s one thing I have going for me: I’ve not tried to rule the world and killed millions of innocent people. Perhaps I should put a “yet” at the end of that statement. I suppose anything is possible. After all, I once tried tight-rope walking on barbed-wire, you know.
Do we really want to live that long?
While I’m not in any mood to kick the bucket today, at the same time I have to wonder if any of us really want to live all that long. Consider the plight of Emma Moreno, the world’s oldest woman. She hasn’t exactly had a great and wonderful life, you know. Her fiancè was killed in WWI. She married an abusive brute she didn’t like. She kicked him out of the house, and shortly after doing so her only child, a son, died. She worked in a factory until she was 65, which seems young compared to where she is now. She has outlived her eight brothers and sisters. She eats the same thing every day: two eggs, one raw, one fried. Even she admits she hasn’t had a good life.
So, if living long means outliving everyone you love, being left alone in a nursing facility somewhere in Italy, having the only time people pay any attention to you is on your birthday, if you make it another year, or when you eventually give up and die, is it worth the trouble of even trying? I can see wanting to live a long time if we still have our friends and still have our families and can still go and do things that we enjoy. Take all that away, though, and what the fuck is the point? At this juncture, it seems that Ms. Moreno is more in torment than happy. She smiled for the cameras, but she had to force it.
I wonder if we make too much of living a long life. Certainly, as long as there are people around to love, then, by all means, keep going. But when one has outlived everyone of what value is life? I suppose one could claim that they are producing carbon dioxide for the plants and trees. At least that’s something productive, right?
There are still options
I don’t suppose all is lost. Not having been wildly successful by age 56 isn’t necessarily a major concern, is it? Look at all the people who were older when they finally “made it.”
- “Colonel” Harlan Sanders was 65 when he started his chicken franchise.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish her first novel until she was 65, and managed to get in 12 others after that.
- Grandma Moses was 76 when she first slapped paint across a canvas, and she was productive for nearly 20 years.
- Edmund Hoyle was around 70 years old when he first began recording the rules of various card games in 1741.
There are several others whose names you likely wouldn’t recognize, like the guy who invented the taser, or the guy who founded Hare Krishna. And how many presidents, including our president-elect, were well over 56 when they took office? Not that I would ever want to be president, mind you. There would probably be a civil war and then I’d get shot. I’ll let Mr. Lincoln keep that dubious honor, thank you.
Still, the point I’m trying desperately to make is that there are plenty of examples of people who didn’t even get a good start on whatever it is that made them famous until they were older and had a good bit of totally unrelated experience behind them. While I’m not sitting on any earth-shattering ideas right at this moment, in theory I’m well positioned to have a brainstorm of some kind that would propel me into the history books. Let’s just hope it’s for a good reason.
Of course, there’s still photography
I suppose, in some sense, all this sounds as though I’m giving up on photography. I’m not, despite how this year has gone. The past four years, for that matter. The number of photographs I’ve taken has been steadily declining, each year being the fewest yet that I’ve ever taken. Rather depressing when one stops and thinks about it. Although, one might say that the reduction in number makes the photographs that were taken all the more valuable. Scarcity can be a good thing, I suppose. Especially after I’m dead.
See, there’s that dead thing again. It keeps popping up.
Part of the issue with photography is a lack of models with whom I can enjoy working. The young woman who posed for the images here, all shot back in 2005, had just turned 21 when I met her. She was lively, adventurous, and willing to pretty much try anything. In fact, there was a lot she was already trying when we met. She was 5′ 10″, perfectly proportioned, and looked sufficiently wonderful dressed, but at the same time didn’t have much hesitancy about getting naked just about anywhere, including once at the ruins in Holliday Park. She understood the artistry and that getting the shots that no one else had sometimes involved taking some risks. As a result, I have a truck-load of archived images that I still enjoy pulling out and re-processing every once in a while.
I need more models like her. We’ve had several over the years, but inevitably, as they get older, they get married, have kids, or take advantage of better offers elsewhere, such as Las Vegas or LA. I don’t blame anyone for improving their lives, but they each leave a special void that is never filled. We once had relationships with our models that enabled us to do some really dramatic and interesting things. No one seems remotely interested in that anymore, though. Without willing subjects ready to step in front of the camera, it is difficult to feel inspired about taking new pictures. Sure, equipment, transportation, and space issues factor in as well, but it’s the litany of muses, the knowledge that for whatever concept I conceive I have the model(s) to pull it off, that is missing.
The Forthcoming Novel
There is no forthcoming novel. At least, not anytime soon. I tried the novel-writing thing in November. I made it two days. Writing a novel, for me, means not being interrupted by chores or children or news or presidential elections or idiots running the stop sign on the corner. Writing, for me, requires that I be able to dedicate my full attention to the process. I need to be able to research everything. Even this article had its share of research, every one of them does. I need to know that the things that I say, the ideas that I present, are at least plausible and preferably possible. I can do fiction, but fantasy is a bit beyond me.
If I ever do complete a full novel, it will be between moments of getting lost in the wonderment of watching cats playing across the living room rug. This morning, it’s the kittens who are leaping and rolling and butt-wiggling all over the place. Their energy is boundless and the entertainment factor is dramatically distractive. I have never been much of a cat person, but the past couple of years with our careful selection of rescued kitties has changed my mind in that regard. They are wonderful little creatures to have around. I can sit and watch them for several minutes at a time, becoming totally lost in their play. Of course, that means I’m not writing a damn thing.
Then, there’s the dog. I love the big guy. He loves me. And sometimes that’s an issue. He wants to play. A lot. And I enjoy playing with him. A lot. I can easily take a couple of hours from my afternoon out in the yard with him, playing tug of war and throwing balls. But again, if I’m doing that I’m not writing, am I? Perhaps I’m gaining little tidbits of information and experience that I might eventually work into part of a story, but I’m not piercing light with pixels (which is the modern substitution for putting pen to paper). Maybe I’ll get around to writing something great and wonderful one of these days, but I don’t see it happening this year, and probably not the year after. There are just too many distractions in life.
What will happen in this next year? Most immediately, I’ll re-work the website a little bit. It’s time to update the template. There’s a new version of WordPress coming out next week, so we might as well get all the kinks worked out of everything at the same time. I’ll move things around a bit, change header pictures, stuff like that. In general, though, I like the layout we’ve been using this year. The number of eyeballs has more than doubled what we had for last year. So, a little tweaking should suffice for the next 12 months.
I would love to shoot more this year, but again, that whole model issue is a concern. Perhaps we’ll meet some people. Perhaps we already have and just don’t know it yet.
Either way, we’ve completed 56 years now. Let’s see what happens next. I fear a new dystopia, but hey, maybe we’ll get cool robot overlords from it.
I’m drinking coffee that is far too weak for a Monday morning. I’m drinking weak coffee because it is Monday morning. You know, the kind where you think you’re pouring the beans into the grinder but half of them are actually missing and falling onto the floor kind of morning. As a result, my coffee is very much like last night’s American Music Awards: Weak and bland to the point of nearly being useless.
Standing Rock Proves Why America Isn’t Great
With winter setting in, government actions at Standing Rock follow a long history of betrayal.
Already, before I even start typing, I know that the title for this article has made some people angry. To say that America is not great is, in the minds of some, a statement bordering on treason. I disagree with that point of view. America, as a country, has always had its shortcomings. We try desperately to cover them up with revisionist history that glosses over things such as the Japanese internment camps during World War II or the blind eye the government turned to Jim Crow laws in the post-Civil War South. The United States, like every other country on the planet, has had to find its way through the various aspects of civil rights and, like every other country on the planet, we have too often failed. In fact, we are failing right now at this very moment.
I’ve hesitated to take on the issue of what is happening at Standing Rock. Protests such as this one are not new and, typically, the native people are thoroughly overrun, again, by law enforcement. When this situation first began, I fully expected that to be the outcome. As a nation, the needs and mistreatment of native peoples has been ignored so frequently that I expect that trend to continue. While there was a flicker of hope that President Obama might actually take decisive action in support of the tribes, which would make him the first US President to do so, he didn’t. Like every other goddamn president before him, he caved to other interests.
Now, with winter setting in, the first snow having dumped six inches of cold on the Dakota plains, the US Army Corp of Engineers has set December 5 as a deadline for all protesters, both native and not, to leave the area. At the same time, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple has ordered an “emergency evacuation” of the land, attempting to hide behind the weather, claiming that the evacuation order was to protect the health and safety of the protesters. Time to speak up.
First, The Backstory
I have a personal connection here. I don’t mention it often because I was taught to avoid drawing the attention. My maternal Grandmother’s family were Bucks, an old Cherokee family that could trace its lineage long before their forced removal from Georgia by Andrew Jackson. My ancestors walked that trail. Two children were lost along the way. They arrived in what is now Oklahoma and established a home only to have that taken away from them as well.
My Grandmother died when I was only six months old. However, I had Uncle Lawrence, “Windy” Buck to tell the stories and the family history. There were times when it was difficult to tell whether Uncle Windy was exactly telling the truth or not. As I got older, though, we started checking out his claims and found the majority of them to be accurate.
One of the matters about which Uncle Windy was most adamant about was not registering as a tribal member. “Cherokees are fools to trust the government,” he said. “They’ve already betrayed us more times than we can count. They’ve already gone back on every treaty they ever signed. Trust me, the only reason they want your name on tribal rolls is so they can round us all up again. Whatever you do, never trust a deal with the government.”
We didn’t. While our relationship with the tribe was close, especially while we lived just outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capitol of the Western band of Cherokee, Mother was as adamant as Uncle Windy about not signing up for anything. We turned down scholarships and other advantages out of the fear that being associated too closely would eventually bring government interference.
During the 1973 AIM incident at Wounded Knee, the fear my Mother felt was palpable. “They’ll kill all of them and not think twice about it,” she worried. “They’ll kill them then come for the rest of us.” Fortunately, she was wrong, but she never lost her fear, always hiding the fact that she was Cherokee. Of course, her given name, Wynema Oresia, was a bit of a giveaway. She made sure not to repeat that error when naming my brother or me.
A History of Betrayal
I found it interesting that a video produced by Teen Vogue featuring six young women from various tribes received a lot of attention prior to the Thanksgiving holiday and immediately thereafter. Just in case you missed it, here it is. Please pay careful attention:
The facts mentioned in the video are true. From the moment European settlers, the “Pilgrims” set foot on this continent, they have done their best to rid the land of its indigenous peoples, people who had been here thousands of years before them. Excavations at the Etowah mounds in what is now North Georgia show that hundreds of thousands of native people lived in that area as early as 1000 ADE. These were predecessors to the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Seminole, and other tribes whose names are familiar. They had cities. They had agriculture. They had commerce. They were a fully functioning civilization long before the Europeans figured out how to cross the ocean.
Almost every interaction native tribes have had with the US government has been a betrayal. By some counts, which I cannot quickly confirm, the government has broken over 500 treaties with indigenous tribes. In a 1785 treaty with the Cherokee for instance, stipulations of the treaty specified that non-tribal people were to not settle on tribal grounds, which, by terms of the treaty, encompassed parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and both North and South Carolina. Crimes against the tribe and/or members of the tribe, were to be punished. Trade with the US was established and the Cherokee were promised a deputy in Congress to address their concerns. The final article of that treaty reads:
The hatchet shall be forever buried, and the peace given by the United States, and friendship re-established between the said states on the one part, and all the Cherokees on the other, shall be universal; and the contracting parties shall use their utmost endeavors to maintain the peace given as aforesaid, and friendship re-established.
That treaty didn’t hold, though, even though it was witnessed by the man who would become the fourth president of the United States, James Madison. By the time Madison took office, seven more treaties had been signed, each of which, under threat of military strike, whittled away at the rights and land given in the first.
An examination of treaties with all the tribes, from the Apache to the Wyandotte and Yakima, show similar patterns where the government appears to give something to the tribe then systemically takes it back. When the treaties because too inconvenient, the government used force. They have repeatedly and consistently stepped over every right the indigenous tribes had in order to get their way.
Indigenous people were not recognized as US citizens until 1924. Even then, many states continued to deny native people the right to vote. Even as recently as 2004, native peoples have been denied the right to vote in certain counties around the country.
From before its inception as a country, the United States has consistently and intentionally trampled the rights of North American indigenous peoples. The US can call itself great all it wants, but with a history like this such rhetoric cannot be considered true.
End the madness now
I am aware that there are currently multiple lawsuits pending both against the government and the oil and holding companies involved in the Dakota Access Pipeline. I have no expectation for any of them to be resolved in favor of the tribes. Neither do I have any expectation that any of them will be resolved prior to January 20. President Obama shows every sign of having checked out on the problem and is hoping to ignore it until he goes away.
While both the Army Corp of Engineers and Governor Dalrymple has said they do not plan to use force to remove any protestor, the fact that officials have already used water cannons against them suggest the government’s words are, once again, insincere. What the action effectively does is prevent emergency personnel from getting to and/or treating any protestors who might become ill or injured. So, as the snow from the North Dakota winter continues to pile up, if use of the water cannons continues, native people affected by such obvious mistreatment will now be unable to find medical care without leaving the site.
This isn’t making America great. This is showing how the United States continues to be a disgrace when it comes to matters of civil and human rights, especially when directed toward indigenous people. When people from other nations, such as Philippine President Duterte, accuses us of being hypocrites, this is exactly what he’s talking about. If any other country were to treat its native residents in the same way, we would invoke sanctions against them and do our best to turn the affected people against the government harming them. Yet, there we are at Standing Rock, denying the rights of our own people to protect their drinking water.
America is not great. America has never been great. Until we accept and recognize our responsibility toward indigenous people and the rights they inherently hold on this entire continent, we never will be great, no matter who is President.
We need to fix this now.
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