J. D. Pendry

J. D. Pendry

During the Democratic Convention of 1968, I was a month shy of 16 years old. I watched on television as Mayor Daley’s police force warred with the hippies and Yippies who were rioting in the streets. A generation brainwashed to believe that a nation wanting freedom was not worth defending from communist oppression had no problem rioting in the streets of our cities while their privileged mentors stayed above the fray and egged them on.

With my parents and one sister, I lived in a North side tenement. It was a red brick three story building with no air conditioning that was a cookie cutter image of all of the others that lined Magnolia Avenue. Like the rest of the neighborhood’s residents, both parents labored daily in Chicago’s factories and were immigrants from below the Mason-Dixon Line - practically foreigners in our own country.

I was introduced to the anti-everything hippie drug culture for the couple of years that I attended Nicholas Senn High School. I got an education there okay but probably not the one that was intended. One teacher felt obligated to tell me, in front of a giggling class, that Chicago would be better off if all of us illiterate hillbillies would go back to our coal mines. I silently agreed that I did not know if Chicago would, but that I would certainly be better off elsewhere. He could not have gotten away with disparaging any other group like that. That is sort of how things went when you ventured out of the tenements and forgot to leave your accent at home.

Three years later, I abandoned the flower child fantasia culture and its pot-fogged brains. I left behind a group of people who were already indoctrinated to believe that whatever America did was wrong and the most awful thing that could befall anyone was to end up in the military. Through the years, some things have not changed much. I abandoned that culture when I walked into a United States Army Recruiting station a few days in front of my 19th birthday.

I spent the next 28 years in an apolitical culture. If I had a political thought, I suppressed it except for the act of casting a solitary absentee ballot vote, which I have learned since was probably not counted for some technical reason or another. While I and others were trying to do our jobs and support families on wages that often qualified us for food stamps, the flower children were doing other things. They were growing up to be college professors, political activists, media pundits with large audiences and members of Congress. It is interesting how those long days that turn into months and years shared with a family that does without many of life’s niceties while you do the job you love for the country you love tempers your perspective on life and makes you intolerant of imbeciles who take it all for granted.

In September of 2001, two years following my retirement from the Army I became more interested, for obvious reasons, in our country’s political environment. It was not long before my observations angered me some. Maybe it was always as it is now with the difference being that I was only now paying attention to it. I did not like what the pothead generation had done to my country while I was away. I saw so-called political leaders who made a sport of belittling Soldiers out of one side of their mouths while insisting that not enough is done to look out for them from the other side. Their views, of course, were always dependent on the audience and the direction of the political breeze. I felt like that hillbilly kid back in Chicago, except this time I was out here among’em and had no place to where I could escape.

I have convinced myself that my one vote probably does not mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I will cast it on Election Day. Nothing worthwhile seems to come out of Washington regardless of who is in charge. Our political parties focus on the destruction of political opponents and kowtowing to whichever group stands to fatten their bank accounts the most. Half of Congress is always focused on making the President look bad and the other half is always looking to even a score when it is their turn. Bolstered by an irresponsible media, they combine to form a sad, pathetic lot. Then you turn on the television and find a little “political strategist” talking head in a box on the right side and another in a box on the left shouting at each other like adolescents, neither of them offering solutions to anything. It is enough to activate ones gag reflex. We cannot agree to fight our sworn enemies. We cannot agree to free ourselves from our energy oppressors…

I think I will just end this here because I am not too sure that I like where the logic takes me. Maybe I will start an old hippie commune. Everyone can have their own room in the bunker. Bring your own food and ammo.

Copyright © J D Pendry 2008 All Rights Reserved

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.