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| Image by Peter Wolf from Pixabay |
This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.
Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.
"Can we all just get along?" -Rodney King
Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,
Early in 1985 me and wild-eyed Walter were doing reconnaissance deep in the heart of Texas. Our mission was to find a home for some ice cream trucks owned by Tom and Miss Kitty, former residents of a rapidly rusting Cincinnati, Ohio.
Tom and Miss Kitty got out of Dodge after most of the local players in heavy industry had done the same and took a lot of jobs with them. They drove their herd of ice cream trucks in a direction that would've seemed counterintuitive to a cowboy and put them to work on the streets of Laredo Austin.
They had more trucks than they needed to serve the good people of Austin and this is why wild-eyed Walter and I were driving from town to town in ice cream trucks in the deep south of the Deep South, South Texas.
We were exploring south of San Antonio and north of Mexico. The population stats of lots of small towns, and one large one, indicated there were a lot of people down there who just might be in need of an ice cream truck.
There was/is a lot of mostly empty space between those towns. If you've never been to Texas it's hard to appreciate just how hooge it actually is, even at the narrow end near the Mexican border.
But Tom and Miss Kitty figgered, sorry, figured, that given that there were a lot of folks down there, and given the fact their winters were often radically different from those experienced by the people that lived at the opposite end of the state, the Texas Panhandle — palm trees as opposed to occasional Blue Norther — there might be some money to be made.
{What's a Blue Norther?}
It's even colder than it sounds... follow the link.
The one large town, Corpus Christi (our first stop) already had a herd of ice cream trucks, so we reluctantly saddled up and hit the trail.
{Reluctantly?}
It's a beautiful party town on the Gulf of Mexico and I was a much younger, completely unattached man at the time pursuing a geographic cure for a broken heart that I had picked up in Pittsburgh.
Now, as you might expect, given the fact that Southern Texas borders Mexico and that all of Texas was once part of Mexico, there are a lot of Latinxers living there.
{The plural of Latinx is Latinxs, there's no such word as Latinxers.}
Wait a sec', I'll be right back...
Hmmm... from what I can tell, Dana, most Latinos, Latinas, and/or Hispanics think there's no such word as Latinx.
{Could we move on, please?}
Yep. Alls I know is that when I found myself attempting to pedal my popsicles in neighborhoods top-heavy with children that were apparently...
All I know is that in certain neighborhoods a lot of kids who struck me (of course I could be wrong) as being of a certain heritage came up to my truck and spoke to me in Spanish.
Having studied Spanish for two years in high school I shrugged and replied, "No hablo Espanol," reasonably confident that these 3 of the 6 or so Spanish words I remembered expressed that I didn't speak Spanish.
I may have been wrong though because many of them laughed and walked away. Sometimes they threw rocks at my truck whereupon I got outta Dodge. Wild-eyed Walter was temporarily arrested in a small town by a cop he thought might be of a certain heritage for peddling popsicles without a permit but he was released when the evening shift, both officers, reported for duty.
I suspect we may have been the victims of implicit bias, but such is life. We honestly weren't that surprised, all things considered, especially history.
{Next, you'll be claiming you were a victim of systemic racism.}
Nope, no such thing. Scientists say race is a social construct, and I agree.
Everyone knows Adam and Eve were Africans but we're all mongrels who tend to identify/bond with groups that we share physical/cultural/etceterological characteristics because H. sapiens are tribal (a survival mechanism) by nature.
Systemic Implicit Bias is everywhere but we can closely monitor it in ourselves and strive for objectivity because we can't prevent it or get rid of it, nor should we want to. Survival mechanisms can come in handy.
After all, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you." -Joseph Heller, Catch-22
But on the other hand, they might not be, it might be you.
{But what about all the fuss about systemic racism?}
Follow the money. There are literally thousands of people earning their daily bread, some of 'em caviar, working in an industry that didn't exist a minute ago.
Have they accomplished anything besides personal job security, the occasional financial scandal, and guilt relief for the upper classes that send their kids to private schools and have abandoned the poorest kids of all colors to the powerful teacher's unions of crumbling and corrupt urban hellscapes?
Just askin'.
Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day
P.S. Free bonus quote: "When I'm no longer rapping, I want to open up an ice cream parlor and call myself Scoop Dog." -Snoop Dog
