YES TO DIVERSITY

diego rivera

I'm having a drink of half Canada Dry, half Jumex mango nectar and a squirt of lemon juice. The mango nectar is a bit flat; the Canada Dry spritzes it with carbonation, the nectar flavors the ginger ale, and the lemon juice adds a zip. Good drink. I'm glad we have a Mexican aisle in the grocery store. I like black beans and everything else along the aisle. I like seeing Mexicans in the grocery store and around town. I grew up with Mexicans and found them to be as good a people as the Anglo kids. Only the Mexicans did not have in them the arrogance of whiteness; thus, I preferred them. We were segregated then. Anglo kids were afraid of the Mexicans and the Mexicans were afraid of the Anglos. It was commonly understood the Anglo kids were superior in numbers, if no other way. I think I identified with the oppressed races because I was oppressed at home by white man. I knew that the white world would be willing to give me a chance for my whiteness, and if I, the same person, were in Mexican skin, it would not be the same. I did not feel right with the privilege that went with white skin. Never have. By this time in the life, a lifetime of experience seeing how arrogant white people automatically present themselves to black or tan people, I'm embarrassed in the company of someone black or tan. I want to say, "I'm not like that," but know how empty it sounds before saying it. And am not so sure I'm not like that. I only know it from my mind, not from my behavior as seen by someone black or tan. If I'm really not like that, let it show in my actions, the only place it counts.    

diego rivera

I am so tired of racial tension after a lifetime of living with it, in it, aware of it, not in denial, it's become one more of the reasons I left "the world" and came here to Air Bellows Mountain where racial tensions don't apply. Nor does any other sort of tension, except drama for the sake of drama. Plenty of that goes around. I prefer not to think so, but plenty of drama for drama sake goes on inside my head. It's what gossip is about. Even continuous drama on television does not supplant gossip. It seems like gossip is a way of making celebrity of the familiar. I'm recalling my first years in the mountains, listening to old man Tom Pruitt talk about different people, who, in our way of seeing, are just ordinary people, talk about them the same way people who watch movies and television talk about the stars, the celebrities. It struck me curious why, when he talked about a preacher who once lied about something Tom said, his reason he left his church, he talked like he expected me to know who he was talking about. He lost respect. He spoke of the preacher the same way people like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher talk about lying Republicans. Louie Gohmert said, Joni Ernst said, Ted Cruz said. A celebrity said. Tom's brother, Millard, too, when he talked about the people of his life, I had the same feeling of listening to a celebrity talk about a celebrity I never heard of, but should have. The only television Tom watched was baseball and the news. He didn't get a tv until he was seventy, given to him by a neighbor from Away who believed everybody must have at least one. It's a sight how many used tvs I've been offered, even told in no uncertain terms to take.

It wasn't right, no tv in the house. I need to be connected to what is popularly called the real world, the world I turned my back to as too unreal to sustain life. A human without a tv was unexpected and weird as a rock on a fence post. It's even more now, but I have good camouflage. I bought a tv to watch movies with when so many movies became available on VCR. Netflix sends three movies a week of my choice from a selection of almost everything. One of my major sacrifices coming to the mountain was giving up movies. Had to drive seventy miles for an America movie, a hundred miles to see a foreign film. Now I can have film festivals from almost any country. The tv is not connected to cable, antenna or satellite. The people that freaked out because I don't have a tv in the house are ok about it now. He conformed at least a little bit. He's toeing in. He's slow, but he'll get there. When they put him in a nursing home, he will have no choice but to watch tv, like when he's in a hospital. I suspect the reason I noted how the old people of the old ways talked about each other, is taking it for granted I knew who they were talking about, the way Dick Cheney is mentioned on the evening news, assuming the name needs no introduction. Evidently, before television, people talked about each other the way we talk about celebrities now. We talk about each other and we're talking about people who don't figure as celebrities, what they call on the news, ordinary people. All who are not celebrities, whose names it is taken for granted we do not know, are the ordinary people. We used to be the common people. Now we're the ordinary.

diego rivera

Becoming aware that the people pre-television talked of each other as stars everyone knows, I began to take exception to we who live in the world of non-celebrities, nearly everybody, being reduced to a non-person, a statistic, the viewing audience, ordinary, finding it socially troubling. I watch the people of the world I live in accepting themselves as the ordinary to the point of not even noticing. And I withdraw to home, reminding self I'm not here to change anybody, only self. I want to flow with the living flow of the world I live in. Without wanting to be of it, I have no choice but to be in it. Since I'm in it, I live best flowing with it. My world is three-quarters right-wing statistically. but it doesn't mean a wall is between me and the rest of them. Everyone I know thinks different from how I think. All have opinions different from mine, and very few intersect with my opinions. I don't care, because I assess opinions the same as nothing. Some of my best friends want to bomb Iran and say Obama is a monkey. I don't care. It only tells me what they think about one subject neither of us knows anything about, but what we get from different propaganda sources. No matter where I live in America, I live among people with no interest in art, reading, poetry or foreign films. I talk with people of similar interests, and we never agree where opinions are concerned. One may say Picasso is the great artist of the 20th century, while another says Duchamp. Both for valid reasons. I'm uncomfortable with this time wherein we are expected to be in full check-list agreement with somebody or they don't like you, you get labelled. Whenever I hear somebody describe themselves, very liberal, it puts me on alert to watch everything I say.

diego rivera himself

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BORED BY WHITE PRIDE

max ernst

Saw a thing on facebook promising this could change the way I think. I couldn't click on it. It looked like something like a hugging contest. Something unexpectedly sweet. I couldn't go there, whatever it was. The intro that it's about changing the way I think did it for me. Not that I reject having the way I think changed. I'm always open to adjusting, fine tuning my thinking. I already know my thinking is based in illusion, mixing details, facts, trends, beliefs I'm unaware of, connecting the dots in my head into a skyscraper of cards. Every card a bit of misinformation, inaccurate details, images arranged into a construction composed by my own attitude toward life. What does some person on facebook who never heard of me know about my thinking? The presumption that I think a certain way is what turned me off. How does that person know I don't already think the way he's making a case for? And what if I don't? I'm half tempted go take a look at what it has to say, but refuse to. It brings to mind somebody saying a sentimental act of common decency restored their faith in humanity. Every time I hear it, I think, but cannot say, If that's all it took to restore your faith in humanity, it must not have taken much to lose it. The American madness to change other people's thinking is totally out of bounds in my way of seeing plain decency. The church I grew up in tried to convince me it was my duty to browbeat everyone I know about changing their way of thinking to the only way, the right way, the way the preacher at the church thought. I wouldn't want to lay that on anybody, God as Fear and Punishment. I had to shed that mind. It took fifteen years by school education and self-education by reading and paying attention to the people I know.  

max ernst

Since childhood, I've wanted through the course of my life to know people from different backgrounds, social circumstances, from the poor to the rich, from religious to non-religious, from pastoral people, who live by supposed-to, to ex-convicts and foreigners, Yankees too. I've been fascinated by the varieties of humanity since as far back as I can remember, always interested in people of different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different languages. I even like knowing cops. I believe our Sparta town police, now, are honorable people. It hadn't always been that way. My best friend through grade school was American-Mexican. He was as American as I was, but he was Mexican. My mother worked sometimes in a TG&Y store as accountant. We'd go pick her up after work. A Mexican girl in high school worked there, Juanita. I loved Juanita. I still love the name. She knew that Mitchell was my friend. I loved the Mexican in her. That she was Catholic fascinated me too. I was like a l dog following her around listening to her talk. I asked her once to say something in Spanish. She asked what I wanted her to say. I couldn't think of anything and we laughed. I had Mexican friends all the way through school. I didn't care that it made me suspect to the other white kids. The Mexicans were far more interesting to me than the white Baptist kids. I also did not like the way they were shut out by the white kids. I extended myself to them, wanting to know them, appreciating them as themselves, liking them especially for being different from the suffocating pride of whiteness. White arrogance toward people I knew to be valid human beings made me ashamed of my white privilege. 

max ernst

In the Navy, my friends were the black guys. I was on an old WW2 destroyer that was sold to Brazil soon after I was released. It could run, and it could ride the waves. It took a 90 degree roll one night and uprighted. I loved how the ship rode the waves. In the very worst times when three-quarters of the crew were out with sea-sickness and and puke was everywhere, I kept on going, thinking to self I'd pay for this ride, and it's paying me. I loved it, walking down a hallway bouncing from wall to wall using upper arms for bumpers, going up steps and stepping down what seemed like three feet to step up to the next step, I didn't like the aroma of puke everywhere, on my clothes too, no avoiding it, but I refused to give in to sea-sickness, because riding the waves was my reason for choosing the Navy to stay out of the Army. I loved riding the ocean. The ship had a dozen or more black guys. I liked them the best and enjoyed social times with them. They were people just like me and the other white guys that called me nigger lover. My closest friend on the ship was Muslim, from Boston. One of the guys on the ship from Texas had a cousin who was going with Joe Tex, then a pop singer on the radio. Going onshore, I always went with my black friends. They were the most fun. The white guys went en masse to the sailor bar to drink as much beer as they could and talk big man talk about pussy. With the black guys I went to jazz clubs. They knew where these places were. Had some great jazz club experiences in Europe along the Mediterranean. My friend, Ameen, played jazz piano on the order of Ahmad Jamal, and jazz vibraphone, vibes. We'd go to a club, enjoy the music by good musicians from all over Europe. During intermission he'd introduce himself to the band, we'd drink with the band and talk. Every time, the piano player asked him to play some tunes. His courtesy was never to play more than two.

max ernst

After being acquainted with a fair variety of people, weary of racial tensions, I committed to a white working class community of mountain people, a real culture. As a white dude, I felt most at home among mountain people. I found my grandmother Worthington in them. From early years in these mountains unto now I feel in the mountains as in grandmother's arms. The attitude was hers, the philosophical mind was hers, the colloquialisms were hers, and the feeling was hers. I didn't learn until I'd been here a quarter century that her parents moved to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County, not long before she was born. Her older brothers and sisters grew up in Kentucky. She grew up in a mountain home, in Kansas. She married a boy whose parents had just moved to Kansas from Ninemile in eastern Tennessee, Bledsoe County. After living here feeling at home in mountain culture as nowhere else, I learned I've got hillbilly blood, lots of it. It was one of the happiest moments in my life to learn I had hillbilly blood on the Worthington side. Great-great grandpa fought for the Confederacy and survived. One of his brothers didn't make it. I felt closest to grandmother in childhood as to any relative. She was my home base. I had fun telling my sisters in Kansas they had hillbilly blood. Throughout my life, I've regretted the divide between races, religions, nationalities in my country. In the grocery store a couple days ago, a black man I'd never seen before came up behind me in line with two items. I invited him to go ahead of me. He was so surprised he looked suspicious, backing up a step. He declined. I said, Go ahead, I'm in no hurry. He did and spoke his gratitude. Mary at the register said that was nice of me. I said, I can't stand to unload my buggy with somebody behind me who has two items. What's the rush? Then realized it was "nice," unexpected, because he was black. I've done the same for white people and got no notice.  

max ernst himself

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