"What makes you Marines so special?"

By Jim DeVine, USMC, WW - II

Every morning I have coffee at McDonalds with two army guys and two sailors from WWII and Korea. Mostly sea stories, but suddenly one army guy asks me, "What make you Marines so special?"

Without much forethought, I say,"Boot camp." and added: In boot camp we are beaten down to the point where we are lower than whale shit. Then the DIs take that gunk and mold Marines out of it. It's that gunk that holds us together like glue and it's called espirit de corps.

A long silent period ensued.

"Anger = Weakness"

Source: op-ed piece from the Christian Science Monitor, 8 April:

Los Angeles - Thirty-five years ago today, on a cool evening at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, Hank Aaron shattered the most hallowed record in sports: Babe Ruth's career home run mark of 714. Yet Mr. Aaron's feat was remarkable not for its dethroning of a mythic American hero, but for its legacy of grace under fire – a legacy that would be invoked decades later in a race for the White House.

When Aaron swung at a fastball from the Dodgers' Al Downing and ran around the bases for the 715th time, he didn't feel like celebrating. "I was just glad it was over," Number 44 recalled many years later. Aaron, a black man, had just endured nearly two years of death threats, and literally tons of vicious hate mail – simply for daring to challenge the Babe.

A sampling:

"Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies...."

"Retire or die!!!"

"My gun is watching your every black move...."

"I was just trying to play baseball," Aaron told me in 1999, the 25th anniversary of 715. But for Aaron it would never be "just" about baseball. As the threats poured in, Braves officials assigned him a 24-hour bodyguard. FBI agents watched over his daughter, Gaile, at Fisk University in Nashville, while police escorted his younger children to school in Atlanta. In a chase that should have been joyous, Hank Aaron risked his life each time he stepped into the batter's box. Few of his fans, or even teammates, knew what he was going through. "I saw a lot of loneliness," said Aaron's confidant, Dusty Baker, who played alongside him in the outfield and watched in awe as Aaron blocked out the threats to focus on his task. "When you get a strong black man, the more you mess with him, the stronger you make him."

Like President Obama's quest for the nation's highest office several decades later, the slugger's ordeal had become part of a historical struggle shared by countless African-Americans.

"That was a time when Martin Luther King was saying to everybody, 'If you haven't found something you're willing to die for, you probably aren't fit to live,' " recalled Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and top aide to Dr. King. "And I think Hank had decided that his life was vulnerable, and that if it meant dying in the course of doing his best, I don't think he actually worried about it."

Aaron grew up in segregated Mobile, Ala.; in 1953, at age 19, he broke the color barrier in the deep-South Sally League, enduring (with teammates Felix Mantilla and Horace Garner) the kind of racist fury Jackie Robinson had felt a few years earlier in the North. John Lewis, the US congressman and civil rights leader, suggests Aaron was endowed with "that extra ounce of grace" that allows someone to endure extreme hardship. And for a black man in America, especially in the South, that meant not showing your anger.

"I think that in order to grow up black in the South, you had to learn that people were trying to do all kinds of things to try to intimidate you," said Mr. Young, recalling Aaron's struggle. "You never got angry. Anger was seen as weakness in the context of civil rights."

In a later generation, Mr. Obama built this understanding into his presidential campaign.

The famously calm demeanor of Obama – like Aaron, he is Number 44 (the 44th president) – can be understood not simply as a character trait, or explained by his never having felt the battering hatred of segregation. Just as significant is Obama's understanding of the psychological and historical dynamics laid out by Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint: "Because of slavery and all the oppression, the lynchings, there's a feeling that the black man is a very threatening creature."

Both Poussaint and Obama used that understanding to help transform the bogeyman stereotype. The psychiatrist worked with Bill Cosby to create the characters in television's Huxtable family. The candidate did so by his remarkable steadiness and by not taking the bait despite unsubtle jabs (consider the Sarah Palin "real America" comment, which many took to be racial code language). The ultimate transformation of the scary black man image was in how America began to see a young African-American as a cool, steady presence. Beside John McCain, who sometimes came across as frenetic, Obama was the steady one we looked to for guidance.

For Aaron, there was a price to be paid for swallowing his anger and enduring the death threats, racist catcalls, and hundreds of thousands of hate-filled letters. "It carved a part of me out that I will never restore, never regain," he said.

Yet he persisted in part because he felt like he was "in the middle of something." Thus, as he rounded the bases in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, he shed not only the ghost of Babe Ruth, but the burden of the struggle which he was in – a struggle that transcended sports, to a deeper realm of courage, resilience, and justice.

Sandy Tolan is author of "Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later." He is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Life Has A Flavor

Michael W. Rodriguez

Copyright © 1999

He stubbed his toe and almost tripped on the railroad tie just this side of Castroville Road. He recovered his balance and glanced around, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, hoping no one had seen how clumsy he'd been.

He grunted and wondered why he cared whether anyone had seen him. He scratched at his beard and glanced around again. Don't mean nothing, he muttered. I don't care; nobody cares.

I don't care, he thought again, and sniffed at the stink of his body odor. He pulled his coat tighter to him and wished he had a match to light the one cigarette he had left. He knew he was saving it for a special occasion, but he also doubted he had any special days left in his life.

He felt tired, or hungry, he wasn't sure which. No, he decided, I'm tired. Maybe I just need to sit for a while.

He eased himself down onto the gravel between the railroad tracks and the bushes that lined the rail bed, away from the road. He swung his head left and then right, struggling to remember again why he was so fascinated with railroad tracks.

And then a distant memory, as if a dim bulb, lit up inside his brain. He thought he remembered a fight when he was younger, lots of guns and little people and loud noises and people shooting at each other. He knew he hated loud noises, but he could not remember why. He knew he also hated little people, although he could not recall why that was, either.

He did know he loved the railroad tracks. They went this way and then they went that way and he had, as a young man, gone this way and that way, too, and he wondered, Why did I do that?

He shifted his weight on the gravel and reached into a pocket of his trousers. He withdrew his hand and lifted his most prized possession to his eyes. His hand held a Zippo lighter, a stainless steel lighter that he'd had forever. He'd held onto it all these years, even when he was in the hospital that time, up in Seattle. They wanted to take it away from him, he remembered, but he just set it down on a table and went back for it later. He knew that if this was all that was left of his life and it went away, then he'd go away, too.

He flipped the lid open and spun the wheel, though no spark flew and no flame jumped to life. That didn't matter to him, that it didn't work. What mattered was that he still had it, that he'd been able to hold onto it all these years.

He'd held onto it longer than he'd held onto . . . What was her name? He grunted, afraid he could no longer remember the name of his first wife. He'd been married several times, before he got sick, but he didn't care about the others; he just wanted to recall the name of the first girl he married. He glanced to his right, to the tracks coming toward him from the east, and then smiled, showing broken yellow teeth.

Thelma. That was her name. Why did that matter? He wasn't sure, but he thought it should be important to him. The marriage hadn't lasted long, but that was okay; the others hadn't lasted long, either.

He sighed and felt his breath wheeze in his chest. He was tired and hungry and he hurt in places he could not even name anymore.

He flipped the lighter's lid shut, the quick snap of it loud in his ears. He turned his head, anxious that no one should see him or his lighter. It was all he had left, it was all that was left of his life, and he closed his hand around it to hide it, but he did not put it back in his pocket.

The sun was almost down and he knew he should find a shelter or an alley or something, but he couldn't will himself to stand.

I like it here, he decided. I think I'll stay here.

He sat for a moment and then his eyes closed and his breathing became shallow. His head jerked and nodded once, then twice, and then it fell, resting heavy on his chest.

Still sitting between the bushes and the railroad tracks, his heart thudded once, thudded again, and then his breathing stilled and his hand opened. The lighter slipped from his fingers and fell to the gravel at his feet.

He was still there when the cop saw him the next morning. The young patrolman turned his vehicle onto the shoulder of the road and called in a possible vagrant. He stepped from the car and walked to the man. He knew, even as he approached, that the man was dead.

Poor old bastard, thought the young cop, and then he saw the lighter at the man's feet. He knelt and, still staring at the man, he picked up the lighter and glanced at it. He read the inscription, glanced at the still-sitting body of the man, and read the inscription again.

"For Those Who Fight For It, Life Has A Flavor The Protected Never Know."

545 PEOPLE vs. 300,000,000
By Charlie Reese
Orlando Sentinel

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don't propose a federal budget. The President does.
You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.
You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.
You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.
You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.
The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party.
She and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.
If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red .
If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.
There are no insoluble government problems.
Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.
They, and they alone, have the power.
They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.
Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.
We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.