Why the Nation Needs My Parents

                     Why the Nation Needs My Parents

                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal  July 17, 2016

            Around 11 pm, having arrived with my high school team from an away basketball game, I began the two-mile trek from the school to our house out in the country.  On the edge of town, one of the city’s three policemen stopped me and asked why I was out walking so late. 

After also securing my name, he asked, “Are you Walter Hines’ boy?”  “Yessir,” I said.  “Oh, ok,” was his response as he drove away.

Being Walter Hines’ boy often made my life easier.  My father (1894-1979) was well known in town.  Perhaps that was because he went to the bank fairly often to borrow money or because he did all of our shopping in town since my mother (1900-1965) didn’t think she could dress nice enough to go to town.

My father lived through WWI, the Depression, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.  Although two of his sons engaged in some of the bitterest fighting in WWII, it was the Depression that most deeply stamped his mind, producing story after story of frugality and sacrifice.

My mother bore her first child at age 17 and her last (her 17^th) at age 47.  A working mom, her work place was fields and huge gardens.  She had no problem with Southern heat and, as one of our pastors put it, “wasn’t too cute to sweat.”

My parents laughed much.  Their joy came from their children and the friends and neighbors who populated their small world.

That world actually wasn’t so small.  My father had a high school education.  He loved  newspapers and magazines.  In our humble abode I can say we never lacked for intellectual stimulation.

Our mother didn’t contribute much to that stimulation.  Her incredible gifts lay elsewhere.  Her 7^th grade education produced the ability to read, but she often stumbled while reading.  One of the joys of my life was to pronounce words for her.  Once she ran into so many difficult words that she said, “Can you sit down beside me and read it to me?”  Obliging her on that afternoon, before saying goodbye and leaving for college, is still one of my most precious memories.

So why would I argue that a nation, especially the most advanced nation on earth, could learn and benefit from a tenant farmer and his semi-illiterate wife?  Because one night at supper, after I had told about a friend at school being punished for stealing, my father said, “Well, starve to death and be ready for heaven, but don’t ever steal, even for food.”  And because my mother, whenever her children would tell her of their misfortunes, would listen and then invariably say, “Well, just go on.”

My father’s words would be called absolutism today.  (You mean we can’t steal food even if we’re starving?)  He granted moral relativism no quarter.  He would be aghast at today’s twisting and contorting of what he considered absolutes.

My mother’s words bespoke the outlook that one should not fret, but hold up and face the wind.

Oh, Mama and Daddy!  America needs you. We need to honor manual labor again, to get out of our houses and do something to make us sweat as you did, to go meet our new neighbors, of whatever background and race, and then take them something.

Daddy, we need to give somebody our last dollar as I saw you do a couple of times.  We need to admit that demon rum is still demonic, that teenagers are not wiser than their parents, that being good is better than being smart.

And Mama, thank you for not aborting any of us.  Many today would cast you as a victim or even look down on you for having so many children.  And you would only chuckle.

Neither of you knew about England’s Wordsworth and Milton, but Wordsworth’s praise of the great Puritan poet John Milton went like this: “Thou shouldst be living at this hour / England hath need of thee / Return and give us manners, virtue, and freedom / Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart / Thou didst travel life’s way in cheerful godliness.”  That fits both of you.

Neither of you would recognize America now, but neither would you be downcast.  You would frown at our bent for therapy.   You would show us how to hold to integrity and how to look upward and outward. 

I’m praying America will start doing just that, and I’m holding on to hope, just as you would.

Roger Hines

7/14/16

The Death of Conversation … Thoreau, Where are Ye?

                    The Death of Conversation … Thoreau, Where are Ye?

                             Published in Marietta Daily Journal July 10, 2016

            Which do you suppose supplies more knowledge and understanding of your work place, your desk computer or the water cooler?  Which produces a stronger family, a modern mom in a modern kitchen talking over the intercom to her daughter upstairs, or the mom and daughter together, talking across the kitchen table?

            You get my drift, but one more scenario.  A small family, after a week of school and work, is sitting in a restaurant on Friday evening.  Which is better, all of them reaching for their smart phones or talking to each other?

            Conversation is in a bad way.  We are absolutely running from it.  We’d rather text than talk.  Emotional distance is the order of the day.

One of the bedrock truths of our existence is that everything is somewhere.  But is this truth really bedrock after all?  When it comes to our relationship with technology, it seems to me we’re always elsewhere.  The claim that technology is connecting us is laughable.  Technology is distancing us, pulling us further and further apart with each passing upgrade.

            I’m not speaking of technology in general.  What ill could come from being able to measure your living room for new carpet by casting a laser beam across the floor?  What harm is there in a GPS that talks to you in the voice of your choice, whether a true blue Southerner, an Englishman, or Bugs Bunny?  How could I not appreciate the medical technology that surrounded me during some serious heart surgery? 

No, I’m talking about the technology of social media and education, two areas in which human touch is gasping for breath.  Currently neither parents nor schools are one bit concerned about the neurological or cognitive effects of children staring daily at flashing screens.  We love babysitters, whatever the cost.  

Americans have come to expect from their technology a continuous flow of infotainment, failing to recognize that 24-hour-a-day news is not news, but news rehash, and that constant entertainment doesn’t actually entertain.  It numbs.

            We know how children and youth view and respond to the online world.  They view it as a way of life.  They respond to it as if – no, because – it is their master.  We haven’t mastered technology.  Technology has mastered us.

            There are two extremes for everything.  Total embrace is one; total rejection is the other.  When essayist Henry David Thoreau grew tired of the busy life of Concord, MA in 1845 (that’s right, 1845), he took to the woods for two years.  His action was extreme, but from it came the following wondrous words.

            “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately … and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I wanted to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

            Could Thoreau make a living today practicing that kind of escape?  Perhaps not, but he still stands as an example of a courageous man who refused to let a changing world change him.  Thoreau also wrote, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friends, and one for society.”

            Technology is fast, but speed doesn’t always give us time to think.  It is exciting but it also offers children illusions of joyfulness (wizards, spells, seductive mermaids), and offers adults substitutes for intimacy (Skype meetings are not meetings).

            Technology is like money.  Those who knock it have never been without it, or have never had heart surgery.  Even so, we are unthinking if we disregard technology’s curse.  Its curse is that it is putting the wrecking ball to Thoreau’s three chairs.            

Solitude is not stillness.  It’s merely an occasion, even in a fast moving airplane, to be alone with your thoughts.  Family is not family if there is little or no family conversation.  And a society is not very social when its schools and work places rely almost entirely on screens, forgetting that eyeball to eyeball and heart to heart can seal a deal or hoist a relationship when gizmos can’t.

 Eyeball to eyeball we’re somewhere.  Gizmo to gizmo, we’re elsewhere.

Aristotle addressed our problem over two millennia ago.  Calling it the Golden Mean, he argued that between extremes there is the promising safe path of reason.  Golden Mean sounds nice and literary, but we could simply call it common sense.

 Eyeballs?  Yes.  Gizmos?  Yes.  But Thoreau and Aristotle would urge us to think about where the technological Golden Mean lies.  Right now, we don’t seem to care.

Roger Hines

7/6/16

Kiwanis, Rotary and Lions, Be Thanked

                 Kiwanis, Rotary and Lions, Be Thanked

                               Published in Marietta Daily Journal July 2, 2016

            Had it not been for the Marietta Kiwanis Club, I couldn’t be telling Rick Weldon’s story. 

            Rick was a member of the Wheeler High School Key Club, the high school organization sponsored by Kiwanis International.  Back before the Key Club was coed, the club for which I was faculty advisor consisted of 25 of the school’s finest young men.

              For the decade I worked with them I couldn’t wait for the weekly Thursday night meetings to experience their infectious zest for life and their inspiring maturity.  I cannot think of a single Thursday night over that decade that a member of the Marietta Kiwanis Club was not present at their meeting.  It was good having an additional adult in my classroom.  It assuaged my still-held concern that youths spend too much time with each other and not enough time with adults.

            The Kiwanians were faithful and so were school principals Larry Hinds, Jim Traylor, and Don Murphy who regularly excused members from class to attend Kiwanis meetings in Marietta.  This certainly contributed to the club’s success with their service projects, leadership retreats, and state convention awards.

            Although Key Club members were good students and young men of high character, they were not all of the same economic level.  Sons of Lockheed engineers and other professionals, most of them were from stable, well-off families.

            But not Rick.  Rick’s father, a struggling self-employed carpenter, died when Rick was 13.  Rick’s mother took on 3 jobs.  Rick had 2 jobs while in high school.  An older drugged-out sister drained his mother’s energy and joy.

            His senior year found Rick in both the club and my English literature class.  Handsome and congenial, but with struggle and weariness written deep on his face, Rick won the hearts of his classmates with his quiet strength and intelligence.

            It fell Rick’s lot to teach a passage from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” that included the lines, “Tis not too late to seek a newer world / Though much is taken, much abides / Be strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

            The class grew still and attentive as Rick began to expound.  They knew of his struggles. Among other remarks that were mature beyond his years, Rick stated, “No excuses.  We’re all supposed to bear up.”  After class I asked Rick if he planned to go to college.  “No, sir,” he answered, “I don’t think I could leave my mom in her situation right now.  I’ll stay on at K-Mart for a while.”

            Eight years ago I ran in to Rick, his beaming wife, and 2 joyful children at Books-a-Million.  He started college at age 20, “graduated late and married late,” as he put it, and now has a successful insurance business.  “I’ll never forget Key Club and those men from Kiwanis,” he stated.

            Rick Weldon isn’t his real name since I didn’t know then that I would be telling his story and didn’t get his permission.  But Ron Younker is the real name of another Key Clubber, a leader in his youth who, fortunately, is a leader in our community still.  So are Gary Cowan, one of the club’s presidents whom I met at Sweet Tomatoes only weeks ago, Judge Tain Kell who was an outstanding student and leader, and Chick-fil-A executive David Farmer.  Stuart Dyer – or General Stuart Dyer, that is – I chatted with a few years ago when he returned home for his father’s funeral.  He, too, mentioned “the Kiwanis men.”

            At age 16 I received a call from the Rotary Club president of my small Mississippi home town.  The club wanted to send me to the American Legion’s Boys’ State program that summer. That week at the state Capitol fed my desire to understand and follow politics, placing me in a world in which I still find myself.  It eventually led me to membership in the North Cobb Rotary Club in Kennesaw.

            Only days ago I was reminded of the splendid work of the Lions Club.  A friend wrote to say that the Mississippi Lions All-State band had placed first in international competition in Fukuoka, Japan.  Local Lions Clubs helped pay for students who could not afford the trip to Japan. 

            Daily and hourly on television, verbally and visually, the mayhem of the world is blasted into our homes.  Rotarians, Kiwanians, Lions, and other such organizations don’t blast.  Their effective response to a needy world is to see needs and quietly, steadily, and faithfully meet them.

            I know because directly and indirectly I have been the recipient of their goodwill, and I am grateful.

           

Roger Hines

6/29/16