Only now approaching this rare air.
Are we aware that the American dream is no dream at all.
But instead a dare to dream together. -- Amanda Gorman, from This Sacred Scene
 |
| Mary Agatha (Larkin) Herron, 1844-1915, my maternal great grandmother. Photo from family records. |
I had a neighbor who once told me, "Everything is political."
Bahrum called himself Persian. He taught physics at San Jose State and during summers worked as a physicist at IBM. He was a political activist who hoped to someday see the overthrow of the Shah (or King) Mohammad Reza of Iran who had ruled the country since 1941, with support from the United States.
It was spring of 1970. My spouse Linda and I had recently moved into an apartment complex in East San Jose and our front doors were across the outdoor hallway from our Persian neighbor and his lovely wife Fereshteh and their son Faramarz.
Our daughter, Molly, was the same age as Faramarz. The little ones were less than two years old and took baths together.
Occasionally on Saturday afternoon, a gathering of Iranian political activists got together in our neighbor's apartment. These were not have-a-good-time parties, but it was noisy. They talked politics in Farsi, the language of Iran.
Heady stuff. They had all the facts and wanted their country back. I knew nothing about Iran. The family of three who were our neighbors were kind and neighborly. We shared meals and conversation, which often turned political. We were not invited to the Saturday meetings.
Because of the Vietnam War, I identified as a peacenik. I wanted our boys home and didn't understand why we were there in the first place. I would have been there myself except for a clerical error by the Pasadena Draft Board that classified me 3A (deferred) rather than the correct 1A (you're going to Nam). Fortunately for me, the Draft Board discovered their error too late.
"You want peace," Bahrum said to me. "But you've never lived under military rule."
I felt naive. The Vietnam War had lured me into anti-war politics and peace marches. So I listened.
Within the year we moved from the Lanai Apartments into a duplex in an old Italian neighborhood on N. 17th Street. We never saw our Persian neighbors again. We heard they had gone to the Netherlands.
In 1979 the Shah of Iran was overthrown by political revolutionaries, like our former neighbors, as well as Islamic extremists, an unlikely mix whose goals, as it turned out, widely differed.
Reading about it, I realized that our former neighbors could well have participated in that revolution in which the intellectuals were duped and subsequently punished, imprisoned and/or executed. The Ayatollah Khomeni fast created an Islamic theocracy in Iran, with harsh rules including the subjugation of women, and crackdown on dissent that continues to this day.
I learned that personal freedom is inherently related to the price of politics. Along with the memory of our former neighbors, the phrase "everything is political," stayed with me.
In the United States we take our freedom for granted. We can say what we want without going to prison. We can read a book without being punished. We have the benefit of a free press, although mostly driven by advertising. We don't have soldiers with arms on every corner. These liberties could be taken away. (We are already being surveilled by technology barons.)
Less than 200 years ago we fought a bloody Civil War over states' rights, slavery and freedom.
Ancestors of mine were drawn into the conflict, shed blood in the Civil War, including both of my maternal great grandfathers, on opposite sides, as well as my paternal great-grand-uncle.
Benjamin Franklin Herron, at age 15, enlisted in the North Carolina Regiment of the Confederate Army. John Henry Courtney, an Irish immigrant who later walked with a severe limp from a battle wound, was a soldier for the Union Army. Samuel Lindley, great uncle of my father, was one (no. 353) of more than 13,000 Union soldiers who died from starvation at the infamous, inhumane Andersonville Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia.
 |
| Samuel A. Lindley in his Yankee uniform with what appears to be an M1855 Springfield rifle. Photo from family records. |
War. Slavery. Starvation. Men. Politics.
The insurrection at our nation's Capitol following the 2020 Election, led by Confederate-flag-waving extremists and their supporters, proves the volatility of our constitutionally guaranteed freedom. They went after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, because they hate women, especially if they posses more power than they do.
The words, "Where's Nancy!" and "Hang Mike Pence!" echoed through the building where our elected representatives debate and pass laws.
Vice-President Pence had the responsibility that day of certifying the Election. President Donald J. Trump had ordered his vice-president to do otherwise, claiming falsely that he had won.
What if Pence hadn't certified the Election? What if he had been hanged? It was certainly a possibility. Unruly mobs are capable of anything. Trump would have been pleased. One of his supporters subsequently broke into Pelosi's home in San Francisco, hoping to do what? Rather than Nancy he found her husband, Paul, and knocked him in the head with a hammer fracturing his skull, a wound much worse than Trump received from his would-be assassin who missed. He played the holy victim with an oversized white ear bandage.
He used a similar ploy for avoiding the draft and Vietnam: his daddy's doctor friend claimed the poor boy was afflicted with bone spurs. They don't seem to keep him from playing golf as an old man.
He's running for President again with a vengeance and the backing of Christian Nationalists who would have us live under the politics of a theocracy.
These thoughts occupy me as we approach our National Election in November.
My hope for the future circles back to the strong women, like Nancy Pelosi, in my family. My great grandmother, Mary (Larkin) Herron, was an Irish immigrant. Following the Civil War, she ran a dairy near Fort Assiniboine in northeastern Montana. She raised cows and supplied milk for her family and the fort. Her husband, the aforementioned BF "Frank" Herron, then an enlisted soldier with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, was a less reliable sort. He skipped out on her and their four children, leaving them penniless. She persevered. The federal government deeded her the dairy land. Family lore tells me she was kind to the Indians.
She was the backbone of her family. Her strength and commitment survived through her daughter, Katherine Lenore (Courtney) Herron, my grandmother, who raised nine children on the rugged plains of Montana. These were courageous women instrumental to the survival of their families during pioneer days on the western frontier. Katherine was wed to George Edwin Herron at Fort Assiniboine circa 1900.
I believe that our nation is ready for the leadership of a woman. I have a sense that our appetite for war can be directed toward a more civil and necessary menu for the people, of the people and by the people. Our nation is out of balance. Women perform the crux of our domestic work yet we fear their political leadership.
Everything is political but politics isn't everything. The human spirit has the capacity to rise above the fray. As expressed by our inaugural poet Amanda Gorman: "The American Dream is no dream at all, but instead a dare to dream together."
 |
| Kamala Harris, Democratic candidate for President of the United States. |
I invite you to join me and cast your vote in November for Vice-President Kamala Harris, a modern-day pioneer, daughter of an immigrant single-mother, for President of the U.S. We have reached a cultural and political milestone. Let's seize the moment.
Note: It helps to have a genealogist in the family. Special thanks to my cousin-once-removed, Don Tillitson, for sleuthing out my relationship to Samuel Lindley.
If you would like to receive my latest blog posts, PM me thru FB with your email address. Thank you for reading. It really is more important than television.
