On Obligation to Ida B. Wells et al.
A belated birthday present to Howard Zinn
The Black Ox (Richard Martin Oxman)

I wasn’t born yesterday.

My earliest memories are of my mom telling me heart-wrenching stories about black people from Johannesburg, her birthplace. She loved black people. Respected the blacks she was close to more than her own folks.

In 1949, a couple of weeks+ shy of my 7th birthday, some very angry, VERY WHITE people were throwing stones at me and my family. Maniacal citizens of Peekskill (in solidarity with law enforcement officers, it seemed), had also hurled dangerous objects at Paul Robeson and Eugene Bullard, among others, that day. We got away unharmed. [Pause.*] Not really, though. Actually, it’s never stopped hurting.

*I use the dramatic flair ’cause that’s what it takes for me to get through this.

Cut to my family dragging me into Lester Maddox’s Pickrick Cafeteria in segregated Atlanta… where (before I’m a teenager) I watch him chase an abused black employee around the tables with a hatchet. Crackers cracked up so, I thought I was hearing a laugh track from I Love Lucy. I remember Atlanta before there were any highways enveloping the realm. Where Papoo, my grandfather, ran a quiet market with lots of black folks having lots of fun with me on my summer vacations away from the Flower of the Garden State, Newark, New Jersey… where I was born, where I grew up. Following the steps of Stephen Crane, Jerry Lewis, LeRoi Jones, Phillip Roth and… Alvin A. “Al” Attles, Jr.

[Pause. Gotta control myself. I promised I wouldn't go into unnecessary detail, to cut to the chase.]

Cut to my father dragging me out of Geraldine “Butch” Fitzgerald’s house on a rainy night in “the wrong part” of Newark when I was 14. With Larry Brown’s dad and local basketball phenom Johnny Price. My first real girlfriend was way less white than Obama. [Twice as black, in fact.] I had forgotten those early stories my mom told, buried them, I guess. Until I was torn away from Butch’s umbilical cord.

[Long pause.]

Just before she died, I met Flannery O’Connor again — we had stopped at Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia a few times before on trips to Atlanta — ravaged by lupus. There’s a lot to remember, but the thing that stands out the most was the fire with which she expressed “differences” between her and James Baldwin. There was a streak in her.

Flannery’s personal dark side, and my father’s dark side (dis)respecting the horrific history of blacks, I no longer excuse away with that old biz about how people have to be judged by the standards of their time and place. That’s not always true, like with regard to Columbus, say. But, be that as it may, horror hangs heavy sometimes… no matter what words wring out on a given day. I love Flannery’s writing (in spite of all this; oh yeah, please don’t judge it by what Bruce Springsteen did with it in his Nebraska).

[Pause.]

The kids in my neighborhood, who were beating black brains in after Blackboard Jungle came out, grew up to be cops in Newark. A lot of them. I lived in an area off of Frelinghuysen Avenue, and everyone from my Seth Boyden Housing Project was slated to attend South Side High School. My parents made sure that I went (albeit, illegally) to (prestigious, at the time) Weequahic High School… a huge life-changer for me. [Rabbi-to-be (Tikkun's) Michael Lerner and I were both in the '64 class.] Still… I was brought back into touch with the very worst trash of Seth Boyden when the tanks rolled into Newark to quell the ‘67 riots. “Got a nigger today, Rich!”

Then there was the (ugliest imaginable) repression I witnessed in Hispaniola when I traveled to Santo Domingo for my very first divorce in ‘76. In part, courtesy of the U.S. Not very far in time from when Boston University’s president, John Silber, was delcaring — on CBS’ 60 Minutes — “A university should not be a democracy…. The more democratic a university is, the lousier it is.”

It seems to never end. My little Marcello (www.marcelsgeo.blogspot.com) got “escorted off of the Stanford University campus” — as recently as 2006 — shortly after he arrived (in preparation for the arrival of Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka)… for speaking out against the privatization of water in Bolivia courtesy of Bechtel… at the Bechtel International Center. [See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM-Hdn7h7tU#GU5U2spHI_4 for a short clip of what he was doing just prior to the confrontation.]

I don’t want to go on. [Pause.] Oh, I mean with this article.

No, I do very much intend to go on. Long after I’m dead, in fact.

For now, however, I’m going to “take charge” with some of the folks at http://oxtogrind.org/archive/336. Starting with the State of California. [See me for the HOW.] We have the full intention of causing unprecedented trouble for the powers that be. Think apoplexy.

We’re going to put an end to institutional racism right out of the gate.

We’re going to — yes, we are — end war on this planet. [Happy belated birthday, Howard.]

Following a new model.

Permit me to give you just one hint of how we’re going to tackle our mutual problems following a new paradigm. By spotlighting what we’re going to underscore in the fight for single-payer universal health coverage for ALL.

In short, we’re not just going to shoot for coverage that’s the equivalent to Medicare. Medicare is too deficient http://www.counterpunch.org/cramer10012009.html. Everyone needs a better deal than that. But beyond the elements of coverage, there’s the rarely-discussed QUALITY provided by medical professionals. The loopholes in Western Medical practice as per my (cancer prone?) wife’s “Zippy Breakfast” http://sosylvie.typepad.com/so_sylvie/2008/05/zippy-breakfast.html. [Sylvie, btw, (with no negro blood in her veins) is "blacker" than Obama.] AND as per… the raging incompetence and clear lack of compassion characteristic of too many in the medical profession. When we transform the extent of coverage for citizens and non-citizens alike, we are going to — simultaneously — put in every possible plug for transforming the attitudinal set of greedy docs. We’re actually going to do something about the fact that too many youngsters become doctors for unhealthy reasons. Training and orientation on our major medical schools will be transformed as a result of public outcry… which we will encourage up the kazoo.

How we gonna pay for all this? No more bang bang in Columbia, Israel and elsewhere. AND the top 1% (in terms of financial wealth) will shell out. The middle class won’t be paying 15% while the ugliest of corporations pay 1.5%. That kind of thing. Duh.

And where are we going to get the oompahpah with which to fire up citizens, create grassroots enthusiasm, belief? Well, I can tell you we’re not going to rely on the Super-Rich to save us. Oh no. With all due respect to Ralph Nader’s latest work… in which he understandably tries to motivate people by firing up their imaginations, we may tax the top 1% more, but we’re not going to do anything that’s contingent upon money when it comes to organizing and preparing for confrontation. Our agons will be supported by… oh, just read what Howard Zinn said many, many years ago:

“What the New Left needs to show, and in specific detail, is where the resources are in this country, what they are being used for, and what they could be used for.”

You’d be hard put to put yourself into a better position than the Sacred Seat in Sacramento, California in order to help the public to self-educate about those sorts of things. Again (http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/taking-over-post-arnold-california/  ), in short, we’re going to start by having twelve unaffiliated, non-politician citizens serving as Governor of California together (making decisions on an equal basis) — for the first time in history — in lieu of having a single self-serving careerist at the helm. We will be able to disabuse one and all of the… self-serving, suicidal nonsense which dominates our lives.

This idea wasn’t born yesterday.

We’re going to make Ida Wells smile in her grave. And a lot of others too. All over the world.

Contact Richard Martin Oxman, the author, at tosca.2010[at]yahoo.com or Marcelle Cendrars at bcendra[at]yahoo.com or Arnold Pepper at impelus[at]gmail.com to join hands in solidarity… or to ask questions… or for any reason.