James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 30, 2008
Tampa Tribune chief editorial writer is Joseph Brown. Today's column dealt with the progress and failure over the past forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. This dovetails with some of my work now on my novel GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, which juxtaposes 1968 in the US versus the same time in South Africa.
JRF
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Joseph,
My wife and I had Shabbat dinner with two Jewish couples Friday. I was impressed with the simplicity and sense of community with which the Jewish Sabbath is celebrated.
By nature, I am not very gregarious, actually somewhat of a recluse, but stimulated by the conversation of my host, Dean of Students, USF Medical School, and his other guest, a physicist.
I've often said I would have little to read were it not for Jewish writers. This respect and admiration for the Jewish culture extends back to my college days.
One Christmas vacation, many years ago, when I was making my typical trip to Clinton (Iowa) Public Library, while most others were otherwise occupied, my mother asked me, "Did you see any of your friends there?"
I answered, "Only my Jewish friends."
When I shared this with my Jewish friends, the physicist said, "In many ways, I think, you had a Jewish mother." I think I did in the sense that we shared a common culture in striving for excellence.
(Dr. Fisher at Kruger National Park South Africa with his Children 1968)
"Vince Lombardi," the doctor replied. Then he quoted the famous Green Bay Packers coach.
"Everyone remembers Lombardi's famous quote," he said, "'Winning isn't everything; winning is the only thing,' but what I think is a more significant quote is this, ''Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.'"
The Jewish culture has striven for perfection and often achieved excellence, experiencing prejudice and exclusion along the way, but changing the world in the process. Look no further than Freud and Einstein.
You write that April 4, 2008 will be forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. African Americans, as you point out, exploded into violence across the nation in shock and frustration that day.
1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the "Chicago Seven" used their anger to disrupt proceedings, while the Republican Convention in Miami found presidential candidate Richard Nixon embracing Sammy Davis, Jr., as a surreal cloud descended on that convention.
Now, imagine experiencing all this through the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail in South Africa.
The Brits and Afrikaners alike delighted in the racial and political chaos in the United States, especially those sympathetic to the draconian Afrikaans policy of apartheid.
Now fast forward to 2008. The African National Congress is in power with the majority population no longer under the scourge of apartheid.
I have not been back to South Africa in nearly forty years. What I hear and read about South Africa today is discouraging. The country is in apparent chaos with crime out of control, as is AIDS. The Bantu people who lived in impoverished conditions in SOWETO in 1968 when I was there, if anything, finding themselves living in worse conditions today in 2008.
South African illiteracy has failed to improve, school dropout rates are at an all-time high, corruption in government seems part of the modus operandi, and this great country is, to put it politely, floundering.
The magnificent Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg was being built in 1968. Forty years later, it is closed and an eyesore on the Johannesburg skyline.
Because of the oppressive climate and chaos in Johannesburg, white South African doctors I know have immigrated to the Tampa Bay area in Florida.
You and other journalists, educators, scholars, and advocates -- Bill Cosby for one has profiled an upwardly mobile family on television -- imply the country has never left the mindset of slavery, and sadly, I agree.
In South Africa, as elsewhere on this beautiful African continent, the ghost of colonialism pervades the mindset of the populace. Colonialism has left its scar on Africa.
As Freud and others have pointed out -- he in "Civilization and Its Discontent" -- our inclination is to go quickly from pain to pleasure, and in this avoidance process from self-realization to self-destruction. We see it everywhere.
This is unfortunate as embracing pain is the only way to grow, as the Jewish culture has demonstrated, and as all those who have succeeded overcoming major impediments know only too well.
I am in the autumn of my years, and something of an idealist, thinking that by this late stage in my life "right would triumph over might, good over evil, community over corruption."
None of this has happened as might and evil and corruption have become only more sophisticated.
Likewise, change has found us developing more sophisticated toys of distraction, while complicating our lives with them without improving the content of our character.
We have preferred to put off the pain and to retreat into the surreal world of pleasure. Narcissism and hedonism are common conditions. It is why the times are still called the "Age of Anxiety," as the times were in the 1970s. This “pathology of normalcy” led me to write LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
What is the answer?
I worked and lived in Europe in the late 1980s, and the sin of the Nazis was palpable wherever I went in Germany, or whenever I was in the company of Germans in the Netherlands. Now, sixty years later, Germans suffer for something they only know in history books. The mindset of Nazism persists.
You can apology for slavery, colonialism, Nazism or some other ism forever and your apologies will not make any of these isms go away. It will remain a scapegoat as long as people fail to get beyond them.
In 1968, I went to a Museum in Belgium, which displayed exclusively Belgium Congo artifacts, and found it chilling. I asked the curator how these artifacts were obtained. He dismissed my question without an answer. Later, I read a history of this tiny country's colonial experience. It was haunting. Belgium colonizers were brutal and they stole Belgium Congo art as if they had the right without consent or compensation.
This defined the colonial experience, which strangely, I felt I was experiencing in Johannesburg in the 1980s, living like royalty, when I was a lower middle class guy from Iowa, whose father had been a brakeman on the railroad. It was obscene and troubling.
Much of the trouble in Africa, here as elsewhere, is connected to this horrifying and cruel exploitation of the people.
When people are exploited, invariably they take their anger and hostility out on their own. I saw this in a small way in my da, who was badgered by his bosses on the railroad, and unconsciously badgered his family when he came home with his booming voice and earthy expletives.
Gretchen Parker, in another article today on race relations, mentioned senator Joseph Biden saying, Barak Obama was "clean-cut." We seldom realize how patronizing attempts to be "with it" turn out to be.
I'm not into "You Tube" Internet exchanging, but a woman I know accidentally found herself witnessing a conversation between two African Americans girls. "They used ugly racial slurs to describe each other in the conversation." She said it made Don Imus sound like a choirboy.
It may seem weird to mention IBM in this context, but years ago, when I was first joining the workforce as a professional; some of my colleagues were with IBM.
It was a requirement for IBM salesmen, then, to address each other as "Mr." and to dress in dark suits, black shoes and knee high sox, white shirts and solid color ties. The hair had to be short, no sideburns, no mustaches or beards, and clean-shaven. Their appearance had to pass muster every day.
The IBM culture was designed to promote professionalism to the nth degree with the idea if you looked professional, talked professional, you would be professional.
Image is reality and my company, Nalco Chemical Company, adopted the IBM look to the letter.
We cannot undo the sins of the past that our people, in my case the white race, has done against African Americans and American Indians.
It is appalling how little attention is given Native Americans when it comes to discrimination. Yet American Indians have the highest death rate from alcoholism, and the highest death rate of babies born suffering from toxic alcohol.
Sure, there are successful African Americans and American Indians. And, yes, they could probably do more for their poorer members. But as Bill Cosby puts it, the poor could do a lot more for themselves. Challenging words but words don't seem to mean much when they aren't translated into action. And what prevents this?
My sense is that it all starts with SELF-IMAGE.
We forget that there is discrimination amongst successful whites against unsuccessful members of their own race. We are never going to dissolve discrimination; nor can we ever repair the damage done by slavery, colonialism, Nazism, or any other terrible ism.
I've encountered discrimination, as I'm sure you have, every phase of my life from a child to that of a man in his advanced years, and yet I have survived to the point of prevailing, as have you.
I give the total credit for this to my mother who programmed a powerful self-image in me, while my da tried equally strenuously to tear it down. It was this tension that made me, and I believe, makes every individual, not a group, no matter what their color, ethnicity, or culture.
If every child, black, white, red or yellow were given a powerful positive self-image, the pain of life would not only be endured but also embraced, and that person would soar on it to heights he or she might not even imagine in his or her wildest dreams.
The content of character builds on this but it needs nurturing from the very beginning of life so that the person will accept himself or herself as he or she is. Because of this acceptance, that person will in turn accept others as he or she finds them. This will in turn embolden that person to face all challenges with a spirit of can do.
Be always well,
Jim
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