Jack of Harts

I’m Gen X. I’m in what is generally considered the mid to older part of Gen X, so I grew up in a world of order where I HAD to get along with the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation. They were the people I was taught to look up to as examples of how to act, and they taught me in school. I was the first generation to be given a single letter as a description. X. And you know what? We liked it.

And as I was getting old enough to be considered a baby adult, I was playing with and talking to and dealing with the Gen Ys. They are my younger cousins. The kids entering school as I was looking at graduating. The kids we were trained to look out for and protect when they went out to the school yard to play. The kids we watched to make certain some drug dealer didn’t try to sell to them, or that we watched when strange vans rolled through our neighborhoods just in case they were one of those bad vans. The kids in church that us older kids were trained to watch and make certain they were safe at all times.

I grew up with and am comfortable dealing with a range of humanity that stretched across a century of birth dates. People who grew up in the ultra-racist times of Democrat-ruled America in the 30s and 40s and who went to war and came back home and wanted to do everything they could to keep that kind of world or war from ever happening again. They built a world where order was the base standard and disorder was not just frowned upon, but unforgivable. They built a world where no one was allowed to see race. Where even admitting you recognized that someone looked black was on the edge of the line that was not allowed. And you’d better have a REALLY good reason that you even mentioned it. Because if you didn’t, they were already reaching for the soap that was going to go into your mouth for daring to mention someone’s skin color.

I grew up in a world where the Reverend Martin Luther King’s words were gospel. Where we looked FIRST to the content of their character and then we refused to look at the color of their skin. To this day, I look to what someone is wearing and how they act before I ever look at the color of their skin. And even then I’m uncomfortable thinking about it. And when someone asks me what they look like, I describe their dress and their actions first. And then they have to ask me what their skin color. Because I was taught from the moment I first realized that people came in different colors that God loved variety, and everyone was equal in the eyes of God. Period. End of Line.

Jesus loves the little children of the world. Red, Brown, Yellow, Black, and White, they are precious in his sight. That was a foundational song we sang in church, and if it wasn’t every week it was often enough that I know it by heart.

The Greatest Generation, the people who taught me, saw what evils racism can do. They saw what Japanese racism did to the Chinese and American prisoners. They saw what German racism did to the Jews and so many other “undesirables.” They saw what Russian racism did to all the ethnic cultures around them. And they saw in America the honorable black men who rose up and fought in World War II, volunteering to serve in a military where they had been wiped out of the military by Democrat administrations of the early 1900s. They saw the evils of racism in a war that killed millions of people and sunk three quarters of the ships on the ocean, and they built a world where that would not be allowed to happen again. A world where that kind of racism was not only wrong, but unthinkable. Literal Wrong Think in the terms of 1984.

That is the world I grew up in. And I HATE that the Democrats have built up a world in the last two decades where the unthinkable is once again not only thought but shouted out by the loudest voices in our politics. I hate it. There are very few things in this world that I truly hate, and that is one of them. And I lose respect for those who celebrate that.