Two lives intertwined now severed

I lost a friend the other day. Well I lost a facebook friend, a person with whom I have had a long history though we have never met face to face that I can recall. It could have happened sometime in the early part when we were both students at Culver Military Academy, we were after all in the same class though in different military units. Culver is what defines our relationship and dominates our past. For me it was a time of learning about other lifestyles, specifically those of those more privileged lifestyles than mine. I learned about segregation and how difficult it is to become integrated once the barriers are firmly in place. It was strangely enough for me the birth of my liberalism.

I was an outsider in a school of sons of wealth and power with a few military families thrown in for good measure. Oh I was a white anglo saxon protestant and from a professional middle class family, but I did not take to the lifestyle. Having three sisters and no brothers, I found myself without an understanding of how to relate to all of these men. Though large in stature I was hardly athletic and this was a school  that valued athleticism. It also valued military order something that I did not take well to also. In my year and a half I rose to no status beyond my presence. While others became full members of their military units I was never passed into the basic ranks. Even while there I was outside looking in.

My friend was quite the opposite. He was an up and rising part of the military system, a First Sergeant of his Company who would go on to be a Company Commander.  Though we never met or talked other than through an exchange of emails in the days leading up to our 50th class reunion there were intriguing similarities and again divergent paths. For it seems that somewhere after High School, and I think a stint in the US Navy after college, my friend made the transition from male to female. It was as she that we first really connected and though I would have loved to have discussed the details of the transition, the how and when, it never happened we simply discussed that which held us together our mutual history as Culver alumni.

It does turn out that the Culver dream cadet did share some of my reservations about the system saying that she felt like a trustee in a prison at times especially in her senior year when duty called to lead by example and also to report from time to time on the behavior of others. Culver is a better place now she informed me, and though I would like to believe that, the pain of the place lingers even now 52 years after I left.

But the strange thing is that pull of the elephant in our living space. I, too, have felt the pangs of sexual doubts. Gender dysphoria is the other thing that we have, or had, in common. I have astounded at least one potential mate by scoring higher on a femininity scale than she. It is probably right that my first wife once declared that she should have been a man, a sentiment with which I could agree, because I always felt like I was the better mother. But while my friend for her reasons made the change and more dramatically given her history, I continued on despite my occasional forays into investigation and discussion, in  the end I think my feeling that the world didn't need another 200 pound drag queen did the trick. My friend was lucky, she was slight of build and perhaps that military bearing helped her to soldier on through what had to be some tough times.

I we will never know, she passed away quietly on the way to an airport. She has flown home. In retrospect I should have gone to the reunion.

America is great, but right wing as well

Despite the hard edged rhetoric from the right, America is still the most conservative country and economy in the first world. Despite what others may say, I and millions of so called liberals believe in the promises of the US Constitution:

     We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
     domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the
     Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
     United States of America . . .

The America that the constitution founded was a country of radically different viewpoints and perspectives. It was a country composed of people of diverse lifestyles and cultures who recognized the need to come together for the common good. To get there each had to sacrifice some cherished beliefs and principles in the spirit of compromise. For almost all early Americans the resulting government was "too big" but they had seen the pain and isolation, the weakness and insecurity of small government. They recognized that in unity is strength. They recognized that a strong federal government with the power to tax was vital to national defense. Seventy or so years later we were told "A house divided against itself cannot stand." It is time to come together to rediscover our common ground and stand together.

There is no guarantee of the free enterprise system, and no prohibition of social welfare programs in the constitution. The ideals of government are apart from those notions. Likewise there is no guarantee of English as the primary or only language. 

What we as Americans seem to fear is that a large group of immigrants will come to this country and fail to assimilate. We fear that they will continue with their culture and traditions and eventually block mainstream Americans and American tradition from their life. We fear that these individuals, who came primarily for agricultural opportunity, will then rise up and overthrow the legitimate government. What we fear is our own history in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, but what we should be fearing is that of which Franklin Roosevelt warned us, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." It is fear that will divide us, it is understanding that will unite us.