Grandmother's Wisdom

A Grandmother’s Wisdom for a New President


My grandmother was a wise and earthy woman, a resident of Skowhegan, Maine where she played piano at the silent movies, was a familiar figure at the local dance hall, went through four husbands, and chose me from among many as her favorite grandson, an anointing for which I have been forever grateful. She tutored me on her Native American ancestry, indulged my every whim, negotiated with my parents during my delinquent teen-age years, and left me with an enduring distrust of authority and an appreciation for her insightful bromides.

When I got into trouble she always listened to what I had to say and then began with the same caution: “Peter, you have to pay now or pay later, and it will always cost more if you pay later,” which I took to mean that she would try to minimize my parental punishment, but I needed to take responsibility for my own shit and live with the consequences; no bullshit, no lies, no putting off the truth of my mischief until a later day, for when the truth inevitably became known, the outcome would be harsher.

Our government should have the wisdom of Grandmother Gladys. America’s beloved founding fathers worked their way through and around the twisted and competing problems of the Old and New Worlds: colonialism, independence, taxation, property right, electoral representation, citizenship, separation of powers, a bill of rights, and a procedure to accommodate changes they could not imagine but knew that history would require. The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States of America are two extraordinary documents. But the compelling spirit of the Declaration of Independence--that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among these being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—was not matched in The Constitution. Meeting in private, the constitutional delegates could reach no agreement on one issue—slavery. They tried, but wealth and regional politics led them to set aside the slavery question. No emancipation.

The founding fathers decided to pay later, and, just as grandmother would have predicted, the cost was greater, beyond comprehension—a civil war, leaving 600,000 Americans died. Reconstruction followed the war, and because victors get to write the new rules, slaves were emancipated, given the vote, and the rights of citizenship. But the white South remained unyielding and unrepentant, and within a decade the North grew weary of the struggle for racial harmony, left the “negro problem” to the South, and went about reaching for new national goals—industrialization and the accumulation of wealth.

History proved grandmother right yet once again. African-Americans were left to struggle with segregation, poverty, illiteracy, racism, cruelty and the apathy of an indifferent nation—during some years, an average of one black person per day was lynched. Yet the U.S. Congress refused regularly and repeatedly to pass an anti-lynching law, preferring to pay later. The cost that time? Protracted decades of bloody race relation marked by lost lives, lost futures, criminal brutality, and America’s national shame paraded across the international press in the form of a picture of a German Sheppard police dog lunging at peaceful demonstrator during a civil rights march.

And on goes history, using the prism of a single issue—race—to document Grandmother Gladys’ wisdom that it’s better to pay now than later.

This leads us naturally to the question of what do we do with the war criminals in George W. Bush’s administration?

The lawyers have international treaties and case law. All we have here is an old ladies’ wisdom. I understand President Obama when he explains that he wants to focus on the overwhelming problems of the moment, wants to look to the future. But I have this dreamy image of my grandmother, dressed in her house coat, wearing her card-dealer’s dark glasses, wandering through the West Wing to find President Obama to lure him into the Rose Garden where she would fire him up one of her ever-present Viceroy cigarettes. And while she had him aside, while he was breaking his marital pledge to quit smoking, she would offer him her “pay now or pay later” cautionary lecture. I can see the images, but I can’t quite hear what the President says in response. But I do know that for the good of the country he best not ignore my grandmother. Because if Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al. are not made to shade their faces from the bright sunshine of truth about their murderous wars, mid evil punishments, and soiling of the Bill of Rights, if they—we—do not pay now, who could speculate what the final payment will be? And make no mistake, there will be a reckoning, and when that time comes, the sins of our leaders will be ours as well.

Dr.Huesos is an unrepentant New Leftist who rebuilds old Harleys