Bringing up kids in today's world

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. Here's another that may catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Her commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and she graciously allows us to share them with on-line readers here.

Two of my grandchildren go to a public elementary school in Norfolk, VA a few blocks from their home. I visited this school a couple of years ago during lunch hour when the cafeteria lunch room was a noisy chaos of energetic youngsters. What impressed me then and impresses me now is that the children paid no attention at all to race. Black children, Asian children, white children all seemed to associate with each other on some selection basis other than the color of their skin. In fact, 60% of the children in that elementary school are black, so my Swedish-English grandchildren are in the minority. They don’t seem to realize this and pay no attention at all to what color the person next to them may be.

This makes me wonder when it is that race becomes such a big deal in our relationships, and when and how we learn to mistrust, fear or hate somebody of a different race from ours. The famous song from “South Pacific” says “you have to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight to hate everybody your relatives hate.” Maybe that’s true but I like to think it is less true now that it was when the song was written.

Growing up in a small town in South Dakota, I lived in a monochromatic society, where almost everybody was the same color. My high school class had one Native American boy and one Japanese American girl. Otherwise we all looked the same. The biggest difference was whether a kid was a Catholic or a Protestant and I’m not sure we always knew that. Among my parents’ friends there was one Jewish couple but that’s as exotic as we got. Nevertheless, racism existed casually in our language and in some songs we sang or expressions we used, none of which I can repeat here, and we just never thought about it as being offensive.

I know only one person my age, a woman who has been my friend for over half a century, who is absolutely colorblind when it comes to race. She never seems to think in terms of what color somebody is and she was genuinely puzzled when her parents were outraged when she announced at a young age that she was in love with a black man she had met in Europe and wanted to marry him. She was banished from the family. That was at a time when interracial marriage was against the law in several states, and long before the laws that desegregated our society.

By the time I graduated from college and got to New York I had finally met a few people of other races but we all tended to move in our own orbits. It wasn’t until I visited my friend and her husband in a ghetto in Philadelphia that I was immersed in a community composed entirely of people of a different race from me. When I served as godmother to her baby boy, she, I, and the Episcopal priest were the only white people in the room. That scene was and still is impossible to imagine anywhere in South Dakota other than perhaps in some small communities on an Indian reservation.

But if we are going to prepare our children and grandchildren to live and work in a society as diverse as the one most people now live in, we should probably do our best to encourage them to experience multi-racial, multi-cultural communities. Chances are, if they leave their high plains home, they’ll be living in one.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.

Tear down this wall!

In August of 1961, I was on the campus of Midland College in Nebraska, practicing football with a contingent of recent high school graduates from across northern Nebraska. We were preparing for the Shrine Bowl football game, a pretty big deal for us – and a wonderful annual event organized by Shriners to benefit crippled children. Our practicing counted for very little, since later that week we were thoroughly trampled in Lincoln by the south squad – led by star running back Gale Sayers – 32 to 0.

At the time, I was oblivious to events on the other side of the world – events that would radically change the lives of millions of people. The so-called "cold war" had shown little evidence of abating in the early ‘60s, and on August 16th, 1961, East German leader Walter Ulbricht and his German Democratic Party (GDP) government made the cold war decidedly colder. They closed all border crossings and commerce in and out of West Berlin. Within a couple of days, they began erecting a 12-foot high concrete wall that would eventually run more than 87 miles, virtually surrounding West Berlin.

The move seemed a throwback to the late 1940s, when the communists halted all road traffic in and out of West Berlin in an effort to “starve” out the West Berliners. An enormous airlift was launched by Allied forces in January 1949, demonstrating the western commitment to preserving West Berlin, and finally convincing the East Germans and Soviets to halt their blockade.

I suspect that very few Americans thought the Berlin Wall would ever be completed – let alone survive for nearly three decades. Before the wall, there were about 1,000 people passing into West Berlin every day. The wall was a renewed effort to isolate West Berlin and stem the out-migration of citizens from East Germany.

In 1983, my son Brad and I motored across the East German corridor to visit the bustling West German enclave that was West Berlin. Our walk through Checkpoint Charlie (above photo) into East Berlin was an experience we’ll not soon forget. Stoic East German border guards took their jobs very seriously and demonstrated absolutely no sense of humor or cordiality. “Rude” would be a good description, and I suspect they were under orders to avoid being perceived as “friendly.” That simply wasn’t their job.

Fast forward six years to March of 1990 – wife Karen and I were vacationing in West Germany and drove a rental car across the same route into West Berlin. This time, however, it would be a very different experience. Just a few months earlier, the autocratic GDR regime of Erich Honecker was ousted, replaced by a group of younger East German political leaders. They decided that the Berlin Wall served no good purpose. The Russians were having problems of their own and were more inclined to abide by U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s admonishment from a few years earlier that they should “tear down” the wall.

Thousands of East Germans had attempted to escape into West Berlin over the years. Understandably, there are no definitive statistics as to how many succeeded – or lost their lives trying to escape. It’s thought that between 100-200 people died.

The Berlin Wall was still intact when Karen and I decided to hike along its route through a quiet neighborhood of West Berlin. We got a close-up view of graffiti that had been etched on the western side of the wall for decades. We saw the East German watchtowers that loomed over the no-mans-land near the wall, better known as “The Death Strip" (photo above). We also came across a few other hikers, who – like us – were collecting pieces of the wall for posterity.

Perhaps most interesting was our encounter with East German border guards – still on the job, but apparently operating under new orders: be friendly. It was a stark contrast to what Brad and I had encountered just a few years before. You can click on the photo to see a larger image.

All of these memories came flashing back today with media reports about Berlin festivities marking the 20th anniversary of the wall’s demise on November 9, 1989.

It seems we humans learn less from history than we should, so I think it’s likely that other walls will be built in other places for other purposes. And I suspect they’ll find a fate much like the Berlin Wall……a pile of rubble and a footnote in history.

Weapons of mass destruction

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. Here's another that should catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Her commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and she graciously allows us to share them with on-line readers here.

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A small item in the news caught my eye the other day. It reported that Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Mont. had “completed deactivation of 50 missile launch facilities.” Clearing 50 silos of intercontinental ballistic missiles means that the United States now has only 450 nuclear-tipped missiles in silos.

I don’t think about ICBMs much any more, and I don’t know who they’re all aimed at these days since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union no longer exists. In fact, I’m sort of surprised that we still have 450 of them, some with multiple warheads, ready to be fired at a moment’s notice. There are still officers in underground bunkers not too far away from us, ready to push the button if they have to.

I remember the years that Minuteman missiles were being deployed around Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City in the 1960s. Out on the prairie, silos were dug into ranch lands, command facilities were built here and there, and we became used to seeing USAF vehicles or helicopters on the landscape. It was not unusual to see a very long trailer, presumably carrying a Minuteman missile, escorted by armored vehicles, driving down some lonesome road. The deployment of missiles hereabouts resulted in an economic boom and I think we all appreciated that, even while pondering the seriousness of being the site of weapons that could destroy the world.

The idea of having hundreds of ICBMs in hardened silos at many sites in Montana, North and South Dakota and Wyoming was that if the Soviet Union attacked us, we could instantly attack them. This was the Cold War strategy called Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, which some thought it was.

There are no missile sites left in our neighborhood now, except for the one out by Cactus Flats, east of Rapid City. It’s a National Historic Site that displays a control center and a silo holding a disarmed Minuteman missile as a useful lesson in history.

The forces that threaten the peace and security of the United States are much different from those of 40 years ago and though we never got involved in World War III, we’ve certainly fought a lot of wars in the years since ICBMs were deployed. These weapons of mass destruction have not been of any use to us in Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

But yet we still have those 450 weapons aimed at somebody. They are just one part of our enormous military budget which is the largest in the world, larger than the military budgets of the next dozen or more major countries combined. Maybe one reason for our huge military budget is that various states have military installations or defense contractors they want to support.

For instance, our South Dakota Senators are adamant about funding the “next generation bomber” even though the Secretary of Defense says we don’t need that kind of plane any more. At more than $2 billion apiece, high tech new bombers are so expensive they use up a lot of money that could be spent on other weapons systems. So maybe Congress should rethink its approach to defense spending.

Back in the 1960’s when a Minuteman missile site north of Belle Fourche had a sort of open house for the public, I visited the underground command bunker along with my kids and mother-in-law. We went down in the elevator, passed through a huge metal door and entered the bunker where two young officers explained how they would fire any or all of the 10 nuclear weapons under their command if ordered to do so. It was impressive and terrifying. When we came back up to the twilit prairie my mother-in-law said, “Well, I wish we could spend the money on something we want.” I still feel the same way.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.