Old men and storage units...

For these past mildewed eight years, thanks to the White House's Current Occupant, I've had to take my consolation where I can: mostly from old men like Ted Kennedy, Senator Byrd, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Max Cleland. These are men who can remember an America gone by: imperfect and maddening, but also a place where decency could live in tandem with politics. They're old guys, but they still roar like ancient lions at the deception and corruption gnawing out the heart of our nation. Sometimes too, I took comfort from an old dead guy like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.

So last night I watched a young black man speak after he had cinched the necessary party delegates for the nomination. And I remembered seeing the Ku Klux Klan parade down main street in Burke, Virginia, I remembered walking up the steps of my school surrounded by men with guns and dogs after integration, and I remembered being hurried out of school a few weeks later because of a bomb threat. I remembered drinking fountains in Tulsa, Oklahoma labled Colored and watching black people sit in the back of the buses. I remembered a few friends who went to Mississippi to work on voting rights for blacks, and who never came back. These images are a part of the factual world that made up my childhood and youth. And now, in my adulthood, I have another fact as bright as Christmas morning. A young black man stood up before all the world and accepted the nomination of his party to run for president of the United States. That's something. That's a stone miracle.

And today too, I read an article on Alternet about storage units. I gathered, with little surprise, that Americans have too much crap and they won't let loose of it. They'd rather shell out $100 a month to store their crap and, often, wind up leaving it in another state, untended and forgotten. Growing up in the South, now living in the Southwest, I can guarantee there are whole states that hold onto crap, crap like dragging a black man behind a car until he's dismembered. Crap like ignoring bad housing and worse schools because only black people live there and learn there. Crap like memorializing the War Between the States like it was something more than a shameful, bloody war. Crap like that.

Be nice to have a National Storage Unit for national crap: a place where we can store our old, old garbage and ultimately forget it. It sure is time for that. It surely is.