EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL? AN EARLY UNDERSTANDING

I remember thinking of equal rights my senior year in high school.

In 1973, just before graduation where everyone would trek off and change the world, some of the class boarded a bus in front of the school.

While we waited to leave, Principal Stuckey came out and played his bagpipes in a kilt.

It’s been a while since then, but that demonstration proved one thing I’ve taken forward:

If you have a kilt and bagpipes, save them for a better day, like the Highland Games where everyone wears a kilt and probably has a bagpipe in the trunk of their car.

Mr. Stuckey’s march had nothing to do with equal rights, but he was a good player. It would have been distressing if he wasn’t, and even worseif a student decided they had the right to wear a skirt and blow on a hollow stick.

But it was 1973, like I said, and there was only one bagpiper on duty. He was a surprise and had no equal, but it was still weird.

2

During those same early years way back when, some of us kids worked summer jobs at the salmon fisheries in Charleston, Oregon.

Hallmark’s was across the bridge from Peterson’s. That’s where I was the new guy on the slime line. Did you know salmon collected sea lice on their skin?

We stood on either side of a long table with one man at the front end cutting the heads off fish and sliding them down the table.

He was called the Head Cutter.

The rest of the crew wore crusty gloves and scraped the ocean bugs off fish before they were dipped and quick frozen then boxed for shipment.

It was the graveyard shift and one night a day guy came in. He brought a date.

Like a fishy King Pin, this older man, probably an ancient thirty year old, pulled off his sweater and wrapped a raw fish in it and gave it to his date as a present.

It was a proud moment.

After they left the foreman announced to us summer hires that we would have the same equal rights as the older guy if we stuck around and made a career there.

It was tempting, but like my classmates, there was a world to change after high school.

Equal Rights For College Freshman, ’73-’74

Some older colleges students in 1973 were Vietnam War veterans.

They explained equal rights in the draft.

“We all showed up and got processed the same. Toward the end of the day one of the sergeants went down the line and started picking people to form another line.

“The line we left was going into the Army; the new line was going into the Marines.”

Imagine being in a draft line and getting assigned to the service you wanted, which didn’t happen because you would have joined your service of preference instead of waiting to get drafted.

What’s the difference between the Army and Marines? Ask a Marine.

To an incoming freshman, there were no equal rights with those guys. They were men and we were boys.

Were they role models for the uninitiated? After freshman year I joined the Army and found out.

I still remember them as good guys who didn’t put themselves above anyone. Guys like me put them up there on our own. They earned it.

A Life Lessons For Paying Attention

If your main goal in life is playing one-up on everyone you know, equal rights are not your thing.

Our job as human beings is understanding what we need to live, and what others need to live, and voting for candidates with a similar understanding.

The flip side is being in the same boat as others, but voting for candidates who promise to punish the side that sees equal rights as a worthy endeavor.

Instead of looking for the best candidate for office, or the better of two evils, some folks only want someone who promises to stick it to the candy-ass, soft, whiney nannies who want to force everyone to do things like get vaccinated and wear a mask during the ongoing Covid pandemic.

The nerve of them all, right?

Whose Equal Rights?

They want a man to lead them, a man who has already failed as a leader but can’t accept his election loss.

The man they want taunts them with, “I don’t pay taxes because I’m smart, but you’d better not try it, you under-educated morons.”

He lives a resort lifestyle, a penthouse lifestyle, the sort of lifestyle that excludes the mass of followers showing up for rallies.

What kind of man do they love with every cell in their body? The man they call ‘sent by God?”

He’s a mirror posing, TV watching, lazy fat man who wouldn’t last a day in the life his followers lead. And that’s okay with them.

He sparked an insurrection and that’s okay with them.

He sucks up to the wrong people, and that’s okay with them.

They don’t care as long as they feel better than the wine and cheese crowd at the country clubs where they work.

And their boy is the biggest country clubber of them all. How does this all work in their brains to make sense?

Equal rights? For who?