The Past Is Always With Us

The old man sat alone on a bench with a cane propped against one leg. We rode past on bicycles and he said something I didn’t understand. I stopped and pedaled back to tell him I didn’t hear him right.

“He’s afraid of losing you. He keeps looking over his shoulder,” the old man explained as he looked toward my six-year-old grandson, Alex, who’d been pedaling furiously in front of me. The old man’s battered cap visor shaded intelligent eyes surrounded by wrinkles. “Pearl Harbor 1941” was sewn in gold thread above the worn visor.

“You were at Pearl Harbor?” I asked.

Alex at his great-grandfather's funeral last December
 Arlington National Cemetery

“Yes,” he answered.

“You must be in your nineties now.”

“Ninety-four.”

Turning to Alex, I asked, “Do you know what happened at Pearl Harbor?”

He shrugged, so I explained that the largest war in history began for the United States when the Japanese attacked the US Navy there back in 1941, ten years before I was born. “This man was there when it happened.”

Suddenly shy, Alex only stared at the old man with wide eyes. The old man’s eyes silently conveyed that he understood how Alex was feeling and seemed grateful for our attention during our short interaction.

Tankers offload at dusk in South Portland Maine

The bicycle trail we’d been riding on was laid out along the Portland Pipeline right-of-way that stretched from where we stood straddling our bikes all the way to Montreal, Canada. There was a huge, ocean-going tanker tied up about three hundred yards from where we were talking as it offloaded crude oil from some other part of the world. Behind us were huge, cylindrical tanks that stored the oil until it could be pumped northwest to refineries in Montreal.

It occurred to me that the pipeline had been completed in1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet it was Canadian involvement in World War II - which pre-dated US involvement - that caused the pipeline to be built. War had broken out in Europe when England and her empire, along with France and its empire declared war on Germany in 1939 following the German invasion of Poland. German submarines had been attacking Canadian shipping in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Canada needed a more secure method of delivering crude oil to Montreal refineries.

We said good-bye to the old man and pedaled the short distance to the waterfront where there was a  full-size model of a “Liberty Ship” bow a few yards from the bow of that big tanker. We turned our bikes into an outdoor display in which there were photographs of what is now “Bug Light Park” as it looked during World War II. The War Department had seized and torn down a residential neighborhood and constructed enormous shipyards on the site to build hundreds of Liberty Ships. These hastily-built, cargo vessels kept the enormous Allied war effort in Europe and North Africa supplied. Tens of thousands of men and women from all over New England worked there. Each woman was a “Rosie the Riveter” in the parlance of the day. They built the ships that would keep their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons equipped with whatever they needed to fight the Nazi war machine.

We looked at the old photos and I explained as much as I could for as long as I had Alex’s attention. Six-year-old boys, and especially Alex, like to keep moving on sunny, September afternoons, so we soon continued our pedaling along the waterfront toward a huge cruise ship tied up to the International terminal across the harbor in Portland. It dwarfed everything around it.

Portland Pipeline Pier at sunrise last month

As we pedaled back toward our South Portland house through what had been sprawling shipyards, I recalled reading the thousands of interviews I assigned my students to do over the decades I taught history. I’d send students out each year to interview someone over seventy years old. Most interviewed grandmothers and great-grandmothers, many of whom were women who had worked at the South Portland shipyard. On that windy Saturday afternoon though, huge kites flew over large expanses of green grass overlooking Casco Bay on what had been an enormous industrial site. I imagined being there seventy years before. Our bikes glided over old railroad tracks, barely poking up through asphalt here and there, remains of what had been.

Moonset over Portland from Bug Light Park last week

History teachers know the past is always with us, especially retired ones like me. Driving back toward our Lovell house in the western Maine mountains, my wife and I pass by other sections of the Portland Pipeline’s 236-mile route to Montreal. Images of men digging it went through my mind along with images of women whose lives were being transformed by their experiences doing what had been exclusively men’s work in the huge shipyard where the pipeline began. Most of them were underground now, like the pipeline, like the old man would be fairly soon, like all of us will be sooner or later.

Today, however, sun is shining. Let’s see what the day brings.

Can't Go On Like This

Something’s in the air - a foreboding. People sense it, and when I ask them to describe it they bite their lips, look away and look back to say something like, “I don’t know. It just can’t keep going on like this. Something’s going to break.” Some think another financial meltdown is coming, but a bigger one, much bigger. Others think it will manifest as a breakdown of law and order. No one I’ve talked to thinks their lives or their children’s lives are going to improve in the foreseeable future. They think about just holding on. They see decline all around them and are bracing for more. They expect the slide to accelerate.

Former Senator John Morse

Two things occurring last week seemed reflective of this:

1. A couple of state senators were recalled in Colorado after they voted for gun control. The most surprising thing was that these were two very blue Democrat senate districts that went for Obama by a wide margin. It was a blue-collar revolt organized by a couple of plumbers who were outspent by progressive Democrats six to one!

2. Nationwide, senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle were bombarded by constituents telling them to stay out of Syria. Here in Maine, left-wing Congresswoman Chellie Pingree said her calls were running 98% against. Those are astounding numbers! President Obama was shocked to realize that if the vote he asked for went ahead, he would have the rug pulled out from under him in front of the whole world.

Chellie Pingree

Are these the same voters who reelected Obama and the Democrats with 52% of the vote just ten months ago? Maybe they’re people who stayed home last November because they didn’t like any of the choices on the ballot, Democrat or Republican. Maybe they’re people only now getting fired up because they know what they don’t want - a government they don’t trust trying to take their guns, and a president they don’t trust trying to act tough.

Something is afoot and political pundits are flabbergasted. These are grass-roots uprisings and they portend a possible sea-change. Ordinary citizens are saying “Stop!” to government. The Colorado plumbers and other ordinary citizens told government not to mess with people’s guns. The rest of America told government not to use military action in Syria if it’s only to save a vain, incompetent commander-in-chief from embarrassment, especially one who has no plan for what to do afterward.

Are people losing faith in government? Unions are worried about losing the forty-hour work week and their subsidized health insurance under Obamacare. Citizens are learning that their doctors will be asking them for details about their sex lives - and it won’t necessarily be the doctors they’ve always gone to either. Obama’s assurances that “you can keep you doctor” under Obamacare are going by the wayside. So are the guarantees that “you can keep your policy,” as colleges, businesses, and other organizations think about dropping health care coverage for employees. Meanwhile, senators and congressmen who gave us Obamacare are exempting themselves from it. They don’t want to go into health-care exchanges into which they’re forcing the rest of America.

The number of working age Americans out of the workforce is approaching 100 million. That’s not reflected in unemployment statistics, which are really far worse that those being reported. There are more people collecting government assistance than there are taxpayers in many places, including my state of Maine. The United States was born in 1776 and came to be the most powerful, most prosperous nation in history by the end of World War II in 1945. Now, in 2013, the United States is the most indebted nation in history. We owe $17 trillion on the books already and that doesn’t count promises government made for Social Security and Medicare which could amount to $100 trillion more unless they’re cut back.

“Rags to rags in three generations.” Ever heard the saying? The context is usually family, but it can apply to a nation. The first generation makes money and goes from rags to riches. The second generation holds it. The third squanders it and goes back to rags. In a country that prizes the “pursuit of happiness” by preserving equal opportunity, rags to riches stories are common. They happen in totalitarian countries too, but the process is usually criminal or violent, or both. Here, people can pull themselves up legitimately by starting businesses which together build an economy that pulls others up with it. We can, that is, unless government regulates business to death or confiscates income through excessive taxation. Government can preserve equal opportunity, but cannot produce equal results.

Half the country seems content to sit back and let government do more and more for them, while the other half realizes, as economist Herb Stein did, that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Sea Glass

We both walk slowly along, eyes on the ground. My wife looks for sea glass at low tide, bending over frequently to pick up a piece and pocket it. I do too because she likes to. She picks up all she finds, filling her pocket and whatever container she brought with her to overflowing. I’m more selective. Down the beach another woman does the same thing, just the three of us on a cool, sunny, September afternoon.

Sea glass and older, ceramic fragments are ubiquitous on old city beaches near our South Portland neighborhood. We found a small beach recently on what had been working waterfront. Rather than smooth sand, small stones dominated, interspersed with large ones sticking up here and there. Scattered about were remnants of piers long abandoned. People didn’t sunbathe there. Few swam either. Some would come to let their dogs run and swim. Others like ourselves came to see what presented itself after the tide.

Houses a block or two back are old too, modest and built close together. A few still have lobster traps stacked around and not many are neglected anymore. Buyers fix them up now, especially along the harbor edge - people who like to look at the water rather than work in it. There’s a Coast Guard Station, a restaurant, clusters of condominiums, single-family homes here and there, and a yacht club slowly taking over an old boatyard.

It occurred to me that ugliness could, over time, turn to beauty. Sea glass is like that. When I asked the other woman on the beach to show me her collection, she said, “Every piece has a story.” I imagined people in the long ago smashing empty liquor bottles in anger, or out of carelessness, laziness, drunkenness or some combination, and I could almost hear the tinkling. They left dangerous shards to cut whatever person or animal might pass by before waves and sand and time dulled sharp edges. I imagined the waterfront as it used to be with small shipyards building wooden vessels. The decrepit remains of some still stood nearby with old ways disappearing into the water over which new boats used to slip in until they too rotted away. In my mind’s eye I saw fishing boats under sail and men returning with their catch, or without one, empty. I saw sad, broken men leaving their broken bottles behind and staggering home to scatter emotional debris over spouses and children.

Alcoholism is like that, leaving emotional and spiritual detritus - often for generations. It, too, manifests in many colors, sizes and shapes and can cut deeply, drawing blood. Wounds fester, or they can heal, dulling pain, leaving scars - even turning beautiful sometimes, like the glass, like the pieces my wife and I collect.

In a church meeting room up the street people wounded by alcoholism in loved ones gathered and talked the following morning. I was one. Some were in pain. Others had also been wounded, but after many waves of grief their pain was sanded down and had lost sharpness. They had become like vintage pieces of glass diffusing light in their subtle, pleasingly-serene manner. Newcomers living with active alcoholics, in whom pain was acute, marveled at the serenity they sensed in the old-timers. They saw that others had felt distress like theirs and transcended it. Drawing hope, they bathed in their reflected light to soothe their wounds and find healing.

My ancestors were all Irish immigrants among whom alcoholism was too common. Great-grandfather John Fitzgerald was one. He came over to St. John, New Brunswick in the late 1800s and, like many other Irish-off-the-boat, he walked down to Boston, stopping here and there to work. He sang and played a piano and he was a charmer, they say. I never knew him as he died of the drink in his early forties. Did he stay for a time along Portland harbor and contribute to the sea glass to be found there? I don’t know, but he married Kate Carney and started a family near the docks in Boston. My grandmother, Mary Fitzgerald, was his first-born in 1894. Then, unbeknownst to them, he started another family in New York City - going back and forth between the two for as long as he could before his charm wore off. Mary Fitzgerald Haggerty lived with us a while when I was a boy and I sensed her pain. Only now do I understand what some of its likely causes were.

These things I pondered as we walked slowly along, eyes on the ground.

Too Much Power in Washington

At a dinner party last week a friend said, “I’m going to say one word and I’d like you to answer in one word.”

“Okay.”

“Snowden.”

I had to think for several seconds. “Ambivalence,” was my response.

Edward J. Snowden shocked me with revelations of the extent to which government spies on us. It upset me and forced me to readjust my understanding of the threat to our Constitution government surveillance has become.

The Constitution limits government; that’s its primary purpose. Our Founding Fathers considered government a necessary evil to be constrained as a threat to liberty. As originally ratified, our Constitution says government may have only these powers and no others. Two years later, the Bill of Rights was added to spell out constraints more specifically.

Snowden showed me that’s all at risk now. The Fourth Amendment is violated when government collects all our phone calls and all our emails. We’re assured government won’t read them unless we’re communicating with a foreign terrorist.

Do I believe that? No. Do you? The Obama Administration uses the IRS to harass conservatives. Can we trust it not to read our emails or listen to our calls? Who would doubt it will continue to spy on - and leak information about - its political adversaries?

So now what? The federal government knows more about us than I ever would have believed and I’m a fairly well-informed person. I was relatively confident of my ability to sniff out paranoid conspiracy theories about secret cabals like the Trilateral Commission, or Bilderberg, or the Illuminati controlling the world. However, other things I’ve learned this year are worrying me more than they did when I first heard about them - all because of Edward J. Snowden.

What things? Department of Homeland Security buying 2700 mine-resistant, armor-protected vehicles and 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition for one. Inserting an “indefinite detention” proviso in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allowing government to suspend our right to due process is another. Then there’s defining people reverent of individual liberty as terrorists, and that definition would include this writer. All this had the support of Republican congressional leaders as well. Where then, are the constitutional checks and balances designed by our Founding Fathers?

When Obama ignored the War Powers Act, thereby violating Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war in his attack on Libya, he was assisting rebels linked to al Qaeda. After they killed Ghaddafi, those rebels killed our Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Though President Obama promised repeatedly to get to the bottom of what happened, all his efforts have been to cover it up. Republicans in Congress with the power to subpoena witnesses, have so far let him get away with all this. Are they complicit? Tacitly so, at least.

 There are reports here and here and here and elsewhere that Obama’s CIA was shipping weapons such as Gaddafi’s shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles to Syrian rebels from Benghazi at the time of the attack. There are reports by his own former justice minister that Gaddafi also had sarin nerve gas. There reports that sarin gas was used - not by Basher Assad - but by al Qaeda-affiliated rebels in Syria last May to kill innocent civilians. In June, Syrian rebels were caught with sarin over the border in Turkey.

President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton both lied repeatedly about what caused the Benghazi attack. They claimed to be repeating the best intelligence available at the time, but no intelligence about an obscure movie ever existed. Both knew that.

Having squandered credibility, President Obama painted himself into a corner in Syria with his “red line.” American and world opinion has forced him to defer to congress for constitutional authorization. American citizens now must wade through misinformation and fashion at least a tentative understanding with which to lobby our congressmen and senators as they debate a military strike. I recommend: "When our enemies are killing each other, don't interfere."

Four-plus years of Obama foreign policy shows me that our president is both incompetent and deceitful. Snowden’s revelations show me that neither Democrats nor Republicans have lived up to the oath they took to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” when they were sworn in. All, however, are reflections of the citizens who elected them. Us. Again, I must quote Pogo, who said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

We’re bad enough, but there are greater enemies out there. Edward J. Snowden has shown us what we need to see, but he has also betrayed his country - our country - to those greater enemies who wish to destroy us. What’s nagging at me now is columnist Mark Steyn’s often-repeated question: “[Have we become] too stupid to survive?”

The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people,” but Congress and the White House act as if it didn’t exist. It needs to be taken out of mothballs and applied vigorously. The federal government must be scaled back drastically.

Embarrassed Yet?

One would think they’d be embarrassed by now to display those Obama stickers. The Portland, Maine area, where I spend a couple of days each week, is a leftist bastion and the bumper stickers are ubiquitous. I see them while waiting at traffic lights, when I pull into a parking place at the supermarket, or wherever I go. Seldom do I see Gadsden Flags with a coiled serpent on a yellow background warning “Don’t Tread On Me,” a symbol of the Tea Party. They’re around, but are few and far between. Never do I see a Romney/Ryan sticker. There were some on display last year at this time but after Romney’s defeat Republicans must have removed them. It’s the same with McCain/Palin stickers; they disappeared shortly after 2008. I still see an occasional Kerry/Edwards sticker on old Volvos and Subarus even though they lost too, but I never see a Bush/Cheney sticker anymore either.

Why is that? Why aren’t Republicans nostalgic for Bush, McCain or Romney? Is it because none of those men was firmly rooted in old-fashioned, conservative, pro-life, small-government Republicanism? All three were big-government types who liked flirting with liberals. None had a strong philosophical core that defined their world view and inspired loyalty. Republicans put their stickers on because they perceived each as a lesser of two evils and willingly peeled them off after election day.

Is there loyalty to Obama in all the progressive Democrats and Greens in metropolitan Portland? I’m not sure. There is for some, but for others I suspect it’s more a loyalty to their leftist world-view which Obama’s rhetoric supports, if not his actions. Going to war in Libya, and now Syria without congressional approval runs counter to leftist thinking, but aside from a few “Code Pink” protesters I saw one day, there’s very little opposition.

Monument Square Portland this summer

Beside Obama stickers, important things for Portlanders are LGBT issues, hating Governor LePage, Opposing the Portland Pipeline Corporation, bicycling and recycling, and plovers. Locals here were absolutely horrified when a dog ate a piping plover chick on Pine Point Beach in Scarborough. What would they think about coyotes disemboweling deer? Put it out of their minds, I suppose. It dominated news for weeks and they’re literally making a federal case out of it.

Several times I’ve been asked to sign petitions to prevent the pipeline from reversing the flow of crude oil between its South Portland terminal and Montreal passing through New Hampshire and Vermont along the way. Though it has been operating safely for more than 70 years, progressives want to shut it down, which will happen when Montreal refineries get their oil from Alberta instead and don’t need crude oil from Portland anymore. They say they’re afraid of heavy crude coming down and polluting water bodies along its 236-mile route, but when I question them, it becomes clear they’re against oil in any form. They are true-believing, Prius-driving, bicycle-riding, vegetable-eating, organic people whose world-view was cast in stone during 1960s and 70s campus teach-ins. They believe only in windmills and solar panels, and nothing I say is going to change their minds. Their rural counterparts along the pipeline’s route near our home in western Maine have been out demonstrating as well.

Portland from across the harbor

Although I run into former students in the Portland area occasionally, hardly anybody knows me there. My column is published in newspapers with circulation only down to about Windham, Maine. It runs on a conservative web site called “As Maine Goes,” but that’s not a place Portland’s progressives tend to visit very often. When I talk to people at the beach, at parks, on the ferry, or elsewhere, they don’t know I’m really a mean-spirited conservative. I smile and let them direct the conversation, only asking questions if it veers into political territory and not stating opinions. Metropolitan Portland is an interesting laboratory in which to study the progressive mindset, and I don’t want to blow my cover.

Portland Pipeline pier at sunrise last month

Obama stickers are a badge of solidarity for members of Portland’s progressive tribe.  They love that Obama has blocked the Keystone pipeline and they’re determined to do their part and close the pipeline here. They don’t see any connection between America’s economic fiasco and Obama Administration policies. Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh postulates that the president’s approval numbers haven’t fallen further because he keeps campaigning instead of governing. Obama may be in his second term, but he continues to make speeches around the country pretending he’s an outsider. He talks like he’d have it all fixed by now if not for former President Bush and conservatives in the House. They believe it’s Obama against Wall Street, rich Republicans, evil oil companies, the NRA, and all other racist, homophobic bigots like them. Things may be bad, but they’d be even worse if Obama weren’t out there campaigning, and thus they remain proud to display his name on their cars.

We’ll just have to wait and see how long that delusion persists.

Quite A Fix

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is a Yankee proverb.

“If it ain’t broke, keep fixing it ’til it is broke,” is a government proverb.

A hundred years ago, the federal government “fixed” the mouth of the Saco River in Maine by building a jetty. They started the project around 1825 when textile mills a little upstream were thriving. The idea was to deepen the river channel and allow ships to travel up to the mills. By the time the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) finished nearly a century later, the mills had begun their decline. As the Portland Press Herald reports: “‘All this made the jetty seem like a good idea at the time,’ said Patrick Fox, director of Saco's Public Works Department. But the jetty no longer seems to be the solution it once represented; in fact, it has become a very expensive and controversial problem.”

Because the jetty altered ocean currents, dozens of houses north of it in Saco have washed into the sea and dozens more are threatened. So now the government is going to “fix it” again, spending $27 million to build still another jetty 750 feet long and perpendicular to the one they finished a century ago. Then they’ll haul in 400,000 cubic yards of sand to replenish the beach, a process they’ll have to repeat every 3-10 years at a further cost of $3 million to the city of Saco each time. “The Camp Ellis [Saco] beach shoreline has shown continued erosion since the early 1900s. We have a problem that we have some responsibility to correct,” says the ACOE.

Patrick Fox says, “It won't be permanent in (the sense) that it'll be fixed forever. It will always require maintenance; it will always require funding.” Fox sounds dubious and who can blame him? It’s his town and whatever the feds do there ultimately becomes his headache.

Consider the “help” Saco and Biddeford Maine got from the feds over the centuries for their relatively small community, then think about how the feds are now “fixing” our nation’s entire health-care system. Consider also that the man who wrote most of the plan, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), described this government fix as a “train wreck."

The "Affordable Care Act" is a misnomer to begin with because it's driving up costs even before full implementation. Like the Saco River project, Obamacare is making things worse, and it will add costs to local communities for generations to come.

Then come government plans to “fix” the entire climate of the planet and stop oceans from rising. Talk about hubris. Their insistence that climate change is caused by humans and can therefore be reversed by humans, is cited as one justification for their newest Saco River “fix.” Lost on them is the historical fact that all the sand they’re trying to control was deposited by glacial melt during the massive global warming 10,000 years ago when there were very few humans around anywhere to cause it.

Now government plans to fundamentally change our entire economy to reduce or eliminate fossil fuels in favor of windmills and solar panels in their effort to fix the climate.

And on it goes.

Government forces banks to send us endless letters explaining how they’ll guarantee our privacy, then it saves all our emails, phone calls, and internet searches in a massive data bank.

Government forces teachers, nurses, hospitals, counselors, and countless other professionals to maintain the privacy of every student, patient, or client with whom they work, then it amasses all our digitized records and saves them all in a huge data bank. All this data is accessible by the IRS - the same agency that leaked private information on political opponents of the Obama Administration, then persecuted and harassed anyone who disagreed with the president.

Government insists that it won’t read our emails or listen to our phone calls unless we’re communicating with a foreign terrorist - and expects us to believe it. Trust us, they say. We won’t abuse this information. We’re only doing it for your protection.

Right.

Government will protect our secrets just as it protected national security secrets like the highly-classified Stuxnet computer virus US and Israeli intelligence used to forestall Iranian nuclear weapons development. According to a Monday article in The Washington Times, the Obama Administration leaked that secret to the New York Times, and then leaked details about the Seal Team Six raid on Osama Bin Laden “to burnish Mr. Obama’s credentials as commander in chief as the 2012 election approached.”

Remember when government spent $1 trillion in stimulus money to fix our economy and it didn’t fix our economy? Economist Thomas Sowell insists it wasn’t stimulus money because we got no stimulus. Quoting Abraham Lincoln, he said: “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

Wish government would stop fixing things for us? I sure do.

Wanting My Scalp

Of all the groups who came after me as a teacher, it was Indians who hit hardest in terms of sheer numbers. It all started with a column I’d written ten years ago on what was called the “casino referendum” in Maine. Some of the tribes here wanted to build a casino and, unlike tribes in other states, they needed Maine state government to approve it. My column didn’t expressly involve my teaching or schools, but one of the local newspapers in which it appeared ran a little blurb at the bottom mentioned that I was a teacher.

Political ads urging Mainers to vote against it used arguments about gambling attracting the seedier elements to our state like prostitution and other criminal activity, and that casinos didn’t fit with Maine’s image of a bucolic, outdoor vacationland and might therefore threaten tourism, which was our number one industry. I went at it from a different angle in my column, reflecting on why Indians were able to open a gambling facility that would be illegal for anyone else. I questioned whether white guilt about Europeans “stealing their land” was a factor and made the argument that various Indian tribes had been stealing each other’s land for millennia before Europeans arrived. What really set them off most, however, was when I pointed out that Indians were fully as savage to one another as Europeans ever were to them after Columbus arrived. That I used the word “savage” in the context of Indian history really put them on the warpath leading to little Fryeburg, Maine.

The first indication of their attack was hundreds of emails in my inbox one morning from all over the country - including Alaska and Hawaii. I didn’t have time to read more than a dozen - all of them vitriolic - before I had to leave for school. Picking up the Conway Daily Sun on the way, I noticed some were published in there too as letters to the editor, again from all over the country. Halfway through my morning classes, I looked up to see the superintendent outside my classroom door. That was unusual as his office was a mile down the street and I was usually summoned there if he needed to see me. I said, “Excuse me, class,” and stepped into the hallway.

“You’ve stirred things up again,” he said with a sly smile.


“Indians? I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve gotten lots of angry emails from just about everywhere.” Later he told me they totaled over a hundred and that the school board also got some.

This superintendent was not easily rattled and I’d grown to like him. I had no idea at the time what his politics were, but he seemed more amused than disturbed by the protests. He had read the casino column and he knew by both its content and by the tone of the protesting emails that there wasn’t much substance to the attacks. He was also an attorney and had explained to several previous complainants about various issues that my status as a teacher didn’t abrogate my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech or of the press.

Still later that morning, my building principal told he’d gotten a call from an Attorney consulting with the Maine Department of Education Certification in Augusta who had also been swamped with approximately fifty emails, many accusing me of racism. She had questioned the principal about me and he told her I was an excellent teacher who didn’t use his classroom as a forum for my personal political beliefs. “She’s going to be contacting you herself,” he said, which she did a day or two later. She sent me an email instructing me to send her a copy of my column. After a few days I emailed back back describing where she could find the column online. Then she called me inquiring about several things, including whether I’d instructed students with the material in the column. I told her we hadn’t discussed the casino referendum in class. She seemed to be looking for a reason to put the Indians off and avoid becoming involved in the kerfuffle. After a while I asked for a copy of whatever report she was making to the then Maine Commissioner of Education and she said that unless she heard anything untoward from my superintendent, the matter would be closed.

Indians continued to contact me, however, some challenging me to debate on a radio talk show somewhere in upper New York State. I agreed to appear but they never followed up with specific arrangements. Other Indians called me a “wasichu” and I had to look that up. It’s a Sioux word meaning “one who takes the fat.” It’s a derogatory term for white people and can also mean “evil spirit.” There was one telephoned death threat which I reported to the Maine State Police.  After about ten days, however, they all seemed to have forgotten me. Their coordinated attack had been fierce but short-lived, the only result being I was entered into Indian annals as one of those palefaces who have spoken or written critically of them over the centuries.