TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 185

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 22, 20000000007


Dear Comrades,

	Today is my mother's 87th birthday.  I've 
had no time to wrap her presents.  They sit in a 
bag awaiting the time when I can sneak them past 
her.  When am I going to have that time? 
Probably never.  She doesn't let on, but she's a 
little upset over this birthday.  She doesn't 
like seeing the numbers mount up.  She says she 
isn't through yet with life, and wants to be here 
a long time.  I have no doubt that she will. 
She's full of life.  Energetic.  Still has a 
delightful sense of humour.  Won't be told to sit 
down and let everyone else do it.  Still drives 
very well.

	I cannot imagine a life without her.  We 
are so close.  But there are things we can't talk 
about and that pains me.  I can't be honest with 
her about my father.  She just can't handle it. 
Doesn't want to believe that he was an abuser. 
This is not a small omission in our 
communications; it looms large.  The frustration 
sometimes gets to me.  But I'm not here to make 
her see my reality.  My birthday presents to her 
are to protect her from the agony she would feel. 
Deep down, I think she knows.  But it won't be 
wrestled with in this lifetime.




 
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Saving the World

	My mother signed petitions to support the 
people during the Spanish Civil War.  She was a 
devoted follower of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 
She loved him.  He was the inspired leader of her 
troubled country.  The depression hit when she 
was nine years old, and her parents, but 
especially Grampa Benny, were good liberal 
democrats, which was a lot more liberal then than 
it is now.  She has described to me a country 
that was starving for food and jobs, all but the 
damn rich suffering, trying to stay afloat.  The 
American people were leaning toward the left. 
Socialism was not a dirty word.  Poverty brought 
left wing sentiments to the common discussion. 
She was instructed and inspired by her Aunt Anne, 
the youngest of the five Brodofskys.  Anne got 
her master's degree in economics from UC 
Berkeley, and was another great liberal.

	So my mother was raised in an el pinko 
household.  It guided her politics.  She was 
pro-union, which meant a different thing back 
then than it does now, and believed in taxing the 
rich to pay for programs for the poor.  She was 
an humanitarian, an old school secular humanist. 
There was that and her Jewishness.  She sat in 
the United States while Jews were being carted 
off to gas chambers in Europe.  She read the 
headlines and saw the photographs of the fields 
of bodies.  Zionism was a reasonable solution, 
and she and my father joined Zionist 
organizations.  There is a blue plastic record 
that my father made on his record making machine 
of members in attendance at the Zionist meeting 
held at our house.  They come one at a time to 
the microphone and speak their names, say hello 
and goodbye.  That record making machine was used 
on many occasions and there are albums full of 
home recordings from the late 40s through the mid 
60s of family gatherings, voices of people who 
have long since gathered their last bouquet of 
flowers.  All this left wing and Zionist activity 
qualified me for being a red diaper baby, but we 
weren't red enough, only pink.

	While I was growing up, leftist politics 
were instilled in me.  I bled for the poor, for 
the needy, for the underdog, for my Jews, for 
blacks, for people of all colours, for the dead 
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I vehemently opposed 
the nuclear arms race, stuffed envelopes for a 
peace organization on old Grove Street, a house 
with a Moebius strip hanging as a sculpture in 
its front yard.  I was a citizen of the world, 
and scoffed at super patriots, flag waving 
jingoists, arch conservatives (who look like 
liberals now), and other baboons with their 
purple red tuchases shining crudely out at the 
world.  I distrusted my government because it had 
lied to us about Strontium 90, about the terrible 
threat of the Russians and had polarized the 
population of the planet into godless communists 
and godful western white people.  It boiled down 
to that.

	I was in high school, vaguely aware of 
the geography of the earth, standing outside the 
International House of Pancakes, when I saw the 
newspaper stand with papers screaming the 
headlines about an attack on an American ship in 
the gulf of Tonkin, in a tiny unknown country 
called Vietnam.  Something shifted inside me.  I 
grew sick at heart.  My nation was going to war 
whether I liked it or not, against an 
insignificant strip of Southeast Asian land where 
there was a civil war going on.  Instinctively, I 
distrusted my government.  I did not believe the 
grave pronouncements of President Lyndon B. 
Johnson.  I suspected him of lying as he opened 
his false mouth.  There were untruths being flung 
at me by the leader of my country.  I was not 
surprised, but I was outraged.  The President 
continued to lie and the war spread out over the 
tiny foreign land and over my own land.  We were 
marinating in propaganda.  We were drowning in 
falsehoods.  I longed to feel as my mother had 
felt many years earlier, that she adored the 
President in office, that her country was being 
led by visionaries who wanted the best for the 
people.  This all segued into the disastrous 
presidency of Richard Nixon, a hypocrite who 
raised my bile every time I heard a word coming 
through his teeth.  For both Jonson and Nixon, I 
could not listen to them.  I'd turn the volume 
off.  I could not look at them.  I'd turn the 
colour control on the television all the way to 
green.

	It became part of my emerging identity to 
loathe my leaders, to disrespect them, to expect 
the worst of them.  I marched among the multitude 
against the War in Vietnam.  I picketed the draft 
board in Oakland and got bonked on the head by a 
zealous policeman.  Honestly, I was trying to get 
out of the street when they told us to, but the 
sidewalk was overcrowded.  I couldn't jump back. 
The cop swung his arm and the club came down on 
the back of my head.  I saw stars.  But I did not 
also see stripes.  So I was good.

	It has been this way all my life, this 
mistrust of government, this revulsion at the 
deceits of governance.  I would love to respect 
the holders of high office.  But I can't.  They 
are too steeped in lies.  I would like peace, but 
it doesn't seem it will happen any time soon.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net