In 1967, I’d about played out my rock & roll pipedreams and my father and step-mother had confiscated my coerced “college savings” (US Savings Bonds compulsorily taken from my paper route earnings as an 11-through-13-year-old plus a couple years of summer farmhand work) and written a $5,000 check (about $47,000 in 2024 money) to a fly-by-night for-profit (is there any other kind?) Texas “computer school.” I was deposited, with $100 cash to tide me over until my first after-school job’s paycheck, in a Dallas flophouse that the school pretended was a “dorm.” I was barely 19 years old. Lucky for me, there were several other Kansas students/victims in the “dorm.” After a few nights of cowering inside our rooms with furniture stacked against the doors to keep the roving drunks out, we found a house to rent together.
That turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement because the oldest-and-wisest of us (a very low bar to exceed) decided to to back home to Lawrence, Kansas and finish his accounting degree at the University of Kansas. Soon afterwards, the next-sophisticated of our remaining quartet of Kansas bachelors decided to move to rented room in a house across town. Not wanting to be stuck paying rent for the guy who had broke up the study-band, I followed the twins and rented a single-car garage apartment behind the house they were renting. Calling that room “an apartment” is a huge compliment. It was nothing more than a tiny room with a camper-style “bathroom” and a single-burner stovetop, sink, and micro-refrigerator kitchen. It cost $10/week, which was all I could afford with $10 going to rent, $10 going to school tuition, $10 for food and transportation, and the rest to taxes and other uncontrollable expenses on a $50/week income. So, when I got the occasional invitation to a free meal, I always took it.
My new across-the-driveway neighbors were the first people I had ever met from Alabama. They rented the entire downstairs apartment, with a quartet of kids, and were the “apartment managers.” They were also the worst people I had ever met at that point in my life: with Confederate flags, racist posters and KKK memorabilia, and swastikas on their walls. They had invited me to dinner one evening and, when I entered their apartment, I was immediately struck with so much radical-right artwork that I thought it was some kind of sick joke. I must have stood in the backdoor way for several minutes, staring at the horrific, nightmare interior of that living room.
I was mostly stunned throughout the evening. I am often stunned into incomprehension by the vile behavior I have witnessed from my “fellow” human beings. But that hadn’t happened so blatantly in my previous 19 years. For the next three years, my bar-of-expectation became lower by the experience on a constant and relentlessly disappointing interval. I was exposed to poverty at third world country levels. I was exposed to racism, brutality, corruption, and unexpectedly selfish and vile behavior. Dallas was a real college-of-the-streets experience for me. I thought I had seen some bad shit, worse than most people ever experience, before Dallas, Texas, but life was just getting started with me.
Meeting the two twenty-something people from Alabama was the beginning of what formed my increasingly low opinion of human beings. Up to then, I had never experience overt, hateful, racist people. Probably lots of discrete variations of that theme, but these folks were not even a little bit shy about flauting their hate. Today, November 5, 2025, many Americans (the good ones) are stunned to learn how awful their neighbors and countryfolk (sadly, and certainly not “fellow” countryfolk) really are. This election is a repudiation of every professed “Christian value” I ever heard on my way to atheism. This election voids 248 years of spoken, if not acted upon, traditional liberal values of equality, equal opportunity, decency, fairness, civil responsibility, patriotism, obligation, and gratitude.
As a friend wrote this morning, “Welcome to Ameristan. Manipulated by affirmation---and that’s a wrap on the US as we’ve known it.” We can never go back to anything resembling the country most of us thought we were building. From here out, everything will be different.
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