Am I an Entitled White Supremacist? I don’t think so.

I was born in 1968. My parents divorced when my siblings and I were all very young. My mother never remarried. We were a white, conservative, Christian family living in a lower middle income, mixed race neighborhood. As children, we played with our friends and didn’t think about racial or ethnic politics and it was glorious. Days spent outdoors, riding bikes, picking wildflowers, playing tag and red robin. I can’t remember how many times we broke the small kitchen windows and garage door windows in our house from playing both baseball in the front yard and basketball in the driveway. We also managed to break the window in our very kind across the street neighbor’s front door once or twice, too. Fortunately, she was like a grandma to us all as well as to her actual grand kids who were great friends of ours. I also spent countless hours sitting on the porch or under the weeping willow tree just reading books like: Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn; The Chronicles of Narnia; The Bobbsey Twins; Trixie Belden; Nancy Drew; Tom Swift: To Kill a Mockingbird; anything Dickens; Poe, Chesterton, Schaeffer, Lewis, Tolkien, Packer, the Bible: these books and so many, many others were and are dear, precious, unforgettable friends who have journeyed with me through the years.

My childhood was filled with friends and family. Not perfect. Not always happy by any stretch. Not easy. Money was tight. I didn’t get everything I wanted. My siblings didn’t get everything they wanted. We worked – hard – to earn money if there were items we wanted to purchase or if we wanted to go on a summer vacation. We knew that if we could show our mom that we could help out financially, then she would be more willing to try to take some time off for a vacation. I picked strawberries. 5:30 am to 4:30 pm. Home by 5:30. 12 long hours in the hot sun, but good money to be made for about 4 to 6 weeks during the summer. No one being raised with a sense of entitlement here. I didn’t even get up that early during the school year! One summer we went to Crater Lake – car broke down when we were almost there – took a while to get some help (no cell phones back then), but we did get there. Went to Disneyland one year. Mom told us before going that we would each get to buy one and only one item. I knew before going what I would get and I still have it – my Winnie the Pooh Bear.

I attended a bi-lingual grade school where the learning of Spanish was part of the curriculum. Some of my friends and neighbors were Hispanic. They and their children were already fluent in two languages, but I knew only one. I was at such a disadvantage! How could either one of us get an equal opportunity education in a bi-lingual school!? It’s was so unfair! Should we not all have been segregated into classrooms based on our racial identities and lingual capabilities? Were we not being forced, against our will, to learn a second language; to identify with a different culture? I mean, how ridiculous is it to ask a school age child who is in school to – I don’t know – um, learn; to rise up and meet a challenge? No, no, no. That can’t be right. I forgot. We don’t do that anymore. Now we want children to fail in the name of equity. That makes much more sense.

Don’t children have the right to choose for themselves what they want to do, say, be, etc…? That’s autonomy, right? That’s what we’re all about, right? I mean, the government has told us pretty clearly that parents don’t have the right to interfere in their children’s choices. (Oh, except when their child is not yet born. Then they can murder their child and it’s ok.) Personally speaking, and please excuse the crass language, that is absolute and utter crap. My mom was a single parent because my dad made the choice to leave. She didn’t give up, give in, sink into despair or lean on the state for handouts. She worked. Full time. 8 – 5. Everyday. She got us up in the morning. Made us breakfast. Got us to school. Made sure we did our homework. Made us dinner. Got us to bed on time. She did the work of a parent. That’s what parents do. The government doesn’t care about you and they surely don’t care about your children or your grandchildren; your nieces and nephews. All the government cares about is getting their radical, leftist agenda dispersed into our world however they can. Unfortunately, one of the best ways they can do that, is through the minds and the hearts of our kids.

My world, my 1968 world, was pretty bad politically. A lot was going on that I, as a child didn’t know about and couldn’t possible understand. By the time I started first grade in 1974 I was aware of world events like the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. I knew about the first 747 being built, the first humans orbiting the Moon in the Apollo 8 mission, something about North Korea capturing one of our ships and Olympic athletes and black power, but these were only words that had been read to me and pictures that I had seen. They didn’t hold sway over me politically at the tender age of 6, although the reality of life and death began to take much clearer shape in my mind at that time.

The one thing that gripped my heart and mind more than any other was that of the Civil Rights Movement and the images and words of Martin Luther King Jr.

Words like:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

The time is always right to do what is right.

Martin Luther King Jr.

As I learned to read, I would pore over essays and quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. I marveled at his ability to communicate so eloquently of the need for people to come together in community because of the fact that we’re all part of the human race, designed by God to be in fellowship one with another. How egregious of an indictment is it against our government and against our society that we have come to such a ruinous place in our story as a nation once again? Children being segregated in our schools. Just using the word segregation makes me want to hurl. Critical race theory. Black lives matter. Martin Luther King Jr. would be weeping, mourning, grieving over the direction our nation is taking. Must we really tread this path again? Lord, may it not be so.