It’s early afternoon as a line of cars makes its way to a cemetery. People gather around an open grave. A heavy casket, draped with a colorful flag, is shouldered and carried slowly to the grave by six young men in uniform. Their faces wear a solemn, set expression that does not quite hide their sorrow. Ancient words of comfort and committal are spoken by a spiritual leader, in accordance with the beliefs of those assembled. Shots ring out, a salute is rendered, there is the unbearably poignant sound of “Taps.” The flag is carefully, precisely, lovingly folded. It is presented to a spouse, a father, or a mother with the thanks of a grateful nation. Another soldier has been laid to rest in a timeless ceremony intended to honor the fallen and to comfort and thank the bereaved.

Now turn your imagination to a small town in the mountains of West Virginia. Families and friends gather, crushed under the weight of a terrible anxiety. There has been an accident at the local mine.  Businesses on the main street have put out signs that say “Pray for Our Miners.” Everyone is waiting, watching, praying. The news for twenty-five families will not be good. After several desperate days, it is time to comfort the families and bury those who have died.

Next imagine any funeral anywhere. Perhaps someone famous has died – a controversial rock star, an equally controversial preacher. Perhaps it is someone who has gained notoriety simply by the manner of their death such as a young college girl whose life has been taken by a murderer.

Imagine these very different, but equally solemn, occasions marred by loud-mouthed, filth-spewing, screaming lunatics. They do everything they can to enforce their message of hate on people gathered for a higher purpose. They are shrill, and their language is scandalous to decent people. So is their appearance–they wear clothing that most decent adults confine to their swimming pools or gymnasiums. Even their innocent children are lisping hatred they cannot possibly understand, taught to them by unfit, hateful parents. Variations of this hideous scene have confronted many bereaved families–most, but not all, connected to the military. It has marred celebrity funerals as divergent as those of Jerry Falwell and Michael Jackson. It has been present at scenes of tragedy or sorrow, public and private, all over the United States. It is the Westboro Hatemongers. (I know they style themselves as “Baptists.” I know a few Baptists, and I don’t think their denomination should be stained by these people. These are the “God Hates Fags” people.) If you want to know what the Devil looks like, look into the contorted face of one of these people.

The scene was re-enacted a couple of years ago at the funeral of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder. It must have been unimaginably terrible. The father of the young Marine decided to try to put a stop to the flood of verbal sewage. He sued the hate-mongers on the grounds that they conspired to intimidate and harm the gathered family and friends. He did this not only for himself but on behalf of every bereaved family, everywhere in the United States. A jury agreed with him and awarded a substantial judgment. Now that verdict has been set aside, and Corporal Snyder’s bereaved and angry father is preparing to have the case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. No matter what the outcome is, the actual occasion can never be re-created.

Yes, we have a First Amendment. Yes, the Constitution guarantees us the right to free speech and to peaceable assembly. It’s equally true that for many years, various governments have enacted laws that might impinge on that right. The classic example is that of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. There are noise ordinances, crowd control ordinances, and any number of forms of expression that are NOT protected by the First Amendment. Child pornography is a good example. False advertising, libel, slander, treason: None of these is protected by our First Amendment.

Surely there are lawmakers well enough versed in the subtleties and intricacies of our law, respectful of our Constitution, and dedicated to justice. Surely they can assist us in crafting carefully-considered, thoughtful laws that will protect the bereaved from the egregious outbursts of hate groups while conforming to our rights under the First Amendment. I’ve chosen to write this on Memorial Day because the death of a soldier in war affects all of us. It bereaves a family, and it ought to grieve us as a nation. We should require our lawmakers to find ways to protect everyone–public citizens, celebrities, private individuals, and especially soldiers–from having their final rites turned into circuses of hate.

The scene: Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada
The cast: Two people named Madison (from Maryland)
One very Canadian, very grizzly, bear (from Canada)
One Park Warden–we would call him a “Park Ranger” in the U.S.

OK, so we were  on a jaunt near a beautiful lake in Jasper one fine day, and we spied a grizzly bear on the opposite shore. He was minding his own business, fishing in the shallows. We could tell he was a grizzly because of the shape of his very fine snout. Since we’re good citizens of Nature, we admired him from afar (through field glasses), snapped a few shots that didn’t turn out, and returned to the town of Jasper. Park headquarters is right in the center of town, and there was a clearly worded sign to the effect that they’d appreciate reports of any bear sightings.

I waited in line, and when it was my turn to speak with the ranger (or warden) on duty, I said, “We had a pretty clear sighting of a grizzly bear out at the lake. I just wanted to report it, since you (well, I said “y’all”) have this sign posted.”

The warden looked at me kindly, but with great perplexity. “I didn’t understand a word you just said,” he replied. This surprised me since my Southern accent is redolent of Tidewater Virginia, and if I use the words house, mouse, or south, people tend to ask if I’m Canadian.

I’ll admit I’m perplexed at the good leaders of Arizona over their avowed intent to “scrutinize” the accents of people teaching school there to search for “mispronunciation.” I have a teaching degree, and I was born in the United States, but I greatly fear I wouldn’t pass muster. They probably wouldn’t like my oddly broad vowels. CNN interviewed four people who are teaching there now and whose jobs are apparently under threat: An Irishman, a Jamaican, a Hispanic American, and a woman from Brazil who has two advanced degrees in English but who was referred to by the education fellow as “Hispanic.”  I thought that “Hispanic” meant “descended of Spanish ancestors.” People from Brazil are largely descended from Portuguese ancestors, so they’re not really Hispanic. Except “Hispanic” now means you have brown(ish) skin and dark eyes and hair and (apparently) that you talk funny.

As for the Irish teacher, I’d have to say that he sounds unmistakeably Irish. I’d also have to point out that the Irish are widely regarded as having preserved the written word and literature in general, through the time we call the “Dark Ages.” The people in those monasteries were literate. The teacher from Jamaica carried that Islands lilt in his voice. But it was a cultivated and educated voice, closer to Britain than most Western Hemisphere voices. And unless the English are mispronouncing things, I’d have a lot of trouble faulting the accent of the “mother tongue.”  The Hispanic and Brazilian teachers were educated, cultured, cultivated women. I couldn’t find a single fault with their voices, their pronunciation, or their accents.

I hope that Arizona has a lot of good colleges and universities, and I hope they’re churning out teachers like mad. If you listen to people from the United States, and if you’re in a fault-finding mood, you find:

• New Jersey, of course. Oddly enough, that characteristic “oi” sound is also echoed in certain accents from Alabama and Mississippi.
• New England, where they pahk the cah for the pahty at Hahvad. I guess. Eyup.
• The South. Old South, Deep South, whatever. Uh-hunh, that’s a Southern accent. They also say “Y’all.”
• New York. Eh? Difficult to make fun of, but I know it when I hear it.
• The Midwest. Yaah, you betcha. They also say “pop” there when they mean “soda.”

I’ve spent some time in Arizona, but I’ll confess I don’t recall what people sounded like there. I must have understood them, and I guess they understood me. Nobody suggested I was Canadian. For now, I’m planning to stay out of Arizona. I have light eyes and graying hair that was once brown. My spouse has dark eyes and graying hair that was once dark. Both of us have quite a bit of Irish in our backgrounds (hence the cartoon at the top of this entry). I sound like I’m from Virginia. Greg? His accent is pure Philadelphia, and I suspect he’d be regarded with suspicion. I don’t think either of us will be visiting Arizona until we get our passports renewed.

I grew up mostly in Virginia. It was mandatory for students in grades Four and Seven to learn Virginia’s history from a specific set of textbooks. High school students studied Virginia history and government as well. When I got to college, several history credits were mandatory to get a teaching degree.

I remember how much I enjoyed our fourth-grade Virginia history lessons in Mrs. Jennings’ class. We would read and discuss a chapter, and our assignment was always the same: Write half a page about the chapter and draw a picture in your notebook. This was great because it gave me plenty of opportunity to draw Colonial or antebellum ladies in their elaborate gowns. Or I could turn to my other favorite drawing subject and work in a horse or two. I loved to draw. During the course of our history lessons, we learned that there were slaves in Virginia who had been brought from Africa against their will and who did the work on the plantations and were the property of their owners. It was all OK, because most of the “masters” treated their slaves well, and most of the slaves were “happy and content.” (Cue up an image of happy, sleek, well-dressed dark-skinned people playing music on the steps of adorable little white-painted cabins with porches and shutters. When did I learn this, you ask? Oh, about 1960 or so.) The whole thing somehow offended my eight-year-old’s sense of fair play. Really. In my young mind it was “not fair” for people to be taken away from their homes and made to work hard for no pay. I suspected that the slaves might not have been happy and content because I knew that I wouldn’t have been. I knew revisionism when I saw it, even though I was too  young to articulate it as anything but “not fair.”

As I grew older, and right up to the present day, I was able to find out for myself about the evils of the Middle Passage and the slave trade. I know about the Door of No Return. I’ve seen the diagrams of ships’ holds and how they could be most efficiently loaded with human cargo. I know about the auctions, the separations of families, the broken lives, the broken hearts, the broken bodies. I’m perfectly content to leave the intricacies of the story to scholars and wiser heads. My take-away lesson has always been that slavery was an evil that tainted all it touched and that continues to haunt us all right up to the present day.

I also believe that there is no country on Earth, past or present, no matter how highly regarded, that does not have dark and shadowy areas in its past. Nations are made up of human beings, and we are all capable of great nobility and of terrible evil. The United States is no different in this respect. Slavery is a dark, ugly shadow on our past. We can’t go back and cause it not to have happened. We can’t make it right. All we can do is acknowledge it, own up to it, and get on with trying to make a better nation for all of us. We can do a better job of that if we stop from time to time and learn from our past–our real past, not our glorified one.

I’m appalled by the recent actions of the Texas Board of Education, who are apparently preparing to revise our history for us. The Middle Passage is about to become the “Triangle Trade.” (Catchy phrase, that…) Of course it was a triangular trade route–one of many, not all involving traffic in human beings. As a young college student, it suited me very well to be able to remind Northern friends that the ships of New England brought the captives to our shores. Still, teaching young people to hide the monstrous evil behind the catchy slogan is a terrible thing, and it will have terrible repercussions. As is said, those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

Apparently slavery isn’t the only facet of our history that’s about to get a re-write. Texas plans to lose Thurgood Marshall and Cesar Chavez. Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are about to step back into the shadows. Lincoln, apparently, had too much to say on the unpleasant topic of slavery. Jefferson carved out every shining word of the Declaration of Independence, the document that still defines our national ideals. Alas, he apparently didn’t follow a Texas-approved Christian religion. Still, a quotation from Mr. Jefferson makes an appropriate message to the Texas Board of Education: I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

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A word about the accompanying photo: This is a bead card showing the products of a European manufacturer of beads. The riches of Africa were considered to be of four kinds: Palm oil, ivory, gold, and slaves. Each item of wealth had certain trade beads associated with it. This card shows beads considered appropriate to trade for human beings. It’s a misnomer to call all trade beads “slave beads.” And trade beads in general can be viewed as a triumph for Africa, as her people took them and made them their own.