Part Nine -- Reality from a Sorcerer’s Bitter Brew of Deceit/Ignorance

The first of all virtues. The poem in this “haibun” is at the end.

“Hey, you old man, you can’t stop us. You can’t take our picture because it’s dark.” Those were the words I heard after dark one night during the summer of 2008 from a pack of kids taunting me as they raced in and out of our steep driveway in defiance.

I called the police and the next day walked the neighborhood seeking support from other adults to stop this harassment that had gone on for two years--mostly during the summers when school was out.

I am sixty-three. Trained as a killer, I served in the United States Marines and fought in Vietnam risking my life. For more than four decades I have had to deal with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I spent close to a decade attending universities to first earn an Associate-of-Science degree and next a BA in journalism. The remainder of those ten odd years was spent at night in a variety of universities earning an MFA in writing. I spent my days at my job as a teacher. I also held a number of other jobs over the years like being a maitre d’ for a Southern California nightclub called the Red Onion or a supervisor for one of the largest trucking companies in America, Pacific Motor Trucking.

I worked for forty-five years starting at fifteen washing dishes and ended a thirty-year career at sixty as an overworked and underpaid, verbally abused teacher in the public schools.

Last year in a motel parking lot, a teen with his girlfriend, both strangers, wanting to rent a room for a few minutes said, “Hey, old man, can you give us a ride to the next motel. They won’t rent us a room here.” Needless to say, I did not give the couple a lift.

One of the kids that wanted to play in our driveway argued with me. Some in this gang glare at me when I drive by while they are playing in the street. Once I‘m out of sight, they head straight for my driveway. I never yelled at them. I did not use bad language. I just did not want them riding their bikes and skateboards up and down our steep driveway when there were plenty of steep streets in the hills we lived in to go kill themselves on. We also value our privacy and the quiet that living at the end of a dead-end-street brings.

The West is not a good place to live if you survive to become a geezer. Geezer is the ‘endearing’ term my sixteen year old daughter calls me. When I was a kid, youngsters were to be seen and not heard. We treated our elders with respect. I do not recall ever saying, “Hey, old man.” Today, it seems as if older people like me are to be invisible and silent while we hand over everything we worked hard for so youngsters that have done little to nothing to earn the privileges and power our society now bestows on them will be entertained and happy. Theme parks like Disneyland and Six Flags have sprouted like mushrooms to fulfill this goal.

More than twenty-four hundred years ago in China, Confucius planned that from the general moral training a society should emerge which would live happily and harmoniously together. Only in this sense can one understand the tremendous emphasis placed on “filial piety” which is regarded as the “first of all virtues.”

Confucius said: “The reason why the gentleman teaches filial piety is not because it is to be seen in the home and everyday life. He teaches filial piety in order that man may respect all those who are fathers in the world. He teaches brotherliness in the younger brother, in order that man may respect all those who are elder brothers in the world. He teaches the duty of the subject, in order that man may respect all who are rulers in the world…. Those who love their parents dare not show hatred to others. Those who respect their parents dare not show rudeness to others.”… “Filial piety is the basis of virtue, and the origin of culture….” (My Country and My People. Lin Yutang. Holcyon House, New York. 1938. Pg. 179)

I’m married to a Chinese woman that was born in Shanghia, China. She suffered with the rest of China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She moved to the United States in the 1980s and is now a U.S. citizen. If you marry a Chinese woman, you marry her family. I know from first hand experience, that ‘filial piety’ is alive and well in Chinese culture.
__________
senryu

first of all virtues
anchors China with the past
West drifts aimlessly

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