Lee Marcus's Blog, page 3

Hornell stands with Charlottesville

In the aftermath of national tragedy, you sometimes feel you have to do something, even if it’s only something symbolic. Many people around the Hornell area felt that way after the tragedy in Charlottesville last weekend, and some forty of us showed up in downtown Hornell on Monday to express our dismay. We held signs we had quickly penned on the way, or even on the hood of a car right there in the parking lot. We made speeches out of our life stories and from the thoughts we had while driving over about the frightening and terrible images we had seen on TV, images of people in Charlottesville with whom we so easily identify. The victims there had been protesting against a hate group who wanted to “take back their country.” What country was that? The white one.
The country that murdered millions of native people, whole tribes of them, to take their land, and has never atoned for those crimes against humanity. The country that hunted down native people in Africa, tore them from their families and their homeland, sold them as commodities, built an economy dependent on their forced, unpaid labor, and tried in every possible way to dehumanize them. Failed in that, but never atoned. That’s the “country” the Neo-Nazis and Alt-Right want back. They have come out of hiding with torches and weapons and parades because they have permission. They finally have a president who’s on their side, or so it seems. They see themselves on the rise.
They’re cowards. Like schoolyard bullies, they have only violence on their side. They can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas, because their only idea is that white might is right, and they know that’s stupid.
Why did they choose Charlottesville for their display of ignorance and cowardice? Because the people of Charlottesville were doing something smart. They were beginning to atone, in a tiny, symbolic way. Charlottesville decided, through democratic process, to remove from public places the statuary that celebrates white supremacy and depicts Civil War leaders as heroes. Mayor Michael Signer said his city has opted for a truer version of their history. Confederate leaders were men who committed treason against the United States of America, and they lost the war. Since when do patriots celebrate their enemies’ leaders?
There will be more Neo-Nazi and white supremacist actions in our country, their leaders full of praise for Donald Trump. We live in difficult times. I want to suggest two things that might help, and I’m speaking now to white people. 1) Let’s go after the roots of white supremacy by learning about its more elusive cousin, white privilege. It’s time. And 2) Let’s turn with open hearts to the leadership of Native American and African American people. They have, by necessity, paid attention all their lives to the currents and undercurrents of hatred in our culture. I think they’re waiting for us to catch up.

OPEN LETTER TO HILLARY CLINTON

AN OPEN LETTER TO HILLARY CLINTON
Dear Hillary,For just over six months our country has suffered the humiliation of Donald Trump as our president. We have acquiesced under the supposition that the 2016 electoral college result was legitimate, at least until proven otherwise. For me, this has felt like a huge vehicular accident I can’t look away from, but desperately need to just stop; only, every morning I wake up and it’s still going on—the screeching tires, crashing metal, blood everywhere. I, for one, am bone tired. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about the many places in the world where I imagine I could live and try to forget.
But I’d have an awful lot to forget: my great uncle Meryll Wilcox, and my uncle John Long, both of whom died for this country. My father, Gordon Marcus, who suffered PTSD, scarred by atrocities he lived through in WWII Italy and dying at 55. My brother John, who served in Viet Nam and also died young, at age 49. So there’s that family legacy, along with the ingrained knowledge that America was once the world’s beacon, worth suffering and even dying for. I can’t just leave.
I can’t leave the farm my parents bought when I was less than a year old. There is too much history here, too much love and loss. I can’t leave my siblings, my community of neighbors and friends. I can’t leave my life as an American, I really can’t.
Still, this daily grind. This collective cringe bordering on paralysis. Watching in agony as the atrocious becomes the ordinary. We all now expect our country’s degradation to worsen each day, and it does.
So, beyond the sighing, overeating, procrastination and a host of other symptoms of depression, I work at the only discipline I can find that offers the slightest hope: community organizing. In February, I started an Indivisible group. In June I joined my county’s Democratic committee. And now I am organizing a democratic caucus for my town, the first in 35 years! This entails driving country roads, knocking on strangers’ doors, and OH MY GOSH finding closeted Democrats, who feel exactly as I do, who are also cringing and agonizing, feeling helpless to save their country from collapse.
It is hard for me to reach out to strangers in this way, and I struggle to get myself into the car. Some days I just can’t do it. But there’s gold in them there hills! So far, almost every person I have interviewed has told me s/he is the only Democrat around here. I’m so happy to show them my list, to prove that there are hundreds of us. So we’re having a party in a couple of weeks in our little town, to dispel the loneliness once and for all. And we’re having a caucus right after that; and maybe we’ll be running a few candidates for the first time in 35 years!!
I am writing to you today, because I know you have much bigger reasons than I have to be despondent. Maybe you have days when you thrash around as I do, and other days when you manage to find a glimmer of light. If I know you, you follow that glimmer. I have read your books, have watched you over the years, and I need to tell you that in spite of all you’ve sacrificed—NO, BECAUSE OF IT—you are a beacon to me. You have long represented yourself and your country with dignity, intelligence, and grace. You have played a role you never asked for (scapegoat) and been denied the one you deserved and wanted: President of the United States. People who are paying attention know that you were cheated, that we were all cheated. But none of that diminishes your stature, Mrs. Clinton. You stand with Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman as an American icon and a beacon of hope in these dark times.
I can’t thank you enough.
Lee Marcus

Alumni Dinner Address 2017

ALUMNI ADDRESS July, 2017
What a pleasure it is to see so many old friends together in one place. My graduating class is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
1967, The Summer of Love (sing: if you’re going to San Fran…)
Did anyone here get to San Francisco in 1967? I didn’t get there for almost another 20 years.
In the spring of 1987, I was offered a job I really wanted in San Francisco. I remember telling my future boss I appreciated the offer so much, and I wanted to say yes, but there was one stipulation, and it wasn’t negotiable: I said, I have plans to go home for a week in July, and I have to go.
She asked me where “home” was, and I said, oh, it’s a small town in upstate NY. She said she was from a small town, too. Ames, Iowa. That wasn’t what I meant by small. Well, I got the job, with my plans intact. One day I was at lunch with a bunch of coworkers when someone asked me why I was taking a week off in July, and where I was going.
When I told them I was going to my 20th high school class reunion, they all stared at me.         “Why on Earth would you do that?” one of them said. Another said,          “I don’t know anybody I went to high school with. There were 700 in my class.”          Another said, “You couldn’t pay me to go to one of those.” They were still staring at me.
So here’s what I said: “There were 40 kids in my graduating class. Aside from my family, these are the people I’ve known the longest in my life. I entered kindergarten with many of them, and we were together for 13 years. Others joined our class from time to time, making it richer. A few left us over the years, and I still miss them.”
Ordinary as that sounds in this room today, to my friends in San Francisco, it was stunning. I think they pictured a one-room schoolhouse, a teacher in a long skirt with a bun on her head, whacking reluctant readers with a ruler. Since they were still staring, I went on to tell them
•     I really did grow up in a house with a picket fence, that
•     the angel who drove my school bus was named Bing Howe and
•     how my best friend, Linda Kennell, and I went to the “basement” and washed our mouths out with soap after Mrs. McCaffery threatened someone with that punishment for saying a bad word. Linda and I thought soap was kind of nice, and couldn’t possibly taste that bad, so we had to try it. (Oh boy, it was bad!)
I told them about marching in the band behind the horses in the Memorial Day parade.
About learning Latin declensions from a teacher who looked exactly like a figure on a Roman coin.
And about being a teacher’s kid. It wasn’t all peaches and cream.
But it was special. I was reminded, by the reaction of those co-workers, how special it was, growing up in Arkport, with all of you.
So…1967. Well, our class tumbled out into a world that was changing so fast, I don’t know about you, but I felt like I was on thin ice until I was about 40. After Arkport, I lived in the North Country, in Baltimore, in Manhattan, Rochester, Oakland and San Francisco, until, at about age 50, I ended up back here. With Dick Muse!! AND THEY TELL YOU YOU CAN’T GO BACK! I even live, once again, in the house with the picket fence.
Here’s the thing. For us, it’s different. If you grew up in Arkport, you can go back! I’ll bet the house you grew up in is still right where you left it. Our teachers are gone now, but Arkport Central School is pretty much as we left it.
•     I walked the halls once a few years ago and actually heard cheerleaders chanting a cheer that I wrote when I was in 7thgrade!
•     Debbie Dungan won a contest to name The Ark-Reporter, and I think it’s still called that!
•     A few years ago, they were refurbishing the front office at the school, and on opening up a wall, they uncovered a set of old, wooden mailboxes with the names still on, listen to this: Kennell, Lander, Fidler, Chubon, Huff, Crowell, Yates, Kelly, Dungan, Flanders ... Marcus.
We can go back, and we did come back today, because a place like Arkport holds onto its history, and its history is in this room. It holds onto us. We hold onto it. We know where we came from, so we know who we are.
Thank you.