October Thoughts, Change: Juan Romero and Sarah Smarsh
Change resides within us. We are protoplasm in constant change. And when we meditate on the word we often have mixed feelings–a child growing taller, a college student finally passing a worrisome class, a new job, a new house, marriage–change, a moving forward. But the other side of the change-coin can be connected to loss. Change doesn’t always have to be about death, but it is about the need for adjustment, for possibly “seeing” our lives in a light not as bright and exciting as youth, but possibly a softer, calmer light. But we are all constantly, though at different rates, experiencing change.
I need to cling to the positives about change today. To have hope that empathy will fall on people’s shoulders like the leaves that are beginning to let go. We all need to let some things go–fear and anger, and our inability to listen.
JUAN ROMERO and ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Juan Romero has died. He was 68. Twice I wrote about the busboy whose life was profoundly changed on the night of June 5th when Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy was walking through the kitchen, only to be felled by an assassin’s bullet. Juan Romero, who wanted to shake Kennedy’s hand, became the person who knelt and held the dying man’s bleeding head. “I wanted to protect his head from the cold concrete,” Romero told Steve Lopez a reporter for the LA TIMES. Lopez kept in touch with Romero, an update he reported on this past June 3, 2018, revealed the night still haunted Romero. He told Lopez: “I want to go back to Arlington Cemetery and just say ‘Hi’ and explain that everything is going good and I’m grateful for his involvement in my life and that I will always respect his effort for social justice. And to say that …I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for him.” Romero did marry, have children and later divorced. He often left flowers at a monument in a downtown San Jose park that honored Kennedy.
Maria Shriver, former first lady of California and niece of RFK, said she had wanted to send a thank you note to Romero. “I always felt a great deal of empathy for him…because of how difficult it was for him to move past that. So God bless him. It’s hard to know why someone gets put into a situation that they’re locked in forever. But as I see it, he was locked into an image of helping someone.” It was poignant that Ms. Shriver used the word empathy. In my mind, Romero’s name and Kennedy’s will be forever linked.
HEARTLAND: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
The author of this new book is Sarah Smarsh, a journalist who grew up in rural Kansas. She stated emphatically: “The American Dream has a pice tag on it. The poorer you are the higher the price.”
Growing up, Sarah endured the direct effects of a wide range of economic policies: farm subsides, banking deregulation and education cutbacks. Smarsh writes: “If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books.” Smarsh does not invoke the term “white trash” as a badge of honor. She questions her own “whiteness” and also rejects the term “white working class” as divisive and harmful. She explains the racist implication of government aid programs. She won’t let us look away from the unconscious biases that separate people of color from the very idea of opportunity. Some of her ideas and statements:
Our society “imbues whiteness with power…using it as shorthand for economic stability.”
Our economy is designed around the idea that whites aren’t supposed to live the way we force black and brown people to live, thus identifying “white trash” as a separate class means they received disproportionate visibility, over and above what we give to nonwhites facing the same (and worse) economic hardship.
When our society erases the needs of communities of color, that glorifies white poverty and exacerbates the oppression of others.
Smarsh is not interested in the pity of elite leftists who might label her “needy.”
Smarsh states plainly that the conflicting lesson of poverty is that “society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.”
Reviewer Leah Hampton in the LA TIMES writes: You may think you have read this book before. You haven’t. This is not THE GRAPES OF WRATH or HILLBILLY ELEGY…This is a tough, no nonsense truth, and telling it hard…and refers to “wasted generations believing in ‘trickle down’ economics, leaving us standing outside with our mouths open praying for money to rain.”
But in HEARTLAND you will find a recounting of “deep progressive roots” in Smarsh’s community, where women’s rights, abolition and pro-labor sentiments shaped her story. Identifying with the legacy of women’s suffrage, Smarsh put herself through college and her education led her to a political awakening and a career in journalism.
THE REVIEWER’S CONCLUSIONS
Leah Hampton, the women who reviewed HEARTLAND, has the same background as Smarsh and some potent advice for us:
At a time of national reckoning about endemic misogyny, HEARTLAND does some serious feminist consciousness raising…rural voters might be the very group that halts our country’s slide to the right. There is rich soil in America’s fly-over states, and if we follow Smarsh’s path, we will find families like mine and the author’s, full of sensible, resilient women who many be disenfranchised, but who are also uniquely poised and equipped to aid in the revolution , and in our collective liberation.
Photo: THE LA TIMES.
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