Now It can be told

Scene of the crime:  Except for the Keybank Building which was not even a gleam in an architect's eye in the summer of 1968,  the newer cars parked outside, and all the trees, now missing, which made this location on that Saturday an off-the-beaten-path location, this is where I either facilitated a break-in or saved a secretary a whole weekend of dire lonely captivity in an old Flats warehouse restroom.

My First, and Last, Living Wage Job

All right, in 1968, graduated from college, half a year of graduate study, and a couple of years of chronic depression, I was grateful to be a mailman. I don't remember what the economic conditions were in those years but for me they weren't good. Because of my appearing exceptionally young for my years and probably having a voice pitched high enough to make the appearance credible, I was often laughed out of interviews with a casual, "Look, kid, I don't know who you're trying to fool, but when you get out of high school, give us another shot." 

Or the jobs just didn't pay enough to support a young couple intending soon to be married. I could have gotten into IT early on but learning Fortran and Cobol seemed dreadfully dull at the time and churning out deckfuls of mysteriously punched IBM cards looked like asking Death to kiss you goodnight. Gates and Jobs were probably still friends working in a garage somewhere. I had no crystal ball but I had taken a civil service test for the Post Office. All I had to do was wait for them to write me again instead of pitching the invitations into the waste basket every month. 

So I was a beginning part-time substitute mailman and I was delivering that Saturday on what was called a "mounted" route, a term thrown back not to the Pony Express (which was a contract service, never part of the Post Office) but to delivery involving a vehicle, possibly in earlier years a horse-drawn vehicle. 

What was delightful about this was that on a business route on a Saturday the carrier didn't even take out half the mail, leaving it in the office for businesses who chose not to have a Saturday delivery. Yet one was expected to take the full time for the route and not come in early. Yea! Lots of free time and a Jeep to drive about anywhere you wanted to go on a Saturday. 

In those days the Post Office was pretty much a hiring arm of the federal government and there was lots of slack. Unlike today's Postal Service which is driven by twin devils of government bureaucracy and business efficiency where people are subject to shooting each other if anyone is pushed just a little too hard.

"Mailman, help me! Help me, mailman!"

The area was in downtown Cleveland, actually just down the hillside from Ontario near what was then the Eagle Street ramp. But it was virtually invisible in that corner of the turn of Canal Road. The Cuyahoga flowed another plateau down and could not be seen except from the rear of the old warehouses which dated back to the 1850s or earlier. One could hear the traffic from the busy streets above but Canal Road on a Saturday was like being on the moon. And this was even before we landed on the moon. 

There were several stops along this stretch but few cars parked in the area--not unusual. As I ascended the rickety wooden stairs of the third stop I first tried the doorknob to deliver in person if I could, but the door was locked. Through the glass I could see no one inside and the lights were out. There was a slot in the door and as I pushed the tied up letters and magazines in through the slot I thought I heard a voice calling, "Help me, mailman, help me." 

I looked around. There was no one in sight. I let the slot clamp shut and again I heard the voice but this time much quieter. I knelt down and pushed the slot open so I could see and hear directly and shouted into it, "Hello, is anyone there? I just delivered your mail." 

"Mailman, Oh, my God, thank you but don't leave me," a lady's voice clearly cried out. "Whatever you do don't leave. I've locked myself in the restroom by accident." She explained she had come in to complete some office work and when she went to the restroom the door closed behind her and locked somehow so that she couldn't open it. "Nobody knows I'm here. If I can't get out, I'll be here alone until they come in Monday morning. You're my only hope." 

"Well, look, I can't be breaking into places, but I can call the police to help you, when, and if, I find a place open, which to be blunt, isn't likely to happen." These were the days before cellphones could commonly be found in every pocket and purse.  

"Take a rock and break the glass. Then come in and let me out. Look, I've got other stuff to do today and I don't want my family to worry while the police take all day to decide to help me," she stated. "Don't worry about the glass. The company will pay for repairs." 

"Lady, I'm not comfortable at all about this." I replied getting more nervous about the whole deal. 

"How comfortable will you be on Monday morning when I tell your boss about  refusing to help me?" she queried. 

Here Come the Gang, er, Door, Busters

I felt like I was sinking into a quagmire but now I couldn't just leave her. I checked the area for a rock and found a board I thought would work. "Here goes," I warned her. The glass didn't break until the third whack and it shattered into the office just like in the movies. Now I'm thinking somebody will drive by and see me at the broken door with the board in my hand and think, "Man, when they say they deliver, don't get in their way." 

I carefully reached in, unlatched the inside lock, and pushed the door over the shards. "I'm over here," came a voice from a door down the hallway. I carefully tried the doorknob which refused to rotate. "It's locked," I said stupidly. "I know that. Can you break in?" "Ma'am, I'm not a big guy but I could try."

[If you are now thinking, "This guy is a nut," I don't blame you one bit.] 

It's amazing how hard you have to hit a door to burst it open, and how much it hurts when it stops you like a rhinoceros slamming into a bridge abutment. "Third time is charmed, they say," at which point the door crashes to the floor rather than just opening and the young, powerful part-time substitute letter carrier goes sliding over its surface and ends up in a lump at the feet of the helpless maiden, who was standing there with the door's three hinge pins in her hand.

"I knocked these out with the heel of my shoe, but I still couldn't open the door," she took pains to explain as I rose from a crumpled heap and pointed at the pins. I felt like telling her that if she had mentioned the hinge pins I would have instructed her to pull on the hinges little by little to get the door open--no broken glass, no crushed shoulder. However, by then I realized I could have done a lot of things differently and let it slide.

Sheepishly neither asked for the other's name. I said I was glad to have been some help while thinking the sore shoulder should be fine by the route's end. When I got back to the post office, my shoulder was still hurting and I thought, "My boss doesn't need to know about this." 

An American Month

On June 1when I wrote "Shoving Your Nose in It" is Journalism's Job  I had no idea of the significance awarded this month:

"I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year." [my emphasis, from Tomdispatch.org]

What author Ariel Dorfman relates in the link below is the human cost to both victim and perpetrator, recently depicted in the film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, about a British officer, Eric Lomax, tortured by a Japanese officer, who was a Buddhist monk, during the construction of the Bangkok to Burma railway, made famous in the motion picture Bridge on the River Kwai.

I never thought that in my waning years I would be writing frequently and earnestly to dissuade our citizenry away from the barbarity of torture. But I never thought I'd have to convince people about freedom of speech or separation of church and state either. 

So here offered for your consideration another article you may decide against reading (this is rather reserved by comparison to others I have linked);

http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=18744fd8cf&e=e8ee0c8340

Past the Tipping Point

Despite the ranting of crazed denialists we are on the way to destroying the planet that gave us life.

Save on winter clothing

Dahr Jamail of Truthout.org promised to update us monthly on ACDs (anthropogenic climate disrupttions) across the world. This grim series continues and, as expected, only gets worse. Like so many of us who have watched the global warming prospect for years, and have cried Cassandra-like to so many who would just not listen, Mr. Jamail presents his findings as one who believes we have already passed the tipping point. His chronicle of these latest events is linked below:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24370-atmospheric-co2-crosses-ominous-threshold

Warning: This article is not encouraging 

Just How Much Better Off Are They Than You?

IMAGES OF INEQUALITY

The hottest “new badge of excess” in the global luxury world? That has to be the “pawbag,” the oh-so-cute miniature replica of high-fashion, high-priced handbagsnow available for the pups of princesses and plutocrats alike. Matching sets for dog and owner start at a mere $1,118 for the Fontanelli little black handbag and can run up to $5,119 for the Leonardo Delfuoco black/green croc.

from http://toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html

To the Bugs

To the bugs who bit me as I shoveled:

I know I upset your home, eight years' compost,

Where nature called you earnestly to churn

And make for my sake a more fertile earth.

I salute your endeavor burrowing

Tirelessly through chopped grass, dandelion,

Avoiding the cigarette cellophane, the

Silvery prophylactic wrappers my

Mower indifferently shredded with

Black and Mild tips, torn munchie bags, children’s

Carelessly wadded homework, Jehovah

Witness pamphlets freely sucked from my lawn.

Despite this good you clearly work, may your

Probosces shrink in pain, your spawn feed birds.

c. 2014,  J. S. Manista

Earning (and Trying to Live on) Minimum Wages in America Today, Part III

Don't like being unemployed? Get a job. Don't like minimum wage? Get a better job.

Things are getting better. Really? For whom?

Maybe my parents did a far better job of educating me of their depression-era young adulthood than I had come to realize until lately: of spare mealtimes--for supper each child getting only a slice of bread smeared with lard; of being told to quit school at sixteen, find work and help support the family (there were ten children in my father's family, eight in my mother's); of hoboes knocking on back doors asking for any small job they could do to offset their begging for a sandwich.

Oddly I took the stories in as a smidgeon but later linked them to romantic notions of colorful poverty (if there can be such a thing)--riding the rails, tales of the desperate Joads extricating themselves from dust of the prairies and hopefully west to California, the tenement occupants of Elmer Rice's Street Scene or poorly paid taxi drivers in Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. What could be headier than popular-level economic debates with the neighborhood socialists and Marxists of the '30s?

History repeats but in a new way. Economic definitions do not let us call the Great Recession another Great Depression. But for the long term unemployed or those upper age rejects of once well salaried middle management who now struggle to find positions within 60% of their previous earnings is there really a difference? Peter Van Buren (whistle blower at the State Department and now mid-career scrambler) takes on some pertinent questions: 

    1. Who's Thomas Piketty? 

    2. Why don't poor people find better jobs? 

    3. Aren't there places all over the US experiencing economic rebirth?

    4. Get off the couch--look for work? 

    5. Get retrained? 

    6. Cut welfare and force unemployed into the work market?

    7. Shut off Food Stamps? 

    8. Raise the minimum wage and lose jobs? 

    9. Then what? 

And, as I said before, don't blame me. And now, don't blame Peter Van Buren either. Just messengers, remember?

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175851/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_a_rising_tide_lifts_all_yachts/

"Shoving Your Nose in It," is Journalism's Job

Hey, I really hate to spoil your day

The sky here is blue. It's mildly warm. The birds are chirping. The cat's asleep on her sunny perch. And we need to talk about torture. 

Since this is the weekend after five years of being held hostage Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was released by the Taliban in exchange for five Taliban terrorists held at Guantanamo it may seem that keeping prisoners in indefinite detention may not have been such a bad idea after all. Despite the advantages of such amoral realpolitick for prisoner swaps, this particular swap might easily have been effected totally apart from the background of torture which is the question here. 

Short of some graphic violence on 24 (which I have never seen) I question whether Americans have any real knowledge of US torture methods or history. Of course a person with internet could just Google "torture" as I did for the images I used here. But gagging (or fainting) over the variety presented--from medieval to modern--doesn't do justice to what we actually do. 

Since we never were asked politically and foolishly trusted government officials to follow existing law, it may be long overdue to find out what Cheney meant by "the dark side." I list below two articles that show: 1. We're still doing it, and 2. Yep, it's torture. 

All I'm asking is for you to become an informed citizen so you can develop a proper opinion, since except for certain especially clever folks you can't have an opinion "without you got no facs." 

So I invite you, Dear Reader, to read (and hang onto your lunch, please):

1. Link was ineffective for an article in The Atlantic website, March 13, 2014, "A Technicality Won't Excuse the Obama Administration for Torture," author Conor Friedersdorf

2. http://truth-out.org/news/item/24030-bushs-fourth-term-continues-guantanamo-torture-secret-renditions-indefinite-

Need An Example? Force Feeding

"In his May 23, 2013 speech to the National Defense University, President Obama addressed the then ongoing practice of force-feeding. Here is what he said:

'Is this who we are? Is that something our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that.' 

One year later, the force-feeding continues and Mr. Obama is silent." 
   from  Guantanamo Force- Feeding--The Resanctioning of Torture, L. Michael Hager, Truthout

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24024-guantanamo-force-feeding-the-re-sanctioning-of-torture