The Garden Of The Prophet

When I was in school I remember hiding the book THE GARDEN OF THE PROFIT in my football playbook so no one would see me reading it. I aced the book report and my pretty young teacher, that I had a crush, on was very pleased. The book,as the expression foes made avery lasting impression on me. It was the first thing I thought of when I started my bookREBIRTH OF A REALIST. Gilbrans words were very prophetic and can certainly be applied to today's America.


CHAPTER ONE
Out Of The Womb

And Almustafa was silent, and he looked away toward the hills and toward the vast ether, and there was a battle in his silence.
Then he said: "My friends and my road-fellows, pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not, save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Garden Of The Prophet----- Gilbran --- Knopf

I ask you is that not Bush's America.

At the end of WWll I sold my old Harley and decided to hitch-hike across the country. I had two objectives. One was to visit an old girlfriend at UCLA and the other was to stop in Indian Country to say hello to a shipmate.
All of that happened more than half a century ago and I hardly need my notes to remember it because I have gone over it so many times. I remained on the reservation for three days and two party filled nights because the family insisted that I stay and ride into Gallup with them at the end of the week for the Indian Rodeo. I spent another day with the family in Gallup and watched Willy’s younger brother win a black and silver saddle for the best roper in the junior class. That evening Willy and I had our last beer together. I remember telling him how glad I was to have been able to meet his father and how impressed I was.
It wasn’t until I reached Flagstaff Arizona that I had a chance to sit down in a truck stop and bring my notebook up to date. As I did, I could feel myself being transformed. The metamorphosis that began when I was discharged from the Navy was nearing completion. The chief, who stripped the cocoon off me with every angry word buried my youthful naiveté in the sands of New Mexico As I hold this yellow pad in front of me and read from the blurred pencil notes, I can re-capture the emotion that I felt at that truck stop. The night before we left the reservation, I learned that the chief, as far back as the late twenties, helped to organize the "Returning Students Association." They were a group of Navahos who came back to the reservation after acquiring a high school and in some cases a college education. They were all welcomed as leaders in the community and were very important links to the Anglo world.
Draft records show that at the time of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, 88 % of the Navahos drafted were considered illiterate. To resurrect that vision of hell on the sands of New Mexico, still ignites the anger and the shame I felt then. The poverty, the frustration, the despair that smothered young Navaho minds in 1947 washed over me like an icy shower. I had left a white world still celebrating their victory and planning their futures in a peaceful and prosperous America, but this too was America.
As a small child, my mother took me to a demonstration where I carried a sign to free the Scottsboro boys (a group of young blacks accused of rape). I knew a great deal about racism and anti-Semitism in my country, but I never expected to see the bland acceptance by the Navaho people of the degrading circumstances in which they were forced to live.
I have reflected on those hours that I spent in Flagstaff many times in my life. In jail, in Selma Alabama, I compared Willy’s experience with young Blacks who were being sent to fight for free elections in Vietnam and getting arrested for trying to help their parents register to vote in America. In Mississippi, while working with the impoverished farm workers who were little more than slaves while their government paid huge subsidies to their masters, and in a poverty stricken Connecticut city when the plants closed and the dreams ended leaving the poor freezing and hungry in high rent fire traps. I became the person to be actively involved in fighting against all of those injustices that blistering day in Flagstaff Arizona.
As I turn the pages of my note pad, I still have to blink back the tears. I remember offering to pay for my meals to Willy’s mother who, of course, would not accept. I offered to pay for the gas for the trip to Gallup and again they refused. Before I left, I wrapped a twenty-dollar bill around the gearshift of the family pick up truck when I took my things out and headed west. As I write this in 2003, I know that high school kids can spend twenty dollars on the game machines in the local pizza parlor. In 1947, a gallon of gasoline was only fifteen cents, but the per capita annual income for the Navaho living on the reservation was about one hundred dollars. White America had a victory to celebrate, but the Navaho did not. There were no jobs for returning veterans and the Navaho war plant workers, who had little education to fall back on, were the first fired once the war ended.
Time magazine of November 3, 1947 stated, "Great numbers of the Navahos are facing starvation . . . From 25,000 to 30,000 are lingering in the state between malnutrition and starvation. By January many of the old men and many of the children will be dead."
I thought that I was an astute young man then ready to take on the New World. The icy shower in July of 1947 drove off the fantasies and left me sitting in that truck-stop promising myself to at least try and be like Willy’s father and my own parents and try to be a REALIST.