Our little regional jet leveled off around 9,000 feet and we watched out the window as the Dunes scrolled below and the lake stretched out in green and blue.
My seatmate was a Pakistani Fulbrighter returning to California from a peace conference at the Dome. He was a nervous flier and so we talked.
He arrived in the States last summer and leaves in August, has traveled some while here.
I asked, “So what do you think?”
He said, “Uh, ha ha.”
The Fulbright program, named for and championed by a politician from Arkansas, “expands perspectives through … cross-cultural dialogue.” The Trump administration is gutting Fulbright and other exchange programs.
Back inside the terminal at SBN, a recorded message plays on a loop. The voice of a happy young man welcoming visitors to my hometown, South Bend, Indiana – the greatest city in the world!
I spent a week in Oakland for work. Took the ferry to San Francisco, took the BART to Berkeley. Walked a lot.
Back in South Bend we deplaned near the Bar Fly cantina, a hockey game on the tube. I was standing in my driveway last year, jawing with a contractor. He said, “Compton is the best rink in college hockey.”
I asked, “Have you seen a game anywhere else?”
He said, “No.”
***
Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith made a quick little video in his office to explain the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787. He sat casually on the edge of his desk and spoke in the assured jive of a youth pastor at a church with no books.
“Many, many men and leaders in our nation’s history knew how wicked slavery was,” Beckwith said. “They knew that god had created even black people, white people, red people, all people, in his image and they were fighting for equality for all.”
Hence the Three-Fifths Compromise with the slave states – “a great move,” Beckwith called it, that “helped root out slavery.”
I wanted to check this out with a different kind of authority and so wrote to Frederick Douglass at his home in Washington, D.C.
Was it true about the fight for equality for all people in our nation’s history? Was creating a permanent electoral advantage for slave states “a great move” that spelled slavery’s doom?
Frederick Douglass is still doing amazing things and being recognized more and more but responded quickly by email.
“Yes, it is all true,” he wrote. “When Edward Covey whipped me bloody as a boy, he was fighting for my equality and for the equality of all Maryland slaves. When I bested him in a fight at the age of 16, Covey grinned and clapped me on the back and invited me to dinner with his daughters!”
“When I escaped to the North and emerged as a famous Abolitionist, planters and politicians from across Dixie cheered my work.”
“Apropos of rooting out of slavery,” Douglass wrote, “I simply direct you to John Brown’s famous last words on his way to the gallows: ‘I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with a Three-Fifths Compromise.’”
Which settles that – in a way the Civil War did not.
But what about the “red people” and our nation’s historic fight for their equality?
I texted Sitting Bull.
“Many American men and leaders chased and killed us across the Plains,” he texted back. “They slaughtered the bison, confined us at Standing Rock, fed us rancid meat, etc.”
“I was shot dead by police during a violent arrest at my house.”
***
“And how did we get to this place?” Micah Beckwith asked in his video, where so few know our history. “We got to this place because of DEI in education.”
On a different camera, this one in Washington, Stephen Miller scowled and said, “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots.”
Music: “Winter in America” by Gil Scott-Heron
