BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
And why did you leave out Bob Hood, or Don Ringinham, a pharmacist who worked for me and now is the owner of three drug stores, or Marva May K--r, another pharmacist who also managed one of my stores for me and now owns her own store, and will be retiring soon to live in Panama and New York. And at BST there were plenty of guys who made more of themselves than the corner idlers Cosby mentions.
And then there was Charlie E----N, a Jewish pharmacist, probably the best I ever had, fast and smart, who worked for me before opening his own store and is now in jail for Medicaid fraud. And what about Bob S---N, a Serbian pharmacist who kept pistols in his locker? . Or Barry S---o, another Jewish pharmacist who stole drugs from the store and resold them on the street.
I don't think race means anything. I suspect the culture and the family. Or lack thereof. And do you know who agreed with me? W.E.B.DuBois, that's who.You see, we knew all this stuff long ago. But we never act on it.
When in the seventh grade my son, Max, was asked to write a paper on Existentialism, and so he called on The Great Robert Earl Hood, and asked him for advice. Bob, who had studied in Switzerland with Karl Barth, told Max to tell his teacher that, "We settled all that stuff in the fifties."
That's how I feel about Cosby and his recent discovery that black children aren't paying attention in school, and are wearing their hats backwards. -- We knew all that stuff in the sixties.
The question is what can be done about it. I am quite pessimistic that any outside force can have any effect on what is happening. Outside forces include, the schools, the government, carrot-offering liberals, and even stick-wielding conservatives.
Once as Bob and I walked on Ninth Avenue, near General Seminary, where he taught philosophy I said to Bob:
"Bob, you are one of the most intelligent people I have ever known, do you really believe in God?" "
Yes," he answered, "with all my heart and soul, I believe that Jesus Christ is my ___ and savior, and that one day I will sit at his feet in heaven."
Bob Hood left a cushy job teaching at the graduate level at General Seminary in NYC, a job that included a fabulous salary and a three bedroom apartment in Manhattan, in order to found the African American Studies Department at Hofstra on Long Island, where he lived in an unheated room, up a narrow, winding, stone stairway in the tower of the Cathedral of the Incarnation. He gave up what would have rolled up into a large pension and took his chances with a project that might not have worked out.
He sold his beloved collection of English 18th Century furniture and a collection of English silver and contributed the proceeds to the African-American Study Center, when funding did not come as quickly as he had expected. Cosidering his age at the time, I would guess that the collection was accumulated over a twenty year period.
He was a radical activist who was a representative of Desmond Tutu. He believed in non-violence in the tradition of Dietrich Bonhoffer and Martin Luther King.
Although he thought himself to be a liberation theologian, without violence, and argued that his people had suffered oppression at the hands of racist whites, Bob was able to divine the difference between innocuous, harmless whites like me, and bigot whites. Bob saw the world from the bottom up, through the eyes and feelings of the poor and oppressed.
Yes, he had a flaw, a flaw of which you may be aware, which was that, although he loved women, he did not think them suitable to the wearing of the cloth. He believed that God had another purpose for women.
But we each live with our contradictions, even me and probably every reader.
One of Bob's favorite Biblical Passages was the Magnificat, related in Luke; Bob had memorized it and when he recited it his voice, deep, baronial, would rise every time he came to the lines, "...He has taken princes from their thrones/and exalted the lowly."
He believed and certainly his world view was from the bottom.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
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