MONDAY'S COLUMN, a follow-up to one describing how an African-American friend felt about being seated in the back of a nearly empty restaurant in North Baltimore, elicited more angry rants, and if I had a dollar for every ugly remark, I could treat all these nice people to a brotherhood dinner at Denny's.
To be fair, many e-mailers on each "side" of this presented trenchant, civilized and heartfelt comment, lodging either empathy with my friend or with the restaurant staff and management. But the majority betrayed a deep-seated discomfort with the whole subject, scornfully attacked African-Americans in general and dismissed my friend's story -- offered here not as grand complaint but as potentially enlightening anecdote -- as a whine. They didn't care to know how an old wound might be easily scratched open by a seemingly innocent slight.
But, alas, that's what makes this one great nation under God!
Martin C. Evans, a former Sun reporter who covers race issues for Newsday, wrote from New York: "The answer is for both 'sides' to listen to each other enough, and to get to know each other enough so trust can grow. The black man has to listen when whites explain that, yes, seating in a restaurant often is assigned according to an order that has nothing to do with skin color (although sometimes it does). And white people have to listen when black people explain that they've lived through such pain for so long that often they wonder whether race has been a factor even in situations when it has not (although sometimes it has)."
A friend in Ferndale, a Texas native and self-described "right-wing kind of guy," chimed in on the matter, and while I've never given him much -- a nice shirt when he turned 40, a couple of bottles of wine -- I gladly give him space in my column today:
"I am just old enough to remember the side-by-side drinking fountains at the courthouse, the separate waiting room at the bus station, and the 'for white only' sign at the Laundromat, though I thought it meant you could only wash sheets and towels and stuff. (Someone had to explain that one to me.) I remember a time when cruel racial stereotypes were staples of everyday conversation and folks got murdered for trying to register people to vote.
"Then a strange thing happened. My school got integrated and from about the third grade on I sat in classrooms with black and Hispanic children and gradually it started to dawn on me that my real world experiences weren't supporting all those ugly stereotypes. Black kids weren't dumb and Mexican kids didn't carry knives and steal stuff. The grownups were wrong about those things.
"Against that background I have to reflect on how wonderful it is to live in a time when the N-word is an obscenity, when we have laws forbidding our police to use skin color for anything except a description, and when we can even have a debate over someone being given a bad seat in a restaurant. I can remember when debates of similar intensity were conducted over the propriety of using attack dogs on the marchers at Selma or arresting people for taking the wrong seat on a bus. We're not done by any means, but we have made some progress during my lifetime."
Tough for Ehrlich to top
Retired four-star admiral. Former presidential aide. Former Naval Academy superintendent. Former commander in chief of U.S. forces, Pacific. Vice chairman, Board of Regents of the University of Maryland. Recently registered Democrat who thinks Republican Party has veered too far to the right. Jumping butterballs, why isn't Charles Larson running for governor?
Kathleen K. Townsend has done something I didn't think possible -- selected a running mate more appealing than she is.
Nonetheless, it puts KKT's presumptive Republican challenger to a test. I mean, how does Bob Ehrlich top this? With Tom Clancy? Captain Buddy Harrison of the Tilghman Island charter fleet? Anybody know if Ed Kane of the Water Taxi service is Republican?
Denial over bay
One last thing about the Chesapeake Bay and the problems with some of the fish being caught there and within its tributaries: It would be nice if some of the people with vested interest in the bay expressed as much passionate outrage about the state of the estuary -- "a system dangerously out of balance [that] operates at barely more than one-fourth of its potential," according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation -- as they do about the press and fisheries managers who report problems to the public.
Critics of scientists and journalists need to get over their denial, realize that their livelihoods depend on solving these problems, and create a political force that demands a bay cleanup program with teeth. Anyone in any of those industries -- commercial and sport fishing, tourism, real estate development -- who tries to pretend the bay isn't really in such bad shape is working to bring about his own demise.
Unwitting amenity
A friend traveled recently through the Eastern Shore hamlet of Still Pond, between Chestertown and Betterton, and saw a house with this sign posted in front: "HOUSE FOR SALE WITH OWNER." Which is fine, one supposes, as long as he doesn't snore.