"Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me." The lesson is that words have no destructive power.

Bullshit.

Words got me into my first fight in school. On my first day in kindergarten. Or should I say my first trip to kindergarten. I hadn’t actually made it into the building yet.

Leonard Gary and I had crossed Gilbert, the side street bordering Hannaman Elementary School on the east end of McGraw. It was a big moment for us in the biggest day of our lives. In our entire stretch of memory, no precedent existed for our crossing of so many streets by ourselves. That included Livernois, one of the widest streets in the universe. We had brand new school clothes like my big brother, George, and our very own school lunch boxes—a powerful symbol to me of inarguable venerability.

If you carried a lunch box, you had to be somebody. My father’s was big and strong like he was. Mine was a little tin thing with pictures on it. That was okay. I understood that I was going to have to earn my man-sized lunch box. As my left foot touched the far side of Gilbert, I counted that as my first big step.

Then there was that big boy with the slick brown hair and the nasty sneer blocking my path. He must have been eight or nine years old. As old as my cousin Sara. Practically an adult. If he was trying to intimidate me, he was doing alright. Lonnie must have been scared, too, but I couldn’t tell because my attention was on the giant. He looked us over and laughed.

"Kinney-garden babies," he taunted.

Babies? Babies? What was the matter with this guy? Didn’t he know that we had crossed Livernois by ourselves? Couldn’t he see that we were wearing school clothes? Couldn’t he see that we were carrying lunch boxes!

Lonnie told him to leave us alone. The big kid thought that was funny. He thought everything about us was funny. And he told us what he thought. Other smirking boys his age were standing nearby. Harassing us may have been his way of trying to entertain them.

I was no longer just afraid. I was angry. The more he talked, the angrier I got.

"Look at those cute little baby shoes. And that cute little baby hat. And that cute little baby lunch—" He never got the last word out of his mouth, because that’s when I hit him—with my lunch box. Bam! Right in the forehead.

A huge red knot popped up where my tin box connected as my first school lunch flew out. He clutched his forehead and headed west at a gallop, screaming and crying as I held fast to my open lunch box and ran screaming and crying to the north.

I was afraid that I had killed him and spent the rest of the day living in dread of being found out and sent to Samson. Samson, we were told, was where the bad little "colored" kids were sent when they got caught screwing up. As it was, the boy wasn’t hurt that badly and I somehow managed to go all the way through the 8th grade at Hannaman and on to the 9th at Chadsey High. There, I learned from Samson graduates that they were kept in line by the threat of being sent to Hannaman.

Words, as psychological weapons, have power far greater than sticks or stones or guns or even hydrogen bombs. Without the right words in the right context to get things moving, chances are better than good that the physical weapons will never be used. That, obviously, is the reason for telling impressionable youngsters that words are harmless—except, of course, for bad words that can get you into deep shit. The law even recognizes some words as "fighting words" when said to the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. "Baby" and "lunch box" probably aren’t among them, but I, for one, can understand how they could be.

Words attached to memorable experiences make permanent, express lane alterations in our brain cell connections. As you have seen within the context of my experience, baby, Livernois, school clothes, lunch box and Samson have meanings which go to those old connections of mine deep beneath the surface of our common language. If you’re not acquainted with Detroit’s main arteries of traffic, Livernois, may have only the meaning for you that I gave it in my story, although the others should be familiar enough. To hear any familiar word without understanding the context in which it is presented, is to recall it without truly understanding what it means.

The lunch box story has no express lane of fighting word imagery for the masses, which is why I told it to get to the ones that do. Beneath the surface of nearly everything you hear today about the Vietnam War is the term, "people of conscience." It packed a lot of punch in the `70s and `80s because names like Martin Luther King, Jr. were attached to it. These were liberal Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists and Communists who stood up to be counted for peace and justice—as defined by Walter Cronkite, the Barragan brothers, the Chicago Seven and Ho Chi Minh.

The EIPJ represented a formal network of such people, as did Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Students for a Democratic Society, to name only three of many such groups. But individuals in government, academia, and other influential fields of endeavor who shared their package deal beliefs about civil rights and Vietnam also qualified as people of conscience. If you think I’m making that up, ask National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg, Noah Adams or Bob Edwards. They are the ones who taught me the definition.

Step out of yourself for a minute and pretend you’re me in the Spring of `85, the tenth anniversary year of Saigon’s collapse. You’re talking to a group of people who think they know a lot about Vietnam. These are not your average fans of Vietnam action movies for whom Pham Van Dong is about as meaningful as Livernois. These are people who were outraged by John Wayne’s, "Green Berets," who laughed at Sylvester Stalone’s, "Rambo" and cried over Jane Fonda’s, "Coming Home." When Oliver Stone’s "Platoon" hits the silver screen in `87, they will give it two thumbs up. Way up.

They worship Walter Cronkite. They read Time, and Newsweek and The New York Times too, if they can get it. They watch Ted Koppel’s "Nightline" and listen to "All Things Considered." They have seen every part of "The 10,000 Day War," and "Vietnam: A Television History and read at least five prize-winning books on the subject by the information industry’s most respected authorities. In other words, they don’t know shit about Vietnam. But they think they do, and that’s what counts.

They generalize from your experience, accepting without question those things that tell the story they want to tell and they challenge, without investigating, whatever you say that argues empirically against it. You tell them about some all-American boys in your platoon mutilating an enemy corps, and they tell you about America’s immoral war. You tell them about two Viet Cong idiots tripping around in the dark and getting blown up by your claymores; they tell you about the My Lai (me-lie) massacre. Tell them about the Chiew Hoi (chew hoy) program with its quarter of a million communist soldiers who defected to the "corrupt, repressive" anti-communist South; they ask you if you’ve been smoking funny cigarettes.

Some of the things you can say to this group about the communists being the comparative bad guys all along, are hardly new to them. They heard Tricky Dick Nixon say the same things. Henry Kissinger too. And George Will. And William F. Buckley. And Jerry Fallwell. And John Stennis. And George Wallace. And Jessie Helms. And ultra right-wing military officers...

Are you beginning to detect a pattern here? Of course you are, unless some of these names are too far ahead of your time to trigger your gag reflex, in which case, you need only consult your directory of Who’s Who in Right-Wing American Politics, 1969-1987.

For most blacks in this country, "conservatism" is another word for institutional racism and economic exploitation of every variety. You won’t have to search hard to find solid, historical and contemporary reasons for those "perceptions." Look at the stereotypes brought to mind by the word "nigger" and compare them with the reasons most often given by conservatives for black unemployment. Look at how people calling themselves conservatives have lined up to debate such issues as Negro voting rights, equal employment opportunity, fair housing practices and most other issues of social degradation and economic exploitation, which have traditionally hammered black people the hardest.

Tradition is the hallmark of conservatism and America has an exceptional tradition of racism and economic exploitation. It also has its share of blacks, like former EEOC Direcor Clarence Thomas, who truly believe in the racial superiority of whites. Some of them can be accurately described as white racists in black bodies. They are known contemptuously by other blacks as "oreos," for being black on the outside and white on the inside. If there is a difference between a black conservative and a Jewish Nazi, it is in the freedom of blacks to join the party of the oppressor as welcomed exceptions to the rule and to speak out for what they believe in. But that says more about the Republican party than it does about oreos. It says more about the wisdom of conservatives to welcome them into the party of Lincoln, which adopted the white racist values of Douglas to nominate Goldwater and to get Nixon elected to the highest office in the land.

Can you imagine what it is to be a black man who could never bring himself to vote Republican in his life—not even against McGovern—to be called an oreo for criticizing the peace movement; to disagree with Martin Luther King’s assessment of the American role in Vietnam and to be instantaneously identified with the entire right-wing agenda; to know that any reference you make to systematic Viet Cong atrocities will get you the kind of response one would reserve for an ignorant impulse buyer of blatant right-wing propaganda?

I know that you know the difference between left and right-wing politics. So there will be no mistake about what I mean, let me define my terms: I see right-wing politics as the exercise of political power to preserve an established economic order, regardless of whether the people in power call themselves Republicans, conservatives, communists or hockey pucks. Left-wing politics would be the exercise of political power to change the established economic order. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves either.

It would follow then, that people on the right, who have the power, can use only as much of it as they can keep. Those on the left, who don’t have it can use only as much as they can get. The "haves," therefore, would be something more than human, if they did not try to deny some portion of their power to the have-nots. The have-nots, would be something less than human, if they did not try to wrest some power from the haves for themselves. The conservative pull of tradition against the liberal thrust of progress would, as a consequence, seem to be a necessary constant in social evolution. Indeed, without a moderate portion of each, you end up with either a feudal society or one in a perpetual state of revolution.

America is, no doubt, home to some who would take us backwards, if they could, to days when "We The People" meant only free, white, 21 and over males with property—including Negro property. At the other extreme, are revolutionaries who would dismantle our entire political-economic system if they could and impose their idea of utopia on everybody. In the middle, is somewhere around 80% of us who know damn well that our lives and liberties would be drastically devalued if either extreme got what it wanted. Depending on which seat we’re sitting in (first class or storage) some of us may want to rock the boat a little from time to time, but few of us want to tip it over.

We are a country of great ideas and great ideals. We say we cherish freedom and justice. Not only in the narrow sense of freedom and justice for ourselves but in the noble sense of freedom and justice for all. In the end, though, a country is only as great as the ideals it truly strives for and the values it will fight to preserve. Without the willingness to pay the price demanded for what we say we believe in, we are at best, hypocrites and, at worst, cowards.

Since the Vietnam war officially ended for the United States of America in 1973, we have become a nation of hypocrites and cowards.

The Republic of Vietnam used to be a politically independent nation of twenty million people, roughly the same as Canada, with its seat of government in Saigon. However, it was as dependent upon us militarily for its survival, as the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi, was dependent upon Moscow for its war. We withdrew our commitment to the survival of Saigon because of the sacrifices we made and were afraid we would have to make again to preserve it. We left behind untold numbers of people to perish while we stood back and watched the panic of impending doom in `75 and called them cowards for trying to escape.

Our nation was very young, far from ideal and not at all secure when Francis Scott Key ended "The Star-Spangled Banner" with a question rather than a statement. That question had to do with the precious symbol of a land free of English rule and the kind of people we had to be if we were to keep it that way. Before I could sing all of the words to our national anthem, I knew what the last words meant. I knew that courage was not our special gift but our special responsibility, and no longer for the preservation of our freedom alone.

Courage is not one of my favorite words, because it means too many different things to too many different people. Some of you might even think I’m talking about the kind of comic book courage you see in a Chuck Norris flick, while I have something altogether different in mind. When Lonnie stood up to "the giant" and told him to leave us alone, that was courage. He was speaking for both of us and making himself the target of whatever might come of it when self-interest alone would have directed him to do nothing. When I struck our tormentor I wasn’t thinking about Lonnie. I wasn’t thinking, period. Courage requires thought, an honest appreciation of the situation and a decision to act on principle. When I say courage, I mean the ability to put fear second to hazardous acts of necessity, like preventing genocide, or saving a young republic at war with totalitarians from extinction.

When I say cowardice, I mean just the opposite. If the words, "acting only in our national self-interest," don’t come to mind, they should.

For you to know what I mean by the word "hypocrite," you have to see it as the tip of an iceberg. Let me show you what’s beneath the surface....

I used to call myself a Christian. I don’t anymore.

Christians are taught that God speaks to them through the pages of the Bible, particularly the first four books of the New Testament, called the Gospels. That is why Gospels is sometimes used by Christians as another word for truth. Christians also believe that God speaks to them directly through their conscience. At least they say they believe, whether they do or not. They have to say it or they couldn’t call themselves Christians.

I could never master the art of telling myself I believed something that I didn’t. As a child, I wasn’t sure whether it was God talking to me or not when I felt guilty about something. But I did believe in God and hell. And guilty feelings always scared the hell out of me. Still, I couldn’t help sinning from time to time regardless of the possible consequences.

With the onset of puberty, I found myself committing more and more sins of the heart, even in church. I would glimpse a little more cleavage or a little more thigh than usual and growth signals would go directly to my sinful we-we. Sometimes, and I could never tell when, my brain would supply the necessary stimulation all by itself. Though I tried diligently to abide by Christian principles, most of which seemed reasonable enough, it had become clear that sin came as naturally to me as breathing. In that respect I was the same as everybody else. If I was to be saved from everlasting torment, there seemed to be only one way out.

Baptists were supposed to believe that the ritual of baptism cleanses you of sin.

I believed that.

To become a true born again Christian, you have to believe. Where faith and intellect conflict, you have to ignore your intellect. My inability to do that was beginning to trouble me. What would happen to my immortal soul if I died that night without surrendering my mind to everything a Christian was supposed to believe? The answer to that question brought me to the point of having to tolerate some fundamental intellectual contradictions. It wasn’t the same as seeing the light, but I had to trust that my sincere desire to, would count for something.

I had just turned twelve when I made my decision to get baptized. I didn’t think I was ready until then and my parents didn’t push it. They didn’t push any of us kids into important decisions we were supposed to make on our own. Even as a very young child, I understood the value of what they were doing and respected them for it. Nobody told me to respect that sort of thing in my parents any more than I was told to resent other things. I felt what I felt, I thought what I thought and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

As the boys who were about to be born again stood by in our blue jeans and white T-shirts, a picture formed in my mind, a picture of girls in blue jeans and T-shirts. What would the ones with a lot on top look like without bras?

I didn’t plan on asking myself that. I just did. And when the picture zoomed into focus all by itself, I tried to shake it. I couldn’t. Not even as I stood waist deep in the sacred pool with Dr. MacNiel, agreeing to accept Jesus as my own personal savior. It was the last thing I saw in my head before the scholarly pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church said the magic words and dunked me.

I went under fearing I would drown and end up in hell. When I came up, though, coughing and sputtering and trying to see visions of heaven, all I could see were wet white T-shirts clinging to beautiful brown boobs.

I guess it was only natural that I would feel guilty for the wretched timing of my wicked thoughts. It seemed so hypocritical. Did that make me a hypocrite? Jesus, I hoped not. But I didn’t know for certain until the good Christians of Tabernacle gave me a lesson I would never forget....

In our church and Sunday School, I learned many valuable lessons in ethical conduct, but one thing I could never buy was the importance of wearing new clothes on Easter. As I understood it, the new clothes were supposed to be symbolic of Christ’s resurrection and the faith of those who believed in him that they too would conquer death. The more glorious the clothing, it seemed to some, the more glory to God. Toward that end, some people would invest a considerable amount of their earthly fortunes. They weren’t dressing up to impress us mortals; they were doing it for the greater glory of God.

On the Easter before my 13th birthday the church was overflowing with people, as was always the case on Easter. Many had come for no other reason than to show off their expensive, fashionable new Easter ensembles and to put down anyone who fell short of their expensive, fashionable new glory. It was hard to tell which they enjoyed more.

Sitting in the basement of the church, where I was lucky to find a seat in the rear, I made a game of spotting the show-offs. The ones whose obvious little gestures of pride, envy and contempt told of the sins in their hearts. Maybe there weren’t as many of them as I had originally imagined. And maybe they would be a little harder to pick out than I had remembered from the year before. To my dismay, they were all much too easy to spot to make for an interesting game and there were far too many of them to make it fun.

I tried to picture what things were like on the main floor where my parents were. In all probability, my father was laughing at the fashion show and my mother was intimidated by it. My brother George, was probably in the balcony looking good regardless of what he was wearing. My cousin, Sara, who came to live with us when she was seven, no longer attended the same church we did. But as I tried to imagine the scene upstairs, I recalled something she told me about ugly people when I was seven. "If you call somebody ugly," she said, "you will turn ugly yourself." She was right, as usual. But she wasn’t there to see what ugly creatures the nattily attired people of Tabernacle were turning themselves into.

The reason she switched churches when she was old enough to decide for herself, was partly because of boredom. Tabernacle was not the lively place black Baptist churches were generally thought of as being. The large congregation would stand and sing some dry old anthem. We’d sit and listen to announcements. The plate would be passed. Then we’d have to sit through a sleep-inducing hymn or two before the minister or one of his assistants would deliver the sermon.

Dr. MacNiel belonged to the learned, dignified school of Gospel ministry. I actually looked forward to hearing him speak because he made good sense. The man had a knack for the fine weaving of words from the scriptures into everyday examples of good Christian living. He wasn’t the most dynamic speaker around but, if you paid close attention to what he was saying, you learned something of practical value and came away feeling a little closer to God.

I had long suspected that this was not the main reason most people went to church. Many of them, I knew, were there primarily to socialize. "Fellowship," they called it, acknowledged sinners all, saved by grace and free from further worry of having to consider the moral consequences of their actions. "Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone," they would say, as they would meet in fellowship after the services and begin casting stones.

Easter Sunday always seemed to bring out the worst in them. From where I was sitting, this particular Easter was worse than most.

The bad thing about a seat in the basement during any Sunday service was the absence of interesting things to look at. There was the podium up front, the speaker in the upper left corner through which the upstairs proceedings were being carried, and the ushers in their shiny black shoes and clean white gloves, strategically posted to keep things running smoothly. That left congregation watching, which is to say, watching how the members of the congregation watched each other.

On this holiest of holy days on the Christian calendar, in this house of God, our minister of the Gospels was offering fresh insights into the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection. I could never make sense of it. This was what Christianity was all about. I stopped playing my silly game, which had become depressing anyway, to listen.

It was hard to concentrate on the sermon, though, with the weird colorful hats of the women in front of me constantly in motion. The women were buzzing about something. I couldn’t tell what at first.

Then, I saw him.

Up front in the doorway across the room to my right was a boy about my age. His skin was dark, his hair long and unkempt, his scruffy denim coveralls and torn checkered shirt caked with dirt. He looked almost as though he had been teleported to the spot where he was standing directly from a cotton patch in Mississippi.

The good women of Tabernacle in the bright new hats did not approve. They scowled, shook their heads and clucked their tongues. They wrinkled their noses in disgust as though they could smell his unwashed body from clear across the room. Maybe they could. But a far worse stench was coming from them—the stench of arrogance, intolerance, self-righteousness and hypocrisy boiled into one noisome stew. It was beginning to spread.

"Imagine coming to church looking like that," said the well-dressed middle-aged woman directly in front of me to the bald-headed man on her right. He seemed to concur, but carried it no further. So she leaned over him, to the woman on his right, who gave every sign of being as offended by the boy’s appearance as the first woman. I could hear similar grumbling in back of me. But for the most part, people were tuned into Rev. MacNiel, their eyes locked on the speaker as though reading his words rather than listening to them.

The boy in the doorway was looking up at the speaker in the same way, although it was clear that he could neither read or listen as well as someone his age was supposed to. His face bore the unmistakable imprint of mental retardation. But in that face, was also the unmistakable look of hunger for knowledge. Who could have expected to see such a look on such a face?

I was moved beyond expression by the real magic of what I saw, the magic of faith that transcended reason.

I looked at the boy and I saw myself.

I saw Jesus.

I saw God!

Need I say, it was a peak experience? If I could have offered that boy a seat, I would have. I couldn’t understand for the life of me, why the women near the door with their Easter furs on the seats next to them, didn’t offer him one of those seats. My first thought was to condemn them all. Then I saw that most of them were probably unaware of his presence, as were most of the other people in the basement.

My attention reverted to the growing minority of people who were aware of his presence and visibly offended by it. They did not see themselves in that boy. They did not see Jesus. They did not see God. They saw a disrespectful visitor to the house of the Lord. An unwelcome guest. A party crasher. A stain on their new clothes.

Meanwhile, Rev. MacNiel’s Easter sermon was being lost on those of us who were looking at the boy. He was saying things I wanted very much to hear, giving answers, perhaps, to the most troubling questions of what it meant to be a Christian. Other words were screening them out, words of indignation that belied a far different set of Christian priorities than their authors would have claimed.

"He ought to be shamed’a hisself."

"My Lord, yes!"

"Here it is Easter Sunday and he come in here wear’n them filthy coveralls."

"He didn’t even wash his o’ nasty behind."

"Who let him in here looking like that?"

"I don’t know, but somebody should get an usher."

These were the pious souls who would have looked at the Jew they worshiped as God and said, "Crucify him!"

Here was a new level of hypocrisy. And a new dimension. These "Christians" were demonstrably unimpressed by the most fundamental teachings of Christ which were being eloquently reiterated at that very moment over the loud speaker. But they had something that distinguished them from other hypocrites in a big way. They had power, influence, the ability to transform their thoughtless inhumanity into action and to silence potential opponents like me without even acknowledging our existence. Nobody had to tell me that; the environment was the messenger and the message.

The woman in the big hat in front of me whispered something to the bald headed man, who got up and spoke to an usher. The man pointed to the boy in the doorway who was still straining to hear the voice coming out of the speaker. The usher stepped over to where he could see him and nodded. Then he gestured for another usher in the next aisle to come to him, and the bald man went back to his seat. He was received warmly by the women next to him who were obviously quite pleased with themselves.

Meanwhile, the two shiny-shoed, white-gloved servants of the church escorted the boy out...and I went out right behind him.

I can’t quote all of the magic words that made the boy in the doorway disappear. It’s enough to know that an insistent, self-appointed champion of righteousness could use them, whatever they were, with absolute assurance that they would work. It’s enough to know that her conscience was clear and that she had done only what the "people of conscience" around her were advocating in the name of the Lord.