IN THIS LAND

Dear Spike:

Before it gets too far away from me, I’d like to share with you the experience I had last Tuesday – and what I think it means for the world you are inheriting.

Tuesday, of course, was the day in which our country inaugurated a new president. I watched the historic event unfold from the base club at Hill Air Force Base.

There, I sat beside a chaplain named Carl Wright and studied the way he beamed as his new commander in chief took the oath of office and delivered the inaugural address.

“I’m having a hard time believing this is all happening,” he told me. “I just have a deep sense of pride and awe."

He had good reason for those emotions. Thirty years ago, the chaplain was a young enlisted airman, returning home from his first duty assignment overseas, only to confront some of the uglier realities of life back in the land of the free.

As he tells the story, he was outfitted in his dress blues, waiting for a bus outside a military base in Charleston, South Carolina, when his pride was wrenched off its hinges.

The driver pulled up, stepped off the bus, and proceeded to take everyone’s ticket — except for the young black airman standing in the front of the line.

“I was getting worried,” the chaplain remembered. “I knew there were only so many seats on the bus, and I’d spent all of my money on this ticket, so I said, ‘excuse me, sir, are you going to take my ticket?’ ”

The bus driver looked him up and down and then, turning to the white passengers, mocked the young airman for having had the audacity to speak up -- throwing in a few cruel racial epithets for good measure.

With no other way to get home to Washington, D.C., the airman took the verbal assault and, when the driver finally consented to letting him on the bus, took a seat toward the back.

“I cried the entire way home,” he told me.

I’m sure this will sound as ancient history to you. As the television in the corner of the base club replayed images of black man taking on the role of our nation's leader, it seemed as ancient history to me.

But then I thought to ask…

“Chaplain,” I said, “when was the last time you heard that word?”

“That word?”

“The word the bus driver called you.”

“‘Nigger?’ Oh, you know, you hear that word all the time.”

“I don’t mean in music. I don’t mean in movies. I mean directed at you. Like that. Like it was in 1979.”

“Oh, in that way? It’s been a few years.”

I could see him flipping back through a mental calendar before he answered more confidently.

Two years, he said

Two years. That all that separated this man — a decorated officer in the United States Air Force — from the last time he’d been disparaged in that ugly, awful way.

Even on days when the world seems forever changed, you’ll sometimes get reminders that this planet actually turns quite slowly.

You should not ignore those truths. But neither should you allow those momentary darknesses to snuff out the lights of change.

Chaplain Wright told me that he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking of the day he cried from Charleston to D.C. And he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking of the times, between then and now, in which he’s been treated as a second-class citizen in this land where all men are created equal.

He prefers to recall a day, not long back, when he stepped off the airplane from his most recent overseas duty in Iraq.

“There were people there to greet me, to shake my hand, and I was thanked for my service."

That, he said, is all he ever wanted.

Love,
dad