Past Sins

I’ve worn a ball-cap almost every day of my life since I was a teenager. I’ve worn a ball cap since long before my hair all fell out. I’ve been through easily hundreds of hat representing football teams and colleges, boot brands, firearms, fishing tackle, and country bands. The one I’m wearing today is a trucker hat, Realtree HD camo with orange mesh. It has a rainbow logo that reads “Y’all Means All.” As fall creeps closer to a dreary Massachusetts winter and the north wind get’s colder I’ll break out my winter hat, a plain blue wool cap from LL Bean with brown leather brim. It’s warmer and weather resistant and has a “He/Him” rainbow pro-nouns pin stuck on the side. I have a “Black lives matter” pin too, for when I need it.

I’m a hoarder of t-shirts. My drawers are overflowing with them. I have a few basic, plain black, tees, and the rest are a mix of Louisiana themes, travel destinations, bait shops and bad-ass country bands. Mixed in are a handful of shirts with more political messages. I have one that, like the hat, reads “Y’all Means All.” I have another that’s just “Y’all” in rainbow font. I have a third that says “Protect Trans Kids.” There are a shocking number of rainbows hidden away in my dresser drawers and I wear them frequently when the weather’s warm.

I started doing the rainbow stuff when I moved to Massachusetts. I started doing it when I realized that my cowboy boots and southern accent made Yankees think I was a Republican. I started doing it when I discovered folks in New England assumed I was the same kind of bigoted piece of shit they were when they looked at me. I started wearing them in the hopes that it would make my potential allies a tiny bit more comfortable and my potential enemies think twice before confessing their racist sins.

I haven’t always been like this though. Once upon a time I was a Republican. Once upon a time I wore an NRA Law Enforcement Division ballcap and a 5.11 branded polo.

You see, I was born in Shreveport Louisiana, the first grandchild in a conservative, religious, working class family. My grandparents on one side were children of the great depression who lived most of their lives without running water or electricity. Eventually they moved to town for work and raised a family on first a postal carriers pay, then disability and seasonal retail jobs and eventually a union job at a GM plant. On the other side were hardcore non-drinking, non-dancing, Southern Baptists. More devout but almost as dirt poor. They tithed ten percent on the money made working at a car wash, selling cookies, and working in the teller cage of a local bank. And to make the point I need to make I have to be honest, as much as I love my family, they were racist and I grew up surrounded by bigotry. I heard once that when the Klan did attempt to recruit a relative he replied “I don’t need to pay dues or wear a hood to hate a n****r.” The story was told as an example of a “good” thing. It was an illustration of the “right” way to be.

I grew up when “The Dukes of Hazard” was a hit network show and you could drive to McDonalds and get a Happy Meal in a General Lee shaped box. I grew up in a time when Hank Williams Junior’s “If The South Would’ve Won” was a number eight hit and the band Alabama had the Confederate flag on the cover of most of their early albums. I grew up with the Lost Cause. My house was filled with volumes of books about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. We toured the battlefields at Mansfield and Vicksburg. Eventually we made a pilgrimage to Stone Mountain Georgia. My Dad retired a Colonel in the Louisiana National Guard and they gave him a framed print of a Confederate General reviewing his troops as a retirement gift.

Bigotry was normal where and when I grew up. It was accepted and routine.

Still I wasn’t as bad as all of that. Sure, I was convinced without evidence that the people who broke into our house were black, same for the person who stole my bike, but I wasn’t really RACIST, racist. I wasn’t a white supremacist. I never joined the Klan. I heard slurs but mama didn’t allow us to use them and while I’d say “shit” and “damn” anytime I thought I could get away with it I rarely uttered “the n word”. Still, I thought it, and in the end that's the same.

I didn’t have a black friend until High School and even then we never went to his house and he never came to ours. One night my truck broke down on the way to a party and that black friend stopped by to help. Me and a white buddy were standing in the bar ditch and “Cedric” was standing with his back to the road and we realized passing drivers were staring hard at him, almost like they thought he was robbing us. So we put our hands up in the air like we were being held at gunpoint. We didn’t do it to be mean. We thought it was just a joke. We did it to be funny. “Cedric” disagreed but he forgave us.

Any idea I might have had about white supremacy ended when I joined the Army. Within a day I went from having one black friend to being surrounded by people of every race, color and creed. Suddenly plunged into such a diverse environment some folks double and triple down on their racism. I’ve never understood how. I learned fast in Basic Training that a white kid will fuck you over just as readily as a black kid. I slowly learned to judge folks by what they did and not what their skin looked like. By the time I graduated from Basic Training I had three black friends.

The Army sent me to Hawaii, and for the first time I found myself a minority. My first Infantry squad had a Filipino squad leader, a Guatemalan Alpha team leader, a mixed race Bravo team leader, a black grenadier, and a Mexican SAW gunner. One of our gun teams consisted of a Dominican machine gunner and a Puerto Rican assistant gunner who barely spoke English. They argued endlessly in Spanish. Within a year my mentor and three of my best friends were non-white. I didn’t just have black friends, for the first time I had black BROTHERS. But you don’t unlearn racism that easily and the all young male environment of the barracks doesn’t help.

My squad was a veritable rainbow coalition. It was more ethnically diverse than any group in this country, yet we amused ourselves by making racist jokes. We made Ignacio pick up trash and mow because “Mexicans are good at gardening.” We made Kevin sit on the floor of the truck because “black folks ride in the back of the bus.” Cliff was an “Oreo” because of his mixed race and I was only allowed to date outside of my family because I didn’t have any sisters and it was all a big innocent laugh, just fun and games. It was just "edgy humor." We had no idea how it looked to outsiders and we didn't care until a joke offended a truck driver so badly they filed a formal complaint and we had to spend eight hours in a racial sensitivity seminar.

All of us, white, black and brown, felt betrayed and aggrieved at even this mild punishment. I mean, goddamn, it was just an edgy joke.

In 1997 I bought my first pickup. We can talk later about how ridiculous that decision was but what’s important is I immediately put a bumper sticker in the back window. It was a small rectangle made to look like the red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger logo. It said “Tommy Hillbilly” and the red square in the corner of the logo was replaced with the stars and bars of the Confederate flag. I didn’t mean anything by it. I really didn’t. It was just Southern Pride. It just represented my history and culture. My buddy Cliff was a mixed race kid from Baltimore and he didn’t mind. Hell he told me he used to draw “The Dukes of Hazard logo” on his notebook when he was a kid. My buddy Kevin was black as night, born and raised in North Carolina and he never said a word. Hell he borrowed my truck any time he needed to move something heavy.

I wasn’t racist. Never mind that I secretly and quietly freaked the fuck out when I found out the girl I was dating at the time had slept with black men. I didn’t use slurs, but I thought them LOUDLY about her ex.

“Southern Pride” is the same reason why, two years and thousands of miles later when I was rooming with a legitimate Hilllbilly from West Virginia in the barracks at Fort Drum, New York we decided to hang a Confederate flag on our wall. Neither of us were racist. We had black friends. We didn’t mean anything by it. We were just good ole Southern boys stuck in New York. It was just a goof. Just poking fun at the Yankees. For two weeks my squad leader looked at that flag and never said a word. We had people over all the time and no one complained to us, but someone took offense. One day while we were working the first sergeant let himself into our room and saw the flag in person. We were quietly ordered to remove it. We were never punished but we were expressly told we could never display the flag again.

I’d like to say I learned my lesson then but I’d be lying. I wasn’t terribly upset about taking the flag down but like with the racial sensitivity class years earlier I was genuinely mad that someone ratted us out. I mean…it was just a joke. If it was a problem why didn't they come to me? Right?

The day I died the first person who came to my aid was a black medic I’d never met whose name I still don’t know. All I can remember about him were his feet, black, ashy, and bleeding because he’d cut them running barefoot across broken ground littered with rusty debris to render aid. He helped save my life. By then I’d stopped even thinking racial slurs but I still had a long way to go.

I was twenty-four before I met an out gay person and the truth is, I didn’t fucking like him. I might not have uttered racial slurs out loud but man I was a grown up in the nineties when misogynist and homophobic jokes weren’t edgy, they were on prime time, network TV. Worse, I grew up in an Infantry barracks in the age of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” when misogyny and homophobia were part of doing day to day business. I have said some absolutely repugnant shit about LGBTQ folks. Women too. I’m ashamed to admit that I voted against marriage equality in Louisiana. It hurts now to confess that it wasn’t until I met out gay folks and got to know them as people, that I realized I was wrong. I can say the same for women too. For far too long I believed “females can’t hack the Infantry” despite the fact that on more than a few days I couldn’t hack the Infantry. It wasn’t until I worked with a female supply sergeant who was also a competitive power lifter that I realized how ridiculous that shit was.

And you know if you dig through my digital history you’ll find evidence of this I’m sure. I never used racial slurs, but if you can find my old Myspace page I’m sure there’s some fucked up shit written there. I know if you dig deep enough into my Facebook page you’ll find complaints about immigrants and arguments for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against abortion and gun control. It’s not hard to find evidence of my past support for Republicans and the NRA. I grew up in a conservative, Christian, military family in the deep South. They were no worse than anyone else, but they were no better, and it took a long time and a lot of work from a lot of people for me to change. And I’m still working on it. I still have to resist the urge to use sexualized language as an insult. I still have to remind myself not to call Alex Jones a “fat ass” or a “bitch.” I still, to this day, have to work to better than the world I grew up in.

And that’s the fucking point.

I’m not writing this because I want to confess my sins. I’m not writing this because I want to wear a hair shirt and be performatively penitent. Nor am I writing this because I want a clap on the back for learning basic human decency over the course of forty-six years. I’m writing this because I want to make a point that change is possible, but it’s fucking hard. If I’m a better man than I was, if I’m a better person than the environment I came up in, it’s because a lot of people did a lot of work to make me that way. It’s because of Cliff and Kevin and Evan and my spouse. It’s because of Amanda and Seth. It’s because folks showed me something better and taught me. It’s because a lot of good people put in a lot of unnecessary work to teach me shit I should have already known. The road from proud Republican with an NRA ball cap and a Confederate flag on the wall to woke redneck with a pronouns pin on his camo ball cap has been long and hard and I’m still not as good of a man as I could and should be.

And that’s why I’m so fucking mad about Graham Platner, the Senate Candidate from Maine.

I could go on and on about his blue collar, working class, cosplay, and if the scandal stays in the news and he continues to be a front runner I just might. I can compare the difference between his hometown of Ellsworth Maine and mine of Shreveport, Louisiana. I can, and I might just, talk about the differences between being the son of a lawyer and a restaurateur verses growing up the son of a soldier and a Louisiana public school teacher. I can talk about the differences between graduating from George Washington University and dropping out of Southeastern Louisiana university. I probably should, because those differences have bugged me since the moment he announced his campaign in a slickly produced, professional video, and became the front runner and a national figure based on his “working class” background but I don’t have the space.

I can talk about how much I would really like to move home and run for a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. I could talk about how I might not be able to win a district but I could lean into populism a little, admittedly just like Platner, and if not win then at least make a Republican incumbent sweat. Except I can’t, because despite not being “working class” per DSA affiliated internet randos, I can’t fucking afford to run for a state house seat, much less the US Senate. The Democrat party doesn’t run folks in Louisiana anyway, they damn sure aren’t gonna touch a dude who can’t pick up the phone and immediately raise a few hundred thousand dollars. They aren’t gonna back a dude who can’t at least afford a slick announcement video, but that’s not the point. In fact all of this is wholly unimportant.

And the truth is, while I want to attack Graham Platner for his racist, misogynistic, and homophobic posts on Reddit I've realized this week most folks don't care about "anonymous" words on the internet. Besides, I’ve clearly established that I’ve done the same, sometimes worse, though I’ll point out that I’m five years older than Graham Platner and grew up in the deep South, yet I stopped using slurs while he was still at George Washington University. All of us are guilty of using “edgy” language and going too far, especially with the anonymity offered on an internet web forum. And hell, Reddit’s little better than a digital Infantry barracks. And since I’m confessing sins I still break out the word “cunt” for someone I truly, deeply, revile. Honestly, may have thought it of Graham Platner this week. If it was just some edgy jokes on the internet he could easily be forgiven, I might even still rank him if I lived in Maine.

Then it was revealed that for eighteen years he wore a Nazi totenkopf tattoo on his chest and nah man I’m out. If you let one Nazi drink at your bar it’s a Nazi bar. If ten people sit at a table with one Nazi, there’s eleven Nazis. If you get one Nazi tattoo…

Clearly I’m not at all swayed by Graham Platner’s excuse that he was a drunk, young Marine who got it by accident and no one ever told him it was a Nazi symbol. I’ve been a drunk young soldier. Most of my friends have been drunk young soldiers. None of us have a racist tattoo. And no one can possibly believe that he didn’t know what he’d done when he sobered up. My kid knows that’s a Nazi symbol. It’s been in every piece of pop culture about the Nazis since 1946. This isn’t some obscure logo or hidden neo-Nazi code, it’s the emblem of an SS Panzer division. Even assuming he really was dumb enough to not know what a totenkopf is, the “no one told me anything” excuse doesn’t fly. No one told me anything about that Tommy Hillbilly sticker, it was still fucking wrong and I still gotta own what I did. I took that sticker off in 1999. I threw away that Confederate flag in 2000. Graham Platner covered his Nazi tattoo last week.

In his apology, Graham Platner claimed he was genuinely asking why “black people don’t tip” and maybe he was. But I submit to you that statement, and the excuse behind it, sounds A LOT different in my thick southern drawl. He blames his “trauma” for what he called “angry, crude and critical…” comments online. I've had a PTSD diagnosis for years. I spent years dealing with human depravity, violence, and cruelty. Y’all know I’m fucking angry. And yet I've managed not to post misogynist and homophobic shit for decades. I managed not to use slurs. Despite my trauma I managed to work and get better. Graham Platner blames his time in the Infantry for the comments he made about women, but I left the Infantry nine years before he did and four years after throwing out that Confederate flag. Maybe he’s telling the truth, but if so, he’s an incredibly slow learner.

I confessed my sins today in the hopes to demonstrate to you that I recognized my past behavior and that I worked, honestly a lot of people worked, to make me a better person. I recognize years ago that my intentions didn't matter compared to the affect I had on the people around me. That Confederate flag might have been a joke, but that's no consolation to black soldier working for a white sergeant with that hanging on his wall. I am truly, deeply, sorry for the bigotry I’ve put into this world and I hope I’m doing better. I know I’m raising my kid better.

I believe people’s past sins should be forgiven if they genuinely apologize and do better. But having walked a lot of the same road, having in a way been the same kind of guy, I’m not convinced Graham Platner has truly owned up to what he’s done. I think he’s still mad that someone didn’t get the “joke.” I think he’s still upset that someone ratted him out. But even setting those issues aside, even accepting his excuses, I know that fucking totenkopf will always be a bridge too far for me. I’ll never trust someone with a Nazi tattoo no matter how they got it.

I believe people can change. I like to think I have. I’m not convinced Graham Platner has. In the end it’s up to Maine voters to decide. I hope they make the right choice.