Shock to the Heart

Back in the day, we used to say lines from the old show "Sanford and Son" to each other that we had memorized by heart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_and_Son), having heard the same lines over and over again, like our parents compulsive "jokes" that were often told in times of stress and/or drunkenness, when they didn't know how to fill in conversational spaces with other humans correctly. 

"Old Man Sanford" would clutch his heart in mock anguish to deliver the well-honed line to his son that he was "on his way home" to see "Ouisie", his wife who'd passed on already, because he was "havin' the big one" that was so often threatened on the show but never actually came about. Oh...so, it's just a lie, then. We kinda felt gypped by the lack of "sudden death" action on t.v., like the nonsense our hysterical parents would blab out loud that was even less funnier than the sitcom stuff repeated for years on t.v. Yeah, sure. I know this line.

It became symptomatic of the psychological distress we'd see in the world that was the response of someone who uses their medical condition(s) as a manipulative tool(s) to get out of work, or human discourse, church on Sunday, or family visits. For a people who felt bereft of power, my parents and their friends employed a handy toolkit for the insane that included veiled threats (and not-so-veiled threats) that they often combine(d) with violent cursing and escalating acts of physical violence, which, rather than convincing us to obey their demands, made us want to stay even further away from their trouble spots. For them, their sickness became weapons for gaining leverage in the home and at work, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

It was silly and wasteful, but so were/are our parents, accustomed as they were to an ever-booming economy fueled through the machines of war. We wanted something better. We wanted something more from them and society, and the world at large. We wanted actual communication over the trite tricks brought on by so much t.v. viewing for the compulsively-addicted brain, followed by periods of paranoid non-engagements that could last just as long as their patterned routines that they inserted in lieu of actual thought. We talked to each other as a social group, and we wanted to see real conversation brought back, egged on as it was by the "shock" tactics of our disc jockeys and talk show hosts. A lot of it was the same old bullshit, but occasionally we broke through the static with our own hard work. See? Repetition does bear results, and I can talk about it at length, too.  
How's that for power tripping?

Huggy Bear!

Yo honky, this here is Huggy Bear. You know, from "Starsky and Hutch"?

Me and my bros hero-worshipped few people growing up, because real-life heroes are hard to find (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/12/ackerman-update.html). Our short list back then (and now) was: Mel Blanc, Forrest J Ackerman, and Lou Ferrigno....in no particular order....or is there? We loved the adults who made stuff just for kids, because that's a form of love every child innately understands, like the punchline to a great cartoon voiced well and excellently drawn. How could we resist? We didn't!

We loved monster movies and the heroes who fought back against the bad guys for all of humanity, as well as any kind of action feature that had the good guys winning, kind of like how we do it now;) To us, they represented the best of what we wanted to be when we grew up: actual human beings that our kids (and their kids, and so on...) could look up to and feel proud of. It wasn't always easy for us to see the kinds of people we knew and loved reflected back at us in mainstream media, marginalized as we are as minorities fighting back against oppression (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/06/curly-girl.html), but like any other "good guy" out there, we persevered, living to fight another day.

The supposedly background character "Huggy Bear" from the 1970s t.v. show "Starsky and Hutch" (like the family from "The Jeffersons" and The Walkers from "Good Times") felt a lot like the people and neighborhoods we came from, trying to make their way against insurmountable odds in a cruel world, just like Fat Albert and his ragtag crew of kids from the block resembled the mixed bag of kids from around the way, in a combination of our 'hoods from the city and the country. Huggy Bear seemed to always be there went it all went down, not as the well-paid white actors in the lead, but still essential to the plot somehow by circumstances beyond his control.

But, that's how it went down in the day. Our guys weren't always played by the white actor in the lead, nor were they the sheriff in the big white hat playing up to the movie's full-face, up-close screen time; they were just there, hovering in the background, waiting to step in just when we needed it. In the meantime, we did what every single one of us in my crew did naturally, because we talked about it at length growing up: we worked hard (harder than most), went to school, entered the workforce, and kept our heads barely above water, at times subsumed by the forces of the tides as they turned, to dominate each and every corner of human life, because that's exactly what G-d promises us. Not easy or cushy, not money or houses or cars, nor anything shiny that can be bought and put up for sale, but who we are brought back to ourselves as the reality of who we really are hits us, and how strong we've become through our jointly-applied labors.

For all the underpaid, unsung glories of the world out there (and you know who you are), this one's for you today. Keep on rockin' and doin' your thing, knowing that the right person is watching you, even when it seems like we're not, because we are. We're right there with it.

(For Mo)