EXTRA: My uncle like many others who felt the call to uniform during WWII to keep us safe from the Nazis

Rummaging through some old family-type photographs my cousin, Lora Ann, gave me earlier this year, I couldn’t help but stumble across this one shot of my Uncle Spinx that feels appropriate to share on Veterans Day.

My Uncle Spinx when he was called to duty

As in Aurelio “Spinx” Salas, who actually was my mother’s uncle (he’s my maternal grandmother’s brother). But Uncle Spinx is a simpler way to think of the man than having to account for all the layers of family that come between us.

ANYWAY, BACK TO the photograph, which shows that my uncle was amongst the thousands of men who – upon U.S. entry into World War II – felt compelled to enlist in some form of service so as to be able to wear a uniform and not have others claiming they were shirking their duty to society.

He served in the Coast Guard, and I have to confess to not knowing much of the details about his military service. I came along a couple of decades later and by the time I would have been old enough to comprehend what he did, it was a part of his distant past.

The fact that he once wore a uniform wasn’t something he dwelled on during his later life, which he lived to the fullest (I still remember his 1970s years riding around  the country with my Aunt Connie on their matching motorcycles) -- rather than trying to exaggerate himself into a 'war hero' to make up for the lack of anything of substance in the rest of his life.

Although I have my own mental image that the streets of Chicago back in the 1940s were being kept safe from Nazis and other fascists who comprised the Axis powers by my Uncle Spinx.

HE’D HAVE KNOCKED out the first swastika-wearing buffoon who dared tried to walk down Commercial Avenue in his home South Chicago neighborhood (where my parents were raised and I was born a couple of decades later).

Part of that image is I can remember him talking about his later years as an educator in the Chicago school system – when he’d tell of some of the “toughs” he’d have to cope with amongst his students and would occasionally have to use some sort of force to maintain control without crossing over the fine line between discipline and excessive force.

 

My uncle ready in the (boxing) ring

But I also remember his talk about his younger days as an amateur boxer – and I can recall some of my cousins joking around with him about the boxer Leon Spinks, who back in 1978 beat an aging Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight title.

Spinks vs. Spinx – who’d win? We’d always joke about how our uncle would somehow have figured out a way to knock the block off the long-forgotten champ.

IN FACT, I often wonder if my uncle were still with us today (it’s been a couple of decades since he departed this realm of existence) what he’d think of these goofy types who see elements of the fascists as a model for our society and try to put a cutesy "alt-right" label on it – even though his generation did their part to put those Nazi crackpots down for the count.

I suspect he’d be p-o’ed! Maybe enough to figure out a way to come back from beyond the grave (he was cremated, and his urn was buried with my aunt when she died a decade ago) so as to resume the fight he and his fellow veterans of that war thought they’d finished back some seven decades ago.

  -30-

“Alt-right” synonymous with “bigot?”

It is the new phrase that came out of the 2016 election cycle; “alt-right.” As in not the standard issue conservative who leans toward the Republican party, but an alternate version.
 

TRUMP: Election opened nasty can of worms

Of course, what makes them alternative is that their racial hang-ups are a little more intense. In fact, they are the base of these people having anything resembling a political philosophy.

IF WE WANTED to be purely honest, we’d simply say they’re bigots. But the “alt-right” term comes from those people who want to legitimize any sense that one’s racial sentiments ought to be permitted to be a basis for government policy.

And also don’t want anything resembling use of the term “cracker” to refer to themselves.

Now I know there are some people who are getting upset these days with the perception that the Republican Party has been overtaken by bigots. They want to think there’s some moralistic overtone to the conservative thought process by which they have become the political party for white people.

They want to argue that not every person who cast a vote for Donald Trump’s presidential bid did so for racial reasons. In short, they’re willing to talk a lot of smack to avoid the very real fact of modern-day politics.

PEOPLE WHO VOTED for Trump either really do have the ridiculous notion that white people are being discriminated against because they’re no longer permitted to discriminate against people not like themselves. Or, they’re more than willing to look the other way when it comes to being around the bigots of our society.

Perhaps to them the notion of being around non-white people with some authority is more offensive than being around white people who are willing to use physical force to maintain their sense of place in the world.

I have one person I knew back in college who, on Facebook recently, said we ought to refuse to use the term “alt-right” and replace it with “all white.” It would be more accurate, she says, if we didn’t try to make the term “alt-white” sound respectable.

How far will alt-right rewrite history?

Yet this is going to be the very focus of much of the rhetoric we’re going to hear in coming years. There are people who must take seriously notion expressed by author George Orwell (as in “1984”) that “history is written by the winners.”

THEY PROBABLY THINK this past election cycle was a “war” in which they’re trying to take back the country from all of society’s undesirables – as in the ones whom the deplorables think are truly disgusting because of their repulsive sensibilities about life!

In that context, “alt-right” is merely a part of rewriting history. And not seeing the incredibly obvious in that photograph playing big on the Internet these days with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in front and a whole slew of white people filling the room.

It is a way where we can go back to the old way of thinking of things, in which a “Martin Luther King, Jr.” was a borderline-Communist agitator for spouting out nonsense about equality and non-violence who tried falsely to portray himself as a Christian.

Let’s not forget that some people do have a twisted sense of their Christian religious faith – I still remember once covering a Ku Klux Klan rally outside the Statehouse in Springfield, Ill., where their “pastor” led everybody in a prayer for God to strike the Earth with a plague that would wipe out all the non-white people.

NOT EXACTLY IN line with any serious religious teachings I have ever heard.

Yet these are the individuals who are being given some credence. Who are being treated as though they have something essential for our society to hear. And whose hostile rhetoric somehow bears a legitimacy to what else is being said.

So how should we truly think of these people? What terms should we use to describe them with a sense of honesty?

There are times when I watch the old “All in the Family” reruns on television and think that actor Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker” character bears relevance to what is happening today. Which makes me wonder if actor Sherman Hemsley’s “George Jefferson” is who many of us will turn to for the proper retort!

  -30-