For me, as an idealistic, young Catholic lad who started out as an altar boy, assisting at Mass and believing everything the nuns and priests told me, the first disillusionment came when I began noticing the difference between what was preached and what was lived.
As I've mentioned here before, I grew up in Cincinnati, the alleged Queen City of the West, a 19th-century nickname when Cincinnati was the sixth-largest city in the United States and southern Ohio was the West - not the Midwest.
We children were told endlessly in the classrooms of St. Ann's of Groesbeck that we were all God's children. But by the time I turned 10, I noticed that although at least 30 percent of Cincinnati's population were black folks called "colored" or something worse then - my school was 100-percent white.
We were not rich folks and my neighborhood consisted of small tract houses, four-plex apartments and stucco duplexes like the one I grew up in.
When I asked my parents, they deflected my question with folk mythology.
"That's just the way it is," my dad, a practical German, said.
"They don't want to live with us," an uncle said. "They're different. They throw their garbage into the street."
Later in life I heard a Swede explain that the reason he preferred not to spend a lot of time with Norwegians was because they (the Norwegians) kept coal in their bathtubs.
British writers trying to explain the centuries-long persecution (and economic and cultural rape) of the Irish said the same exact thing.
By 13, I was in revolt against what I saw as the hypocrisy surrounding me. Sports helped me reach clarity. I loved baseball, played on two teams every summer and, even though I no longer cared much for America's former pastime, I still remember plays and players seen from the bleachers at old Crosley Field, watching the Cincinnati Reds playing Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers. It made no sense to me that my baseball heroes, Jackie and Willie Mays of the New York Giants, who any fool could see were easily equal to white players, were in any way less deserving of anything that my fat, lazy neighbors took as their birthright simply because their skin was pink.
It wasn't long after that I quit serving Mass and only went to church on Sundays to look at the pretty girls. And it wasn't simply the Catholics. The whole country, 1960 America, brayed about freedom and proclaimed itself the beacon for enslaved people everywhere, yet black Americans were forbidden from entering Coney Island, Cincinnati's riverfront playground.
The 1960s get a bad rap nowadays. We "lost" Vietnam; drugs and easy sex replaced the old values, etc.
The truth is the '60s saw America finally beginning to give black people some purchase of the American dream. Despite eight years of Bush, a bad war in Iraq and locally, a mayor enthralled by the super-rich, Seattle and America are better places than when I was a boy.
The work is far from done, but I know in my heart that the more honestly a country and city confront their social and cultural demons, the better off everyone will be.
The primary enemy to real progress be it social, cultural or simply interpersonal is hypocrisy, the strong desire to claim everything is fine and avert the eyes from any proof from the contrary. Hypocrisy is a mortal sin in my book, more pernicious even, than greed or unwarranted violence.[[In-content Ad]]