All It Takes Is A Little Love

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed on a Houston street in the early morning hours of July 7. His death came from the bullet of an ICE officer under circumstances that are still hazy and without a thorough investigation and evidence from witnesses to the event we may never know what exactly happened at an intersection of Canal Street and and Wayside Drive. 

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo came to Houston from Mexico thirty five years ago and settled into the anonymity of Houston’s east end, a place of which I am quite familiar. My own grandfather purchased land and built a home in that area back in the nineteen twenties after coming from the area of Europe now known as Slovakia. He was attempting to get away from the subjugation of his people by the empire of Austria Hungary which was determined to create one culture. My grandfather’s language was outlawed in public spaces including in church. He saw a move to the United States as a way of beginning anew with infinite possibilities. Back then people were free to just arrive in the United States with few exceptions.

My mother and her family lived at 517 North Adams street in the shadow of downtown Houston. Much as with today’s immigrants they endured insults and taunts from neighbors but my grandfather urged his children to ignore the noise and become good citizens of this country and so they did. Such seems to be the story of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. From accounts from his family he was a man of routine who worked hard every single day to provide his family with a stable life. Because of his hard work they bloomed just as my mother and her siblings had done in the same part of town a century ago. 

The main difference between my grandfather and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is that Grandpa was able to come to the United States without any kind of permission. He showed up in Galveston and went to work building a life. For Mr. Salgado Araujo it was different. His coming to America was deemed illegal even though Mexicans had been crossing into the United States without question for decades until quotas and rules changed the status quo. Thus Lorenzo was no doubt hiding in the East end among legions of Mexicans and Hispanics who lived and worked there. In the meantime he appears to have been a model citizen save for the secret that he held in his heart. He created a business building homes. He paid taxes and provided jobs for others. He rose early and went to work and came home late to sit on his front porch to enjoy the life that he had built. He had three sons that he sent to college. One graduated from the University of Houston and became a teacher just like I did. Another went to Tufts University, an elite school for very bright students where he earned a degree in engineering. A third son is presently attending college. 

On July 7, Lorenzo set out for work just as he had done for decades. He drove his van to the intersection of Canal Street and Wayside Drive to pick up some workers so that they might travel to a site in north Houston where they were building a house. The rest of the story is unclear. The ICE officers claimed that when they attempted to stop Mr. Salgado Araujo he tried to drive away and in the process seemed to attempt to harm one of the agents. 

While that scenario sounds problematic on the surface further investigation shows that the ICE agents were wearing masks and were in unmarked cars. Knowing how dangerous that part of Houston can sometimes be it does not take much imagination to understand why Mr. Salgado Araujo might have panicked. I can’t say that I would have done anything differently myself. I can only imagine the terror of the poor man’s last moments of life. There is no telling what thoughts raced through his mind. Fear creates very dangerous situations.

The description of this man from his family and friends and neighbors is of a good man who somehow believed that coming to this country was necessary even as it was illegal. Over the years he had worked on the possibility of getting legal permission to stay. He had three all American sons and was a model citizen in every other sense of the word. He was not all that different from my grandfather whose focus was on providing his family with a good life through his labors. Ironically toward the end of his life my grandfather was beaten over the head by an officer with a baton in downtown Houston just because he looked foreign and out of place. Grandpa soon after had a massive stroke and weeks later he died.

Houston is mostly a welcoming and friendly city that in many ways seems more like a small town. We live and work together in harmony, helping each other in difficult times. People come here for the opportunities to find work. This is not a beautiful place but a very practical place, one where we mostly get along. We honor hard work like Lorenzo was doing. We are one of the most diverse cities in the nation. Everyone here has the kind of opportunity that my grandfather was seeking. It is heartbreaking to me that masked men in unmarked cars felt that it was justified to pursue a man just going to work mostly because he probably looked foreign to them. Even if he had politely complied he and his passengers might have simply disappeared without anyone knowing why. As it is nobody knows exactly where the other two men who were in the van were taken by ICE. 

It would be easy to just assume that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo brought this moment on himself from the time that he entered the United States illegally. Some will say that he should have just complied with those masked men in unmarked cars but I wonder what any of us would have done in such a frightening situation. It’s easy for those of us who did nothing but be born in the United States to talk about following the law. Only someone fleeing a life of difficulty might understand what brought this man to Houston in the first place. He had shown that he was a good man, a hard working individual contributing to our nation with his skills and with his three brilliant sons. His should have been an American dream, not the horror that ultimately changed the course of his life and his family’s life forever. His death is a blot on our nation. The full story of what happened on the day of his death must be told.

If man is to survive he will learn to take delight in the essential differences between cultures. To learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.  —-Gene Roddenberry

I was a young adult just out of high school when the original Star Trek first aired on television. Back then I still watched programming in shades of black and white because my family had not yet purchased a color tv. It was a show that fascinated me and I never missed an episode which was quite a trick back then because there was not yet a system of recording programs for watching them later. One either sat down at the given time or missed an episode until a future that none of us had imagined. 

What struck me the most about Star Trek was the diversity of the characters. The very idea that in the future people working together for a common cause would come from many different backgrounds and universes was enticing. I had grown up in Texas where contact with people unlike me and my family was rare. I would see the Black citizens of Houston at the back of the city bus that I rode to downtown with my mother but rarely had personal interactions with them. I knew where most of the Black people lived in segregated neighborhoods and sometimes was present when my aunt’s maid was cleaning her house, but mostly knew nothing about people who had lived in my city longer than my mother and her family had. 

In the last couple of years of my time in high school three black students enrolled and suddenly I was getting to know some of them on a very personal level. I remember that they came and there was not so much as a blip in our daily routines. As far as I knew they were generally welcomed and accepted and it made me proud to believe that their integration of my school had gone so smoothly. It was fifty years later before I learned from one of them that they endured many moments of prejudice and bullying that most of us were unaware had happened. It literally broke my heart to know that racism had existed within the walls of my school but it also reminded me of how naive about such things I had always tended to be. 

I married in October of 1968 while my husband and I were still students at the University of Houston. There I watched a Black woman become the first homecoming queen of our school. I followed the leadership path of Black students who rose to prestigious positions in student government. I wanted to believe that we were tearing down the walls of segregation and learning about one another with harmony. Of course it was my own view of people that all too often shrouded the truth of the struggles that Blacks in America would face all the way into the present decade. 

I suppose that I was fooled by those episodes on Star Trek that seemed to be precursors of a new kind of world in which individuals would be accepted just as they were, not according to some kind of classification that ranked people simply by judging the worth of their cultures and even colors of their skin. I had sat across from two lovely Black girls at lunch each day when I was in high school and because I embraced them so heartily I believed that everyone else did as well. 

I kept watching Star Trek even after it left prime time air time. I watched and re-watched old episodes each night with my husband as he returned home from work each evening. I wanted desperately to believe that our country’s original sin of slavery, segregation and prejudices was slowly but surely being eliminated. I created a hopeful idea in my mind that my generation was smarter and more open to differences than those of the past. I wanted to believe that day by day we were moving closer and closer to being a nation that had reached the ideal of all being created equally. 

Sadly as I matured I realized that the fairytales that my father read to me and the hopes and dreams of Star Trek were still unrealized as one year bled into another. Some of my minority colleagues and students would tell me that prejudice lived on in abundance and that I needed to be aware of the danger of thinking that all the work to create a more open and accepting society was done. It was in watching the hatefulness being aimed at our first Black president that I could see that we were still dreadfully behind in fighting racism and isms of many different kinds.

I worked with immigrant children some of whom became Dreamers, those brought into the United States as infants without legal admission. I had students of the Muslim faith who became despised after 9/11 even thought I knew them as delightful young people with beautiful customs that were in fact making our nation better, not worse. Then from out of nowhere came a movement that would be known as MAGA with a leader spewing the kind of hateful rhetoric and fear of differences that I never expected to see again. 

We are living in a backwards time when different lifestyles, cultures, religions and shades of skin are being demonized by our own president and a good percentage of the population. A crew of diverse individuals like the one on Star Trek is anathema to them. People are losing their jobs and their freedoms based solely on unreasonable fears of differences. Our president is working day and night to prohibit the value of women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, and essentially anyone who is not white and male and conservative. The Star Trek vision of delightful acceptance of our differences is being challenged on many fronts, taking us back to a terrible time that we should never desire to endure again. 

I have become a realist even as I cling to a hopefulness for our nation. Somehow I believe that the most Americans agree with Gene Roddenberry that diversity is exciting, not something to fear. I see those beliefs being acted upon in the daily life of neighborhoods and even at the FIFA games. We have become citizens of the world whether the MAGAs like it or not. It is not a naive set of beliefs that envision a more inclusive world but there is a subgroup that would fight our efforts to make it so. We still have work to be done just like the crew of the Enterprise. The question is whether or not we have the courage “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

When I was an educator there were moments when I had to make difficult decisions regarding how to react to egregious behavior from my students. Sometimes it was not particularly hard to determine how to handle a student who had continuously flaunted the rules. It was when a student who seemed to be successfully working to overcome incredible obstacles chose to do something truly horrific that I felt a sense of failure on my own part. Nonetheless I always understood that it was important to mete out just consequences without favoritism. To do any less would send a message that I was hypocritical when it came to fairly holding everyone responsible for their actions. 

There was a time when one of my favorite students stole a test from one the teachers and then had the audacity to attempt to make copies to hand out to his friends. The young man was bright and so charismatic that he won an election to be the president of the student body. When a few honorable students stepped forward to reveal the truth of his theft there was no question in my mind that he needed to be stripped of his office even as it made me sick to do so. 

One of the things that has bothered me the most about many politicians is that they often get away with flaunting their misdeeds. Some of the best years of my life came when Bill Clinton was president. I voted for him twice. When the sordid details of his affair with an intern came out I lost the respect that I once had for him. I thought that it was just that he was impeached by the House of Representatives. 

In the present day we have a president who has been found guilty of sexually abusing a woman to whom he must now pay a stiff fine. By his own admission he bragged about being able to grab women by their private parts simply because he was famous. He ran around with Epstein for years and cheated on all three of his wives and yet the Republican party scoffs at the idea of asking him to pay for his vile mistreatment of women. Presently they are doing everything they can to keep the Epstein files under wraps. 

In my own state Ken Paxton, a vile man who has been accused of taking bribes and having multiple affairs is the Republican candidate for the Senate. Recently he was in London with his mistress at the same time that he was questioning the religious beliefs of his opponent and parading his own faith as something deep and spiritual. 

I mention these things because the good Democrat citizens of Maine are faced with an ethical dilemma. There have been many whispers about their candidate for the Senate, Graham Platner. Now at the eleventh hour a former girlfriend has stepped forward with accusations that he raped her. Certainly there should be some kind of attempt to find the truth before he is found guilty but the problem is that many  disturbing issues about Platner have been raised. This is just the worst of the lot and there is no time for having any kind of full blown trial. It seems that Platner has been pushed into a corner by all kinds of problems with his past life. Now there is great discussion as to whether he should leave the race or not. 

There are some Democrats who believe that turnabout is fair play. If Trump can be president with his horrific history with woman and Paxton can run for the Senate even though his life reeks with horrific deeds, then the best thing to do is keep Platner in the race. The argument is that the Republicans don’t seem to be upset by similar actions of their guys so why should the Democrats lose a promising candidate over the same kind of sins.

I want to win as many seats in the House and Senate as possible in November. I fear that if the Democrats lose it will indeed be one hundred years until the Republican hold on our nation is broken. I know Trump and his party play dirty all of the time. I live in Texas and I have seen it so often that it makes my stomach turn. Nonetheless how can we expect to complain about people like Trump and Paxton and others if we look the other way when one of our guys behaves in the same way. What kind of message does that send to the women of Maine, to our daughters?

I am sick of men getting away with their attacks on women. We have two Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republicans who were credibly accused of sexual misconduct by women and yet we seem to have believed the men and viewed the women as hysterical liars. This is why it is so difficult for women who have been sexually abused to step forward. Their privacy is invaded and they have to endure the humiliation of being accused of inventing stories even when their evidence is detailed and haunting. Why don’t they come forward sooner? Perhaps it is because they already know that they may not be believed. 

It is time to call out the hypocrisy of looking the other way when our president is guilty of a sexual crime and so it should be with Graham Platner whose checkered past is calling his character into question. When the stories keep piling up just as they have with Ken Paxton it’s easy to see that there is a pattern that should never be ignored. 

Maine Democrats should have the opportunity to find a new candidate. Maybe Stephen King or Heather Cox Richardson would be willing to step forward to represent or more likely there is another candidate of good will and good character who can still defeat the Republican in November. There is still time to show some honor and message to the world that Democrats are not hypocrites. The stability of our nation depends on holding our leaders accountable.

Years ago I was visiting my brother at the same time that a friend of his from work had come with his very young son. The boy was a whirlwind of destruction, running through the house breaking things with every step and nobody tried to stop him. I did not feel that it was my place as a visitor and my brother appeared to be so engrossed in the conversation with his friend that he failed to notice all of the damage that the child was inflicting on the place. My brother’s co-worker totally ignored the raucous sounds emanating from wherever his son was running like a wild stallion. By the end of the visit the child had cracked a window, bent the window blinds, broken a vase and strewn cookie crumbs all over the floor. It took every ounce of self control from me to keep from grabbing him and sitting him down in a corner where I might prevent his rampage with my evil eye. 

When it was time for the boy’s father to leave he simply shrugged and laughed has he attempted to round up the naughty boy who kept running away from him yelling,”Idi Amin is coming to get me.” I was in awe of how the scene unfolded with the father seemingly resigned to the fact that his son was out of control. 

I never saw that little boy again but somehow I never forgot him. I often wondered how things had turned out for him. He had reminded me of yet another very bad child from my youth who often attempted to terrorize all of us kids who lived on the same street with him. His name was Tigre, a fitting name indeed because he was as wild as they come and his mother’s only response to his bad manners was to smile with a kind of pride as though his antics were humorous. He is another soul with whom I purposely lost contact but whispers to this day indicate that he went on to live a very difficult adulthood with few friends and multiple divorces. 

I have often wondered if such children are actually somehow uncontrollable or if their parents simply refuse to make the effort to teach them how to act properly. They generally are allowed to do and say whatever comes into their minds and they have grave difficulty working with other people. I’ve encountered several of them during my teaching days and I have found them to be confused and incredibly unhappy. Some of them have been downright dangerous like the child whose anger led him to continually abuse his twin brother and his mother. While he seemed to be the king of his family, he was actually quite lonely and friendless. Eventually I saw that he was spending a great deal of his adult life in the penitentiary. 

It is difficult to know what creates such a person. Part of it might actually be a form of mental illness but there is also the possibility that the child has never been properly taught how to get along with other children or how to respect people and their property. They run wild without direction until they are so bad that they are frightening and even their parents lie awake at night worried about the kind of violence their children might inflict on them.

As a teacher I learned how to lovingly demand better behaviors from such children. They usually acted properly in my presence but would often revert to their horrific ways when they left my classroom. I did my best to teach them how to control their energy and their tendencies to be mean and cruel. I learned that they were filled with a kind of raging anger that they did not like like but had no idea how to tame. Few people had said “no” to them and most of the responses to them were punishing rather than instructive. 

The biggest problem with allowing children to rule the roost without consequences and efforts to help them control their worst instincts is that as they get older and stronger the damage that they can inflict becomes ever more dangerous. They don’t just break things. They break bones and damage souls. They become the abusers and thieves and criminals that wreak havoc on the world. History has shown us that such humans may seem to be strong but are in fact only cruel. 

It hurts my heart when I see a child screaming for attention with nobody responding. I cringe when parents tell me that they can’t even try to calm them down because they do not listen. They change their children from one school to another excusing their horrific behavior by blaming the teachers for not understanding what the child needs. They shower the child with things hoping to buy the child’s good graces. What they do not do is the hard work of correcting and talking and setting expectations that the child will control the demons that rage inside. It can be done with patience, consistency and efforts to determine what is causing the anger inside the child. It may take counseling and even medication but mostly it requires time and love on the part of the parent. 

I am fully aware that there are indeed cases of children who are mentally disturbed but even they can often change with the correctly administered guidance and love. Luckily most parents do their jobs and the children may go through phases but ultimately come out just fine. Sadly the ones who don’t are generally ignored by parents too busy and afraid to take control. Sometimes such children are actually being abused or watching abuse in their homes. Whatever it is I have learned that a child running through a house crying, “Idi Amin is going to get me!” is already in grave danger of becoming an out of control adult. There is nothing funny about letting that youngster run wild. Out of love its our duty to help him with patience and determination or find someone who knows what to do. 

I often wonder how many horrible adults might have been saved if someone had curbed their bad instincts when they were children. If we love the children we should all be watching them and taking the time to help them be better before it becomes too late.  

There is a question going around that gives me pause. The query asks, “Are you proud to be an American?” I hesitate when asked this because of the word proud. I tend to be proud of my accomplishments because they took hard work, determination, willingness to go the extra mile to achieve. Pride indicates some kind of effort has been expended not just being born in American. Living here for all of my life has happened almost passively. I feel incredibly fortunate to be an American. I like being an American. I believe deep down that Americans want to be good and generous people but being proud is the wrong word to use. 

I am proud of Americans who suffer slings and arrows of condemnation for having the courage to stand up for what is right. I am proud of those souls in Minnesota who literally risked their lives and their livelihoods to attempt to protect their neighbors. I am proud of American athletes who train for years to represent us well in the world at large whether they win or lose. I am proud of the moments when Americans are welcoming to those who come to visit or to live in our country. I am proud of the courage of our Founding Fathers who so courageously and audaciously declared their independence from a tyrannical king. I am proud of myself when I have the courage to point out problems that need to be remedied. Just saying that I am proud to be an American requires no effort on my part unless my pledge of allegiance acknowledges that we are one nation of many diverse people who must always insure that there will be liberty and justice for all, not just the sheepish followers of a particular person. 

What the history of our nation tells me is that even our beginning was an attempt to right wrongs. It was revolutionary to question the king and his rules. Those founders and the citizens who followed them were protesting a system that had too long been simply accepted as a kind of divinely blessed way of life. They were radical. They were brave. They did what they believed was right even as their actions were illegal and might have landed them in jail or hanging from a noose. I am proud of what they were willing to risk and of the democracy that they ultimately created even as they themselves understood that it was not perfect. 

We honor the flag and our national anthem as symbols but those things in themselves are not who we are as Americans. They are things, personifications of the nation that we have built. When someone uses them to protest, they are literally following the example of the people of long ago who understood the importance of using such images to express our needs in the continuing efforts to insure our freedom. I am always proud of the people who risk their careers and livelihoods to peacefully stand up against any form of persecution. 

I am proud of that my great grandfather fought in the Civil War to save our union. I am proud of my father and uncles who fought against fascism. I am proud of my grandchildren who are willing to point out problems that are affecting Americans who have little power. I am proud of the brilliant Americans who have made scientific breakthroughs that have saved lives and helped us to keep improving the world in which we live. I am proud of the Americans who go to work each day to teach, or protect, or create, or soothe, or repair but I am not proud just to live in a certain place. But for the vagaries of the universe I might have never even existed much less lived in the United States of America. Millions of things done by the people who came before me had to happen in certain ways to get me here. Mine was nothing more than the act of being born and I am very happy about how things turned out but not necessarily proud.

There are indeed meaningful ways of being a proud citizen but those things require much effort on the part of each of us. We must pay attention to the issues and take the time to learn truth from multiple sources. We can’t simply tune in to media that supports our views. Our jobs should be to seek the bare faced realities even when doing so can be distressing. With our knowledge we then must make decisions of how to vote, not only for only our personal beliefs but for the welfare of the largest number of people. When we take the time to vote intelligently we can certainly feel a sense of gratitude and even a bit of pride. 

It is all too easy to fall into a state of blind allegiance if we stay too busy to seek out what is really happening. We do not have to walk in lockstep with the crowd. Wearing a flag pin on our lapels only means something if we are willing to be active citizens working for the betterment of all. Being a proud American is not about a circus. It is a serious endeavor in which we should all be hard at work. I am proud of how much time I have dedicated to studying the issues that face us all. I am proud of all of the hard work that brave and concerned Americans have done over two hundred fifty years to make this nation better and better for all. I think that is what most of the founders had in mind. We must never forget that the work is never done. We will always be a work in progress. I am proud to be part of that work right now.