A Life Of Social Justice - A Long Haul With Frightful Women

Robert Finley had given his all to social justice. There were the Freedom Rides, marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Bull Connor and his dogs, sit ins, protests on the National Mall, and Negro friends. 

Later there was the glass ceiling, the environment, climate change, the gender spectrum and capitalism itself.  There had never been a moment of doubt or hesitation.  He and thousands of others were joined in a political consensus - progress was real, Utopia was not only possible but around the corner, and if there was meaning to life, it was giving to others. 

Now in his later years, Bob sat disconsolate and wondering as he watched the parade of beautiful, blonde, young women step brightly down Pennsylvania Avenue to and from the White House - a White House that should have been his and the legions of those who had fought so long and so hard for graciousness, compassion, and harmony. 

He shook his head as he nibbled at his sandwich, shaking the crumbs for the pigeons who clucked and cooed at his feet.  How could this have happened, he wondered?  How could this moral reprobate, this arrogant, divisive, unprincipled man have made it to the Oval Office?  What tear in time-space had let this braggart come to earth?  

Decades of discipline, hard work, patience, and love were gone.  The black man was relegated to the ghetto, the lesbian consigned to Bernal Heights, the farm worker sent back across the border, and every last brake, bit, rein, halter, and trace with which he had harnessed Wall Street gone in a flash, setting free once again the monopolistic, predatory, arrogant robber barons of America. 

'Need a friend?', said a well-dressed man in blue suit to Bob. 'You look like you could use one'. 

Bob looked up from his sandwich and smiled at the man, one of the genteel male escorts who routinely cruised Lafayette Park.  By rights - after all he had fought long and hard for the gay man - he should have offered him a seat; but he was in no mood for the kind of casual intimacy that the man was offering. 

No matter how militantly he had taken up the cudgel of gay rights, he was privately disgusted by what fagg...Here he stopped himself, about to think an unutterable slur.  He revised his thought, composed himself and tried to right his ship, yet the thought completed itself...I'm disgusted at what these (blanks) do with each other. Reaming, water sports, buggery, cornholing, bathhouse sex. 

'You've got the wrong man', Bob said to the young man in  the blue suit, tossed the end of his sandwich to the pigeons and walked quickly away. 

This was the whole problem with social justice, he thought as he walked towards his office - espousing, endorsing, committing to political causes that offended him. Lesbians, dildoes, and scissoring was just as repulsive as the gay thing.  The black man had, despite decades of generosity and support remained in the same stinking, pestilential, drug addled, dysfunctional shithole ghetto he started in. 

Worst of all, he had for all these years been surrounded by nothing but frightful women - short, unwashed, ugly, frizzy haired, Jewish women he had seen before only on Brooklyn subways.  These were his cohorts, his colleagues, his sisters in arms.  Meanwhile all the bright young things he had had squired at Yale before his political days, were things of the past. 

 

Ahh, Heather Morgan, he remembered. Soft, pliant, wealthy, and with a fresh Midwestern blush and in love with him.  Where was she now? Who did she marry? Why wasn't she, still in the full blush of the bloom of the rose not here with him now?

Instead there was Esther Pilchman, finishing a rancid sardine sandwich, smears of mustard and horseradish still on her lips.  'Bob, we've got to talk', she said as he walked through the door. 

This time it was about immigrants, ICE pogroms, and Trump's planned genocide. She howled about Auschwitz, Soviet ethnic cleansing, the barbarity of Union soldiers as they exterminated Native Americans.  'You see?', she shouted, holding last of her sardine sandwich.  'You see??', she said. 'It's Kristallnacht all over again'. 

No, it was Esther's putrid, ugly ranting all over again, overblowing, inflating, inventing, and doing a St. Vitus' dance, wailing and twitching, turning blotchy, smelling badly and as ugly a woman as Bob had ever seen. 'Stop it!' he shouted silently, unwilling to challenge the clearly unhinged creature bouncing around the airless, cramped office. 

'Sorry to run', she said.  'I'm off to protest' and with that grabbed her stained and saggy Hopi cloth bag, and walked out the door leaving Bob alone, disquieted, and unhappily looking at his inbox, an old fashioned relic of the halcyon days, filled with flyers, announcements, screeds, and torn copies of The Nation. 

Bob sat heavily in his chair and stared at the portrait of MLK, the poster of Che Guevara, the stale bagels, dust devils, and bookends holding Marx's Communist Manifesto, Engel's The Coming of the Proletariat, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. 

A Presbyterian born and raised, Bob still wished that he could go to Confession.  He was having bad thoughts, traitorous, devilish thoughts, and he could live with them no longer.  He hated black people, gay men, lesbians, freeloaders, and especially the unholy ugly women who harped on about them.  

Right now, his Yale classmate Hetherington Adams (Addy) was sitting on a St. Bart's verandah overlooking the harbor, lovely young mistress at his side, not a care in the world, a satisfied life of investment banker behind him, scion of one of Boston's most well-known families, father, grandfather, emeritus and model. 

Had it all happened the way Bob had planned - a progressive revolution which would have turned America into a socialist union of shared values, equal benefit, and harmonious inclusivity- he might be enjoying his later years.  Instead he was still at his cheap steel desk in a third-rate office, pursuing a stale, outdated, hapless agenda. 

'Yes, but it had to be done, and someone had to do it', he shouted, but it was empty valor, a last hurrah, a desperately off tune swan song. 

No one can ever admit that they have wasted their life - that would leave them horrifically empty before death - but Bob came close.  'There's still time', he thought; but of course there wasn't.  He had played his cards, no more were to be dealt, and he was left only with a few scattered dollar chips. 

'Goddamn it!', he shouted.  'Goddamn it to hell'.