The World Is A Small Place

When one enters high school, that will be the period of forming who one is, who one becomes.  It not only begins to take on this mold with your academics, but also the type of friends you select, or that select you.  Your personality, your thought patterns, your image, and your friends all begin to take shape.  One doesn't really think about this when they are in high school.  All they think about is the clique they can join, the friends that they want to select so that they will make them look good, and the clothes that they wear.  For me, it was the Vietnam War years.  The Vietnam War was and undeclared war.  We were over there beginning in 1950 only as advisers to the French because the French didn't know how to fight a jungle war.  Our military had already fought many skirmishes in the Pacific Islands with the Japanese.  So our military had experience that the French needed.  In the early sixties, the French gave up, cut and ran leaving our military holding the bag.  Then we had a president whom was not paying attention to any of his Generals and the war escalated with sending more and more of our troops to their death.  I was paying more attention to this than my high school mates and I began communicating with radical groups protesting against the war.  In speaking with some of my classmates, they were more involved in the back seat of their boyfriend's cars, or trying to help me get "saved".  I didn't want to get saved.  I wanted some of that ass in the back seat just like everyone else was getting.  But, I was different.  I vowed I would never date anyone from the same high school that I was in.  I didn't need any gossip.  I didn't need any humiliation that might arise from it should a break up occur.  Shit!  I was already getting enough humiliation from my older brother.  I passed out an "underground" newspaper in high school trying to bring awareness of the Vietnam war.  The problem was the paper was not a local paper.  San Antonio had their head shoved too far up their ass to pay attention to anything like that outside the city limits.  So, while others were in the back seat banging it out, playing football to make a big impression on the next piece of ass they could get, or trying like Hell to be a hypocritical Christian, I was communicating with groups like the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the SLA, and so forth.  I even got removed from class several times because I refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  The only allegiance I had at the time was to help stop sending our boys overseas for a death march.  Being in a small "head in the sand" town like San Antonio, Texas, I protested where I could, described in The Train Runs No More.  I gave up real quick on my conversion of other classmates to become more aware of our politics.  I even had issues with my parents because of the posters of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale on my bedroom walls.  I was in  my own world on this one.  So, here I was doing the protesting that I could where it made the most sense which was no where in the city of San Antonio.  And there were my classmates.  After high school ended and I began looking for real work, I had run into employers where my classmates had already gotten a job.  When completing the employment applications, I referenced those classmates that were working there.  Because of my reputation that I had formed in high school with those classmates, I never got the job.  So.  Always remember.  The world is a small place.  Be careful of whom you piss off.  You just might need them some day.  In today's world with computers, the world has become even smaller.  I had a boss at Lockheed in Marietta, Georgia that I became very close with.  He needed someone to perform a certain job on a C-5 one Saturday.  He needed someone that was going to work.  Detailed in my book, The Train Runs No More, he called me up and asked me to come in.  I asked how he was going to get around the union.  He told me, "Fuck the union!  I want somebody that wants to work and I know that you know the job and when you go in there, you're going to work on the job until it's done.  Now.  Do you want to work or not?"  I was at work within a few minutes since I lived right down the street from Dobbs, A. F. B.  In a crew meeting one day, he was explaining working as a team.  One of the things that he said and that I will always remember, "Be careful of who you piss off.  They just might be your boss one day".  He was right.  But I didn't adhere to that philosophy until after the fact.