THE THINGS THEY CARRY

By

Gerry Niskern

One of the characteristics that my mother loved when we moved to Arizona when I was a kid was the openness and lack of prejudice. We had moved here from a small town in the East and she loved the fact that no one cared if you were Italian, German, Austrian, Polish, Russian, or whatever. That had not been the case when she was growing up. She especially liked the idea that her girls were going to go to school in a state where most families were newcomers. No one carried  “home grown” bigotry to school.

I went to school with Mexican and Asian kids at Jackson and Adams Middle School. I graduated from Phoenix Union in l950 and there were many Mexican and Asian students graduating too. Daisy Yee was the Valedictorian of our class. Yes, the African American kids went to Carver but that changed the following year and the schools became desegregated.

I went to work at the Valley National Bank, which later became Chase. I worked along side Mexican and Asian girls in the Installment Loan Dept. We ran around together shopping on our lunch hour. One of the Mexican girls, Amelia, took part in my wedding.

Our ideas from home carried us thru school and on into adult life. Sure, some of our parents were liberal Democrats and others were conservative Republicans, but that didn’t define our lives. We were there to learn from past history and prepare for the future.

The kids in Arizona went back to school this month. Almost all wore new backpacks to carry their tons of books. But, think about this: they carried something else. They carried a heavy load of  political rhetoric that  they were saturated with from TV and the Internet. Even the Kindergarteners could probably tell you if their mommy and daddy was  Republican or a Democrat and the “state of our union” right now!

Think about it.