POLITICIANS

One of the fun things about blogging on a regular basis is readers look at whatever sources or reading list you post besides what you blog and make a decision.

You're a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican. You're a libertarian or a Whig, a Rotarian, Presbyterian, sectarian, vegetarian or egalitarian, to name a few.

 There's a sound reason behind it although it's really like those vapory, reflective patches that look like water on sultry hot summer days way down the road most of us have seen at least once or twice in our driving lives, just a mirage. 

People feel more comfortable if they think they know where you are, what you are. Snap decisions and big-time assumptions, seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum, aside. Douce bag or troll, saint or wizard, people love labels.

Back in grade school my best friend, I'll call him Jimmy C. to protect the guilty, used get in trouble so often he became a permanent fixture in the principal's office.

Jimmy was a bright kid who always hung around guys four or five years older than him. Jimmy knew how to dress, he knew how to talk to girls and he knew when he had to how to scuffle and fight.

Unlike many of the other kids who'd break out on the playground whenever they could to play, Jimmy was always reading something, a magazine, a newspaper, a box label. Sometimes he 'd get into trouble for bringing it to class. But that never stopped him.

 Back then corporal punishment hadn't been banned yet by the PC crowd. So Jimmy learned pretty quickly about free lunches; there are none. He took his share of whacks, way more than anyone else, and he took them well.

They hurt and they hurt bad, but you'd never learn that from Jimmy. What I did learn from him was this. One day after another of his tours in the principal's office, where they kept him waiting a long time before doling out his punishment, a form of punishment in its own right, he told me he sat their watching people freely come and go.

A lot of the teachers would pop in, see him there again, and just shake their heads. Most came to check their mail boxes, tiny little cubicles all neatly lined up and alphabetized. The longer he sat there watching the parade, he later told me, the more he realized what those boxes symbolized.

They're categories, he said, categories that people constantly seek to put you into for their own benefit, their own comfort. It makes them feel better, superior. That way they think they know how to deal with you. If they believe they know where or what you are it's easier to hate or like or ignore or discard you. They can relax and feel good, justified.

When I asked for an example, he gave me a one-word answer I'll never forget, politicians.

We moved that summer and I lost track of Jimmy after that. Years later I learned after high school he got drafted, went to Nam where he did two tours. He was wounded twice, received a battle field promotion and came home with a box full of metals he never threw farther than the attic, all in the name he told me later of a political war he never believed in.

When he came back he married, had a couple of kids and used his GI Bill to get a law degree, though he never worked a day in the profession. I ran into him one Saturday morning a few years later at Home Depot. He and his wife were getting ready to celebrate his 50th birthday that weekend.

She came home from shopping later that day and found him on the living room floor. He was dead at 49, a myocardial infarct.