Another great part, Shayne.
“What's wrong?” Cyrus asked after a long sip of coffee. He held the cup tightly in his hands, enjoying the unaccustomed warmth.
“I don't recognize this place,” the angel admitted. “It's nothing like the America I knew.”
“It's not so bad,” Cyrus said.
“They're putting people in jail without trials,” he said. “Everybody is suspicious and angry and…”
Things are bad... but....
“Everybody isn't suspicious or angry,” Cyrus said, shaking his head. “Except maybe the cops of the government. Most people are the same as they always were. They get up, go to work, come home…live their lives.”
“I guess it's mostly the government I'm mostly talking about,” the angel admitted. “I don't remember them being so paranoid.”
“Next time you come back to earth, try coming as a black man,” Cyrus said. “Then you'll get to see what paranoid is.”
Yes! There may still be racism in America, but compared with what things used to be like, they have improved enormously.
“Thing is…the government gets paid to be paranoid so the rest of us don't have to.
What a great observation! (Not always true, but still great.)
“I guess it's just seeing it all at once,” the angel admitted. “Guards and guns and people locked up without trials. I never expected to see it here.”
“You weren't around in the forties, I guess.” Cyrus said.
The angel shook his head.
No, Clark, you weren't around in the forties.
“My father worked as a guard in one of the internment camps there. They locked up more than a hundred thousand people who hadn't committed a crime other than being born Japanese.”
Yes.
(And in Sweden, "undesirable" people like gypsies were being sterilized.)
“Sometimes you just have to have a little faith. As a colored man, my uncle couldn't join the navy as anything more than a cook.” Cyrus chuckled. “Of course, with the seasickness he had he wasn't even much good for that.”
The angel didn't say anything, just sat and listened.
“The year I fought in Vietnam, it was still illegal in sixteen states for me to marry a white woman. It was legal for banks to refuse me a loan for a house in a white neighborhood. I had relatives who had to deal with the Klan.”
Yes.
And the lynchings, can you believe them? I think there were still lynchings in the 1940s.
Just look at this picture. It's from 1930, I think. Note, however, how all those white people keep milling around the hanged bodies of the black men, as if they are not at all afraid of any sort of punishment. They are so
confident that nobody will question them, and they are so pleased with themselves after having committed murder together.
Billie Holliday: Strange Fruit When you look at images like these, and listen to Billie Holliday's song, then you realize how much America really has changed for the better.
And Lois got herself in trouble... please help her, Clark!
Ann