THANKS TO THE ENGLISH FOR...

While I was in church this morning, I had a bunch of  Brit/USA thoughts flit across  my mental horizon.  Somehow I wonder why the English get so much of our attention.  After all, they were not the first to the party.  But they sure stole the show, didn't they?  Right out of the gate they have the largest, oldest operating company on the North American continent (Hudson's Bay Trading).  They aren't even the first Christians to make it here.  Not even the first missionaries.  Just as they were behind Raul Amundsen to the  South Pole, they were behind Leif Erickson to North America.  Perhaps, thankfully for them, Leif was more interested in the fish than in the land.  Or maybe he had a solid home life, who knows?  Then, of course, the Spaniards claimed the sunny south.  Their predilection for warm weather must have had something to do with the way the flags were planted.  The Portuguese were in on the game too, but no one could tell them apart from the Spaniards except for the fact that their language was so sloppy, that no one could understand them.  It is possible that they made friends in Brazil because of their delivery of cheap labor from Africa.  So, with all of this spinning round and round in my coconut, I came home and found a little boy in a shirt that was printed with an image close to the one at the head of this piece.  It's then that the following happened:
Dear English, thanks for the pretty color scheme for our own flag.
                             Thanks for letting us borrow and remake your language.
                             Thanks for being more interested in Canada than in US.
                             Thanks for disliking the French more than US.
                             Thanks for exiling the best cooks to Louisiana.
                             Thanks for wearing those nice, bright red unis to Concord.
I have told you once before that I worked for a British Company for a couple years.  Some of them have a sense of humor about "losing" the "States" and some do not.  No matter who they are, they do enjoy the days off.  They also like to claim Thanksgiving as their gift to us.  That, dear friends is a story for a different blog and a different time.  Be that as it may, I do hope you are having a blessed Thanksgiving episode this year.

RED-COATS, JAPANESE, AMERICAN INDIANS AND ME

This is a result of something that I wrote yesterday...and a couple days before.
1. A couple days ago I wrote that there's only one way to talk...directly and in truth.  I forgot to mention that if you advocate that kind of behavior, you had better have the ears to match.  Today, I had to put those ears on.
2. Yesterday I alluded, not too subtly, to a name that used to be applied to our Native American Brethren.  Today I had to listen to my son telling me that HE knew what I was saying and meaning, because we had talked about it at the Pow-Wow yesterday.  He advised me to put it in the context that it was in yesterday during our conversation.
Get ready, this is going to be a ride.

How many of you U.S. born citizens have worked for a British owned and controlled corporation here in the U.S.?  Now that we have that question out of the way, let me push on and ask if you were working there on one or more "Fourth of July Holidays?"  Were the days leading up to the holiday and those immediately after it "different?"  Did you notice that there were those who had a sense of humor about it and some who did not?  Was most of the humor centered around the language differences but stayed a safe distance away from politics and culture?"  I have had the "pleasure" of living through that experience three times.  Each time was a little different depending on who the "players" were.  The second time was the one with the most humor.  The Chief Executive Officer came to work in a bright red blazer on July 3.  He took the directors out to lunch and stayed in character throughout.  That one, was comfortable.  The others, not so much.

How many of you had the joy of working for a Japanese owned and controlled company here in the United States?  If you did, you perhaps noticed a small degree of heart flutters on both sides of the desk on December 7 and 8.  The worst part of it all was that no one dared to mention anything about the war that had just ended some 40 years earlier.  In the Japanese company we did not have the luxury of 200 years distance from the fact.  We were not even at the halfway mark to one century, never mind two.  This was further complicated by the discomfort caused by the inability to communicate fluently, from the heart, in a common language.  I worked for ten years for such corporations.  In one, I made fast friends and one of them follows this blog at a safe distance, both historical and geographical.  Rio-san, don't be afraid to comment.
In both of the above scenarios, I was the one at home.  On Sunday, I was the guest.  On Sunday, July 3 at Pechanga, I was invited to attend a house party being thrown by those who have been here hundreds of centuries before me.  This fact was not lost on me as I wrote, " I had many thoughts run through my head and my heart this afternoon.  Let me just throw out the most daring and the most powerful.  I am convinced that I was looking at an image of the people of the Bible.  I was present at a venue where the activities were the commemoration of rituals that go back multiple thousands of years.  I was witnessing human memory at its strongest.  I was witnessing TRADITION like few of us ever experience.  The rituals were being practiced by young and old alike in a community that respected them all with equal dignity.  The music was created by the simplest and oldest of instruments, the drum and the human voice.  I saw all this take place in a spirit of unity on a plot of land dedicated to such rituals by the people who once roamed this land in unfettered freedom."  At one point I turned to my son [his wife is Native American] to make the point quoted here.  It is here that I said something like, "we live with the memory of our previous name for these people.  We referred to them as "savages".   We grew up and we now realize that  the Christians who slaughtered them, imprisoned them on rocky, non-forgiving, poorly productive land and made them walk from Georgia to Oklahoma were the real savages."   

This is the real and full context of what appeared in yesterday's copy of the blog.  Yes, I heard it from my son who knows that I only listen to straight talk full of truth.  Now, give me one more paragraph.
Some months ago as me and my first cousins were all gathered around a campfire in Utah, at our family pow-wow, so to speak, some of them asked me this question: "is it true that our Grandparents were part Indian, maybe even on both sides, father and mother?"  [I get asked these questions because I am the eldest] This was my answer then and it remains my answer now.  That is what I have heard from some of the old people that I have met along the road of life.  I know that it was not a case of ever claiming to be of such and such degree of blood.  It is a family tradition, passed on by word of mouth, but never verified nor proven in documentary form.  Four of our aunts and uncles were born in Saskatchewan, the other four in the U.S.  A La Salette Missionary priest who was for one year a teacher of mine in the seminary had been stationed in Saskatchewan for about 15 years in the 20's and 30's.  He told me that there was a Dion who had relatives who were at least 50% Cree.  He also told me that the Dion's who were connected by marriage to the Dubois and the Bachand [our grandmother was Bachand]  had at least 2nd and 3rd degree relatives with Cree blood.  That's all I have.  That and the physical attributes of my paternal grandmother.  

DECEMBER 7 -->> AUGUST 15 SSSHHHH !! JULY 4 -- OH YEAH!

How many of you have worked for a Japanese company?  Hmmm!  Ok, how about a British one?  Well, what are you waiting for?  And do you remember the date of Lionel's wedding to Eileen?  Hmmm?  The thought that got me here is one about the Pearl Harbor attack because of the December date.  It also came first because the first time I worked for a foreign company while here in the United States.  I worked for a Japanese company.  There were many comments and remarks about "did you wear your sneakers today?" This, always in the privacy of some corner or closed office.
The Japanese "surprise"attack on Hawaii always caused the great silence to take place on December 7 of any and every year that I worked for a Japanese company.  I soon learned that it was best for me to stay behind my desk, take a short lunch and leave the office early to avoid the tension filled air.  Actually I remember one year when some of us got into a conversation about the Mitsubishi cars that were beginning to get popular.  One guy made us all laugh when he wondered out loud if they were going to make them steel grey with propellers on the front grille.  One guy said that, "No, that would be too expensive.  They were  thinking of making their logo "0".
That was the way we spent most of the December 7th occasions.
The August 15th days were not much more comfortable.  Every now and then we would hear an indelicate question raised about, "Gotta check with ya about did ya call Missouri yet?"  We always were very careful about what we said in front of our Japanese bosses during these two days.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Now, I have to say that the Brits were altogether different.  They had as many barbs about the Revolution as we did.  Stuff like, "after we took care of the French in Canada, we lost our thirst for anyone else."  The fourth of July was not somber, by any means.  It was a holiday, true, but the 3rd and the 5th were generally banter and needles all day long.
It has been quite a wonderful experience for me to be able to get these opportunities.  It gave me a chance to live human experiences on the other side of the coin, so to speak.  After having been the employer in the Philippines and in Mexico, I could feel some of the challenges that the people who worked for me in the other countries must have felt.  It is not until you have life experiences such as these that you realize just how different people can be in the most normal and natural situations.  In the instance of the Japanese, for example, I went from having employees who wouldn't, or couldn't ever say "no", culturally, (Filipinos) to being an employee of people who couldn't or wouldn't say "no".  To this day I still  haven't made up my mind which experience was worse.
Oh, by the way, I did meet one Filipino who knows how to say "no" and who is not bashful about it one single bit!
That's it for today.  Believe it or not, I have a couple of thoughts still in the oven, so to speak.  Some great pictures too.