Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll offers a case study in MAKING LEMONADE. She writes:

You all know the old advice about “When Life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” I have never been fond of the saying, to tell you the truth, well-intentioned though it be. For one thing, lemons alone do not make lemonade – you also need a LOT of sugar and fresh, potable water. A lot of “lemony” Life situations – natural disasters, plague, homelessness, war and rationing, to take but a few examples – will find sugar and potable water in short supply.

But I take the point of the saying: in whatever situation you find yourself, however wretched, you can glean a valuable life lesson out of it, turn it to your advantage, or at least have some fun. And so it was for 8 of us in early January.

We had gone to Winslow, Arizona, not just to “stand on the corner” in homage to The Eagles, but to see the Quarantid Meteor Shower, reputed to be well worth the trip. And also to quarter and eat at La Posada Inn, whose Turquoise Room has provided me with several of the best meals I have ever eaten outside of my late, great Mama’s dinner table.

We were what at one time would have been considered an interesting and diverse mix of people. Four married couples, ranging in age from 54 to 80. Abby and Ken from Florida; Mr. AG and I from Arizona; Alan and Kaarina, winterers from Palm Springs, residents of Canada, but natives of Britain and Finland; and Ange and John, winterers in Arizona, originally from Indiana and Minnesota.

We were two lawyers, one playwright, homemakers, one retired comic, two engineers, two tech weenies, a yoga instructor; one Scott Johnson groupie (no, really); world travelers who speak six languages among us; pet lovers, Concealed Carriers, insanely proud grandparents, painters, a tap dancer and drumming student; a pianist, composer and band leader; a very good golfer; a woman with a pilot’s license, a guy still sporting his full Santa Claus beard from a recent community Christmas parade and his “Elf” wife; Jews, Christians, agnostics, humanists, six conservatives, two socialists, several short women (with Angela the Amazon towering over the rest of us at about 5’6″) and several tall men.

If you were keeping score, you realized that was way more than eight people, tribute to the fact that we are all many things at the same time.

But here’s the thing, quite remarkable in my opinion: despite these amazing differences and interests, we would have earned not a single point for “diversity,” as we were all white, and, to the best of my knowledge, heterosexual and happy with our genders! I suppose the four of us women could have claimed some sort of Diversity Privilege, but that doesn’t cut much mustard today. Glory be, we women aren’t even allowed to lay claim to being the only people with vaginas! In Lefty Loony Land, there are Tampax dispensers in the Men’s Room. Yikes!

Why, some idiot claimed that “Straight black men are the white males of the diversity movement now.” Good grief! Haters gotta hate. And losers gotta cling to victimhood like Titanic survivors to a piece of driftwood. As the “tribes” get broken down into ever-smaller units, some category is going to find itself labeled as the Perpetual Bad Guy. Toxic white males as Bad Guys is so yesterday.

Let me ask you this, my friends. If you were at a cocktail party, who would you rather chat up? A beautiful white woman (hint: not me) who can fly a plane, shoot a gun, sell industrial rubber in an all-male industry, and drive a tractor? Or a boring person whose father is half African-American and half Irish and therefore is one quarter “black” and counts as “diverse”?

OMG, Ammo Grrrll said that black people are boring!! No. I absolutely did not. Including my own black and Hispanic foster kids, I know many black people and gay people and Mexican people who are smart, funny, kind, and interesting. What is interesting is not their skin tone or whom they have sex with, but the fact that they can do cool things and are nice people. You know, that wacky old “content of their character” deal MLK appealed to. Why is that so hard to understand?

Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because multiple, lucrative industries have grown up around the fact that “Diversity” is all that matters now. And the arbiters of who counts as “Diverse” will decide who counts, thank you very much. And YOU probably don’t! Not even Jews and Asians! Discriminated against, yea, systematically murdered, for millenia, Jews are just icky white people who have done too well and ruined the curve and the narrative. Sorry!

So how was the Quarantid Meteor Shower, you ask? Ah, here comes the “lemony” part. A massive cloud cover came in and blocked out the sky entirely for both nights when the Shower was supposed to be showing off.

This did not prevent us from bundling up in all the clothes we had brought to Arizona from Minnesota and going out away from the bright lights of Greater Metropolitan Winslow (pop. 9,754) to lie upon the frozen ground and try to see even one little meteor. It’s amazing how invested one can get in thinking one sees it. But it always turned out to be the lights from a plane or a tedious alien spacecraft or some other stupid thing, never the goldarned meteors.

And here comes the “Lemonade” part. After the better part of what felt like many hours, but was probably about 45 minutes, somebody, possibly I, said, “Hey, let’s just go drink.”

And so, we “made lemonade.” We drank lovely exotic martinis, ate beautiful food, laughed and talked and laughed some more, shared experiences, moving and humorous, and got to know each other better. At some point after drinking several pre-drinks before the drinks and wine at dinner, I suggested that we should channel CNN when asked about how awesome the Quarantid Meteor Shower had been, and just bald-faced lie.

“Quarantid Meteor Shower? Oh yeah, it was great.”

By the way, the Eagles lyric “standin’ on the corner in Winslow, Arizona” has become a cottage industry in itself. There is not only the corner, with Henley and Frey in bronze statues, but now there’s a flatbed Ford parked there too for you to photograph. Good times; good times.