I grew up in the working-class side of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, where it would be hard to disprove someone who declared, “All persons are either Catholic or Jewish.”
In the kid culture I experienced, we all knew each other’s religion, but it was not a significant separator, or even a reliable indicator, as to who you were likely to befriend. Greater significance might be tethered to whether you rooted for the White Sox or the Cubs.
My first inkling that adults of the 1950s were not so blasé about such matters came with a Christmas card someone sent my parents. It was not received with seasonal cheer; instead, it made them angry. “Doesn’t he know we’re Jewish?” I could not believe how long they dwelled on it. If phrases like “good intentions” had made it into my nine-year-old’s vocabulary, I might have better understood what troubled me about their complaint.
Another inkling came a year later when I found myself wandering through the basement of Parkside Elementary, closed for the summer. When a lanky janitor spotted me, I assumed he was about to upbraid me for trespassing, but instead he simply said, “Hi there.” After a few additional pleasantries, he appeared to rescan me and asked, “What are you?” The question made no sense to me, and I guessed that none of the possible answers tumbling in my head—a boy, an American, an earthling—would have satisfied whatever itch he was trying to scratch. After saying “What?” multiple times, I finally deduced that he wanted to know my nationality. When I told him I was Jewish, that seemed to settle the matter, even though I had left out my Russian/Polish ancestry.
Four years later, I received far stronger input as to the power of such dividers. By this time, I was living further south in a neighborhood known as Jeffery Manor, which was closer to northwest Indiana than to downtown Chicago. A friend named Nathan and I rode our bikes across the Indiana border, where some boys by the road threw stones at us while shouting, “Are you Jewish?” I reflexively shot back, “No!” We pedaled like Olympians, and once we made it to safety, Nate gave me a lecture, saying, “You should never deny your Judaism.” The comment left me feeling embarrassed and cowardly, even as I admired him for saying it. Sometimes, I still revisit that moment, wishing I had said something else. Other times I end up arguing the point: Shouldn’t self-preservation count for something? If it didn’t, there might not be Jews.
In high school, the predominant groups were Jews, Mexicans, African Americans, and Serbians. Our coexistence was largely peaceful, and if not for last names, you might have a hard time separating the Jews from the Serbians. Our grade point averages did not separate us much either, which came as a surprise to many Jews. Jewish and Serbian students were openly cross-dating, and not all parents were pleased.
None of this is to suggest that there was no segregation. Most of it we imposed ourselves, at lunch hall tables and study halls with open seating. If you were Jewish, there were some classmates you never encountered, except in the gym. This included the swimming pool where I once accidentally bumped into one of those guys never-seen-elsewhere. His immediate words were “After school!” and he shot back a venomous glare. I walked home looking over my shoulder, but, fortunately, he never materialized.
Another way we were segregated was through honors classes, deemed to be more challenging than the standard curriculum. One didn’t choose these classes; the school did the choosing, resulting in an over-representation of Jews and Serbians. I was mostly one of the Jews not chosen for honors classes, which at least spared me the onus of privilege, and possibly the resentment of others so classified.
In Chicago, of course, the most significant divider was neither religion nor nationality, it was race. The city was checkered with neighborhood borders that did not exist on maps, but everyone knew where they were. These invisible lines had everything to do with your sense of safety, how fast you walked, your ability to rent or buy a house. When I was twenty-one, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Chicago, leading civil rights marches through our segregated neighborhoods. I wanted to be part of it. I’d like to think this came from some inbred virtue in my makeup, but in fact, it was the 1960s; causes were everywhere. At the time, my political consciousness had not evolved enough to pick a side, but it seemed oh, so cool to have a side. I began to observe things in a different way. Then there were those kids in Mississippi being blasted by fire hoses or dragged by the shoulders into police vans, just for holding up signs. Who couldn’t figure out the injustice of that? Mississippi was far away, but now MLK was coming to me.
Needless to say, the residents of the neighborhoods we marched through were not particularly appreciative of our notions about ending discrimination. The main target was Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood, well known for its racial bias. Counter demonstrators could frequently be heard chanting, “I wish I were an Alabama Trooper / That is what I’d truly like to be. / Cause if I were an Alabama trooper / I could shoot the [N-words] le-gal-ly.” One of the Chicago papers later referred to the chant as an “anti-integration slogan.”
During one march, a thin blue line of police officers separated demonstrators from the chanting—sometimes rock-throwing—crowd. A bare-chested man in blue jeans broke through the line and charged toward us, but, fortunately, the police caught up and tackled him. Once again I was ducking stones. The sky seemed to darken with them. The only defensive strategy I could think of was to track individual stones so I could anticipate which way to weave. I never got hit, but Martin Luther King Jr. did, along with Al Raby, leader of Chicago’s Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. The news of Raby being hit was passed down the line from one demonstrator to the next. March leaders stopped our forward progress, apparently thinking it would defuse the situation, and had us sit on the sidewalk. A chorus of “We Shall Overcome” broke out. It struck me like the voices of heavenly sirens, breaking through unspeakable cruelty. It never sounded so sweet.
By the time I started at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1966, America had new dividers. They went by many names: the hippies, the youth movement, the counterculture. Like a cruise ship offering a palette of excursions, they could take many forms. You could be a war resister, a feminist, a longhair, a Deadhead, a Marxist, a Panther, a drummer, or maybe someone who just went to Woodstock.
Membership in one group did not inoculate you from the scorn of others. Marxists didn’t much like the Trotskyites, militants didn’t like the pacifists, socialists didn’t like the liberals, Gene McCarthy supporters disparaged followers of the first Robert F. Kennedy, and if you eschewed meat purely for health reasons, as opposed to ethical, I knew people who would like a word with you.
It was hard to keep in mind that there were those on the other end of the spectrum—students pursuing their own educational objectives—who couldn’t care less about Trotskyites, the angst of vegetarians, or the rest of us, flouting the conventions of normalcy with our beards, hair length, and continuous protests. They must have thought that the whole world had gone mad and that they were on the losing side.
After college, in 1969, I moved to San Francisco, the belly of the beast as far as the counterculture went. My first residence was a fifteen-dollar-per-month back porch. As in college, the population splintered in many directions: some political, some spiritual, some drug-related, some not on anyone’s map. Initially, I never felt I fit in anywhere. In my first year, the thunder I thought I heard turned out to be the Symbionese Liberation Army bombing a police station. One of the members of a local co-counseling group turned out to be Squeaky Fromme, a member of the Manson Family, who in 1975 attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Obviously, not everything was so extreme. My own involvement was along the lines of writing groups (I was working on a novel featuring a semi-autobiographical character struggling to avoid the draft), encounter groups, a hippie, a free university with everything from eviction law to basket weaving, and improv classes. (Members of a religious cult once attempted to infiltrate one of our classes.) It was not all extremism and infighting. That was tiresome and nonproductive. Another viewpoint—I’d say the prevailing one—was: Fuck dividers. Come together. We are one. Kumbaya.
“How did that work out?” you might cynically ask.
Things changed. One of the main drivers was economics. Fifteen-dollar monthly rentals were no longer available. By the early 1980s, the San Francisco Bay Area morphed into one of the most expensive areas in the country, particularly for renters. It was no longer so easy to be a crazed poet living on the fringes. Neighborhoods once filled with would-be writers, actors, musicians, and activists, became places only the highly-salaried could afford. Many in the love-child generation fled back to the nine-to-five, fearing for their economic lives. My own career path progressed from cab driver, to library assistant, to computer programmer. Eventually, I became a home owner—a designation I once would have disparaged. But after the age of fifty, to borrow a Coen Brothers title, the Bay Area rental market felt like No Country for Old Men. And to borrow an old Bob Dylan line, the national mood no longer suggested “revolution was in the air.”
For me, it was not revolution in the air—it was the smell of urine in the old age facility where my father spent his final years, while part-time-working me lacked the resources to help him. It was also the knowledge that the next rent increase (they came annually) could entirely blow apart my life.
With or without revolution, the nation continued to polarize. Naturally, the polarization was always there, especially on the left-right political level, but in 2016, with the introduction of a new president—he lives rent-free in my head—it took a quantum leap. This one seems deeper, and it goes beyond politics. With politics you can state the issues and argue the merits. What seems at stake now is rationality itself. To half the country he is mad, to others a political Messiah.
Politicization should not surprise us in an era where Internet algorithms, whose raison d’être is to collect our clicks, constantly woo us with repetitions of our stealthily tracked biases. Cable news, of course, works much the same way, never challenging us with content that would jeopardize their market share. Admittedly, I only watch MS NOW so I am clearly part of the problem. (Bonus confession: When CBS was widely regarded as the most liberal network, I only watched CBS.)
All that is to say, the country has a new divider which hardly needs naming. If pressed to do so, one would only need to cite the primary colors red and blue. It is a specter that hangs over everything, not just intensified Thanksgiving dinners, but those verbal minefields we tiptoe around daily with relatives, coworkers, neighbors, that friend of a friend. It triggers the strongest of passions, and I am not above the fray. Upon meeting someone new, their chosen side vis-à-vis this divider is the first thing my radar is scanning for, and I am not likely to reveal my own leanings until I’ve detected signals on the other side. Are you red or are you blue? It’s the lurking unknown, and like that janitor who once interrogated me in a school basement, if not for the constraints of civility, or my self-concept as a polite person, the first question out of my mouth might be: What are you?
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Dennis Kaplan is a Chicago native, transplanted to Oakland, California, where he writes computer code by day and other things by night. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in First of the Month, Bristol Noir, Eureka Literary Magazine, Oxford Magazine, Eclectica, Tales of the Fantastic, The New York Times Syndicate, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and others. He is the co-editor of The Workplace Anthology.
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