Hey, name-callers, try thinking for a change

Last week a letter-to-the-editor writer wrote a piece castigating me for my stands on President Donald Trump, and that’s fine.

I get my say, you get yours and that’s the end of it.

I’m tremendously proud of Karen Brayham for doing just that and signing her name.

But I take exception to some false personal assumptions she made about me that she didn’t have to make in order to make her other points.

She said that it “seems” I was “never affected by being between a rock and a hard place” and that I must have enjoyed “an upper middle-class lifestyle and never wanted for anything.”

She also said I “had no clue” that a military parade was something that we can all get behind to thank our fellow Americans who gave their lives to protect our country.

Let me point out, we already have military parades least twice a year, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, to honor our active duty servicemen and women and veterans, just not with tanks and planes and missiles, which is what I object to.

I’ll put my working-class credentials and respect for the military at up against anybody’s.

I was a Navy brat for 19 years and you know what they say about the military – if you’re in the military, your whole family is.

Both my father and stepfather were career Navy (enlisted, not officer) in the submarine service and both were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

We moved 18 times in my first 18 years. We always lived in rented s---holes where there was mold on the curtains, cockroaches in the cupboards and sprung springs in the couches.

Twice we lived in trailers and once in a Quonset hut. Look up Quonset hut if you don’t know what it is.

I would come home from school and find my mother cleaning the oven and knew instantly we were moving again. Most often it was mom and I who did all the moving because dad was out to sea.

I was always the new kid in school, having to catch up with that school’s coursework, having to explain how to pronounce my weird first name. Every time I made a friend, we moved.

I went to 14 schools in five states – Connecticut, California, Virginia, Florida and New Jersey — good schools, bad schools, integrated schools, segregated schools, urban schools, rural schools and a couple of schools on military bases.

Ask me where my hometown is and I can’t tell you.

When you talk about your old neighborhoods, Sunday dinner with your grandparents, friends from kindergarten, parishes and parochial schools, I can’t join you.

We were not “dirt poor,” but we were “enlisted man” poor. We had free medical care, a roof over our heads and commissary groceries, sort of like food stamps today.

When I went to my senior prom, I had to buy my prom dress used for $10 at a sale in the school gym.

In California I went to school with the children of migrant workers who were picking the strawberries and walnuts and lemons in the fields and groves nearby.

I tried picking strawberries with them once and every time I pass a display of strawberries in the grocery store, I think about the back-breaking stoop labor it takes to harvest them even now.

I landed in Norfolk, Va., from California around 1959, so I got to witness first-hand the horrifying ugliness of Jim Crow.

I saw the chain gangs and tarpaper shacks (actually, no tarpaper), the “colored” restrooms and fountains, and kids going to school barefooted.

In 1961 I spent two months going to school in people’s basements because my “public” high school had closed rather than let four black kids go to it. That didn’t just happen in Little Rock.

I was the first in my family to go to college. I went to Rutgers University, College of South Jersey, in Camden, N.J., a “workingclass” commuter school where the classes were in rowhouses. No ivy on those walls.

I worked as many as 30 hours a week at two or more part-time jobs throughout college and full time in the summers.

One scorching hot summer I ran shirt mangles in a laundry where I sustained so many minor burns I stopped noticing them and had to examine my arms nightly for new ones. I was paid $1 an hour.

In 1965, I delivered the mail for the summer. The only reason I got to do that, and make decent money, was because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated that the post office had to offer me, a woman, the job.

Then, I chose a profession, journalism, where nobody ever makes a dime and where there are no eight-hour days. You do get to see the best and worst of people up close and personal every day.

These early life experiences shaped me and I wouldn’t trade a minute of them.

But I understand they are very different from the ones that shaped most of you.

I understand that makes me an “other,” an outsider, a “them” on the tribal continuum.

Sorry I make some of you so uncomfortable, which I clearly do.

My life experiences also gave me a very thick skin so every time one of you feels compelled to call into Sound Off to say, “Jodine Mayberry stinks,” well, I’ve been called worse.

But because I am a columnist, you Sound Off callers and online commenters can verbally abuse me by name while you hide anonymously behind screen names and cute tags. How brave.

It’s as easy for you to jump on the computer and call me, and each other, names as it is for our president to ruin whole careers and a person’s lifelong reputation by exercising his thumbs on a cellphone.

Instead of calling me names, try beginning your next rant with “Jodine Mayberry is wrong on … because ….” Try thinking about the issue under discussion.

Our president name-calls constantly and he’s given you permission to do the same, but we do not have to stoop to his level, right? “us versus them”