Columns

By Roger Barbee

What Air’s in Your Tires

Because we paraplegics use our arms and shoulders to propel our manual wheelchairs, the condition of our shoulders is especially important. It matters not how large our biceps may grow, if our shoulders suffer injury, we will be forced to use a battery powered chair or have someone push us anywhere we wish to go. In case the reader is not aware, battery powered chairs are expensive, and having someone push us to wherever we desire to go is not practical. Thus, when I recently developed a constant, stabbing pain in my left shoulder I was concerned.

I did what I think most folks do when a physical pain comes on—I took an inventory. I curtailed my riding of the stationary handcycle by riding less days each week and clocking less miles. I also made my workouts less strenuous. When that did not change the intensity and frequency of the pain, I strove to decrease the  amount of hard pushing of my wheelchair that I had to do. Even though our house is built on a slab, and our lot is mostly flat, I was cautious about the  ramp leading to our back porch and the ramp to my shop. I concentrated more on how I pushed my wheelchair in order to not stress my shoulders, especially the left one. Finally, the ache’s frequency and intensity did not change,  In a fashion, I just quit and, taking the convenient way out of my problem, decided that after twenty years in a wheelchair my shoulders were finally giving out from being used for what they were not designed to do.

Not long after that pathetic conclusion, I noticed that the air pressure of my wheelchair tires seemed low. While in my shop later that day, I pumped each tire to the recommended ninety pounds of pressure and went on about my business. Now, I am no Archimedes, but within a few days I noticed the pain in my left shoulder had lessened. I began my old riding regime and felt no sudden twinges when I went up the two ramps that I must use every day. While I never shouted, “Eureka”, I was, as they say, one happy camper. And paraplegic.

The 2010 van that I drive, like all contemporary vehicles, has an abundance of notifications that appear on the displays or even on a cellphone. Mine has this silly, yellow logo that appears on the speedometer’s lower left-hand corner if the pressure in any tire becomes too low. It is just one more example of, to paraphrase the slogan of one early pioneering scientific company, “Better living through….” In this case, through computers. But my wheelchair is manual and has no computer or intelligent operator it seems. Because of low tire pressure, my wheelchair required more force to move it, requiring more work from my shoulders, especially the left one. Gads, after twenty years of using a wheelchair, wouldn’t you think that I would know to check tire pressure?

My first wheelchair was black and had hard rubber tires. It took little time to realize that, while the tires would never go flat, the hard tires caused discomfort, and I despised the black. Quickly, I purchased a purple wheelchair with pneumatic tires–the color was cool and the ride comfortable. But a wheelchair is, after all, a machine and like any machine it must be maintained. But the air of the tires is so common, not complex like other parts. Air! It’s all around us and free. All life on earth depends on it, even in so simple of an invention as the  pneumatic tire.

A quick Google search reveals that the pneumatic tire was patented in the United States by Robert W. Thompson, a Scottish inventor, in 1847. (In 1849 he patented the fountain pen.) His “aerial wheels” were a hollow leather tire enclosing a rubberized fabric tube filled with air. However, because the price of rubber was so high, his inventor languished for over fifty years until a new way of manufacturing rubber lowered its price.

But never mind. The point is that because of such a simple cause, my shoulders suffered, and that sharp pain could have developed into something much more serious. And I think that our  lives are so much like the lack of  adequate air in my tires. We all need air in so many ways for our lives, but what air fills our souls? What air supports our dreams? What air refreshes our spirits? Our lives are made better when we believe in something larger than ourselves, and for me that is God. He is the air that I breathe. He is the air that keeps me afloat. He is the air that soothes my pains. He is the air that cools my burnings. He is the air in the tires of my wheelchair that allows me to push and roll easily as I traverse life.

By Roger Barbee

The cultural war is full of blather concerning how our schools teach history. In Texas, a heated discussion is on-going about a book’s treatment of one of that state’s icons, The Alamo. I remember watching the Walt Disney movie version of that battle and its heroes and villains but know now how wrong Disney’s telling was. But I remain curious about the process of our learning history whether in the classroom or during independent reading or watching a movie.

For instance, I am reading a memoir by President Carter. I am reading it because I liked the man when he was President, and, because I grew up in a small town, the sub-title of the book attracted me: “Memories of a Rural Boyhood.” The title, An Hour Before Daylight, offered me much to learn about a young boy’s life in rural Georgia during the early 20^th Century. Now, I accept that because it is his memoir, President Carter is entitled to his memory and his purpose for the book as he writes in the dedication: “To my newest grandson, Hugo, with hopes that this book might someday let him better comprehend the lives of his ancestors.” I, too, hope the book gives Hugo a window into the lives of his grandpa and other ancestors; it has certainly taught me. It has also raised questions concerning President Carter’s interpretations of events during his early life, and thus how we learn history or what we are told is historical by writers.

On page 149, President Carter writes: “ I also knew about some of the serious crimes that were committed in our region. One tragic and horrible measure of poverty in those days was the lynchings that occurred, at least partially because of growing competition even for the least desirable jobs, which in the past had been saved for black workers. As the Depression deepened, an Atlanta organization adopted the slogan ‘No Jobs for Niggers [sic]Until Every White Man Has A Job.’ The number of lynchings in America quadrupled in 1933 over the previous year, and remained equally high during the hard time that followed.”

This explanation of lynchings comes from a Naval Academy graduate who also served one term as President of the United States, so what could be wrong? Well, Carter is correct when he writes of lynchings as “tragic and horrible.” He also is correct in that the lynchings of Blacks quadrupled in 1933 as compared to 1932. But is he correct when he credits the lynching of Black citizens “partially” to the Depression and its hard times?  Hardly.

Lynchings were not a “horrible measure of poverty in those days”  as President Carter writes. Every study of every lynching shows that the “tragic and horrible” act took place when the hate filled injustice of a white majority avenged any real or perceived violation of the Jim Crow code. Any minority could be lynched, but the violence was mostly reserved for Blacks as a way of striking fear in the local population. I don’t know why President Carter writes of the history of lynching as he does, but on that page his memory collides with historical fact, and he is wrong in his interpretation of history in this example and one more that I will mention,

“Worse Than Slavery” (Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice)  is the story of the feared prison farm in Mississippi by David Oshinsky. In his well-documented book, Oshinsky shows us an American gulag that allowed prisoners to be “hired out” to wealthy landowners to work on their plantations.  Parchman Farm would not have differed much from the chain gangs in Georgia that Carter writes of with the convicts, mostly Blacks, dressed in their horizontally stripped shirts and pants. He describes the chains used to tether the men together and he shares how he and his buddies romanticized the lives of the men they saw on the chain gangs. However, on page 61 he writes: “Georgia law permitted the chain gangs to be contracted out to private employers, so they helped with road construction, railroad maintenance, and other such jobs.” Oshinsky details the same system used in Mississippi and it is one of harsh treatment to any convict “hired out” to a private contractor. What Carter gives us is a romantic view of life on a chain gang much like that when he was young, and  I doubt that any prisoner brutalized under such a system would view his labors as helping with public works improvement.

I don’t know why President Carter would write such historically wrong interpretations. Yet he has, and that fact is dangerous because he is a respected person and his word, like the word of many well-known people, is revered. Years ago, when the brand-new alternator my mechanic friend Larry had just installed in my Jeep failed, he explained it this way:” It was made by people, and any people made thing can fail.” So can people’s view of history.