My father was born and raised poor in Kentucky and West Virginia. He grew up during the Depression. He wore his hand-me-down shoes until he literally couldn't find things to hold them together anymore.

He remembers being 6 in Arjay, KY and watching his uncle Pat stagger drunkenly from a sallon carrying a rifle and firing 6 times into a crowd of men. The rifle misfired all 6 times. He was taken to jail where he spent the night and came back the next morning, hungover and dragging his rifle behind him. No harm done. Nothing to worry about.

According to my father, these rural areas were dotted with gangs--not black or hispanic kids from the mean streets but poor white kids who knew how to shoot a gun before they could talk. He said, you got your own piece on your 14th birthday (silver-plated .45 was considered THE shit) and from there on out, you used that to settle all your arguments, grievances and problems.

My father remembers many times, simply running for his life from some gang headed his way. He remembers a 12-year-old boy with a rifle pointing it at him and making stick his mother's brand kitchen knife between two rocks so he could blow the shit out of it. My father went home and told his mother he dropped it. It was a very hard knife to get in those times and she beat the hell out of him for breaking it. He knew if he told her how it really happened, his drunk-ass stepfather (real father deserted the family) would have killed that kid and his whole family. He'd rather take a beating he didn't deserve.

When WW2 started, he joined the Navy in late December of 1941. He served 5 years and made 1st class petty officer--I was the only of his children to follow in his footsteps militarily. I served even longer. When he returned to Kentucky, his life was right where it had been when he left. He went back to Japan as part of the rebuilding team, married there and spent the next several years there.

When the family came to the States (I wasn't born yet), my mother went to live with him in squatterville USA. Big change for a Japanese girl in a fairly wealthy family. She still talks about how horrible it was. One thing that got me was her description of these large, dirty, disgusting, amorphous critters she saw slopping about in a pen. What ARE those things?? Sheep, my father said. Sheep?? Sheep are cute and white and fluffy!! These are disgusting!!

Unfortunately, a lot of non-Americans seem to think that way about Americans--cute and white and fluffy. Then they come to America and see the truth. I've been seeing it since the day I was born.