Last weekend, I made my annual pilgrimage to Chattanooga for LibertyCon. In addition to the expected geekery and humor, I happened to catch John Ringo hold a 300-person auditorium spellbound with a personal recollection from his childhood.
To understand it, you need to know that John Ringo’s father was a civil engineer who worked on major assignments overseas. John grew up in 23 foreign countries, attending classes at fourteen different schools. This story took place in Iran, before the fall of the Shah. You can listen to the audio here, or read the transcript below.
John Ringo:
January of the first year I was there. I was ten years old. My father is working in Abadan, we were living in Teheran. He would work down there for three weeks, then come back to Teheran for a week, back and forth.
My mother decided that we were going to go down and visit my dad in Abadan. And we were going to take the train. It was winter, and Iran has more snow than you would expect. It’s a lot like Utah, actually. The weather was very, very cold. As a matter of fact, that year, right around Christmas, it had snowed so heavily that the roof of the airport collapsed from the snow. And I had to go upstairs and shovel the flat top of the building. Until I couldn’t move any more and we got an Ash Kali. And I’m not even going to explain what an Ash Kali is… just “day laborer.”
The train went down overnight. And, at one point, we were stopped on a siding and I woke up in the middle of the night, because the movement had stopped. And I kind of got out to look around, and we were in this upland valley in the Zagros Mountains. It was one of those nights that was so cold that you could see the trees cracking. There were these leafless poplar trees, and snow, and you kind of see a village off in the distance. The cold poured off the window.
While I was out there, I noticed some movement. And my mom had told me, and it was true, that they still had train robberies. So I was like “Cool! It’s bandits! What am I going to do?” I was an adventurous ten-year-old kid, right? Ooh, maybe bandits are going to be boarding.
But it wasn’t bandits. It was women and children in rags… who were going along the train track, picking up coal and rice and wheat that had fallen off the train… so they would have a little bit of heat, and a little bit of food, to make it through another day.
That image was, you can call it childhood trauma, if you like. And every time that I see certain directions, I realize that we’re heading in the direction… we are either headed towards children in the snow, or we are headed away from children in the snow. So at a certain level, everything that I do… is to try to make a world where the only reason that children go out into the snow is to play.
The problem is we as Americans have no idea what the rest of the world is like. Americans are seen as rich, America is seen as a nation with streets paved with gold. We are the only nation on the planet with fat poor people. Poor people in homes.
John saw the world as it is.
Bandit 6 knows how to get out of that part of the world!
The fact that America has fat poor people isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a testimony that things in America are pretty damn good. In the 1950’s my oldest brother and my mother used to walk the train tracks in Indiana to glean coal that had fallen from the trains so they could heat their apartment. So this story hits pretty damn close to home.