There's a long essay about this in the layout of the record. It's about a story that my father told me about growing up in the segregated South in the early '50s. Growing up in a poor white community, right next to an even poorer latrine-dug black community. A school bus full of white children on a dusty road, in the heat, in the South, and a grown African-American man walking to work. And one of the kids on the school bus leaned his head out the window and spit full on the face of this man. The school bus driver – an illiterate Caucasian, working-class man who has no cultural reason to [react to] this – kind of changes my dad's life. My dad was one of the younger kids on the bus. [The driver] stops the bus, slams on the breaks, goes back and finds the kid who spat in the face of the black man on the road, and said, "You have to apologize to him and with your clean handkerchief, wipe his face – or I will not take you to school." So, he goes up and apologizes and gives his handkerchief to the black man, who is also astonished. ... This story, this sense of wonder: It's not nature, it's not nurture, there's something deep within us that recognizes, even in the South, that this was wrong. This school bus driver is for every other purpose a historically unimportant man ... but how this story, how much of an impact it had, and how it's still having an impact. ... There's this hopefulness inside of us all despite how fucked-up everything is.
Quoting Thomas Barnett:
There's a long essay about this in the layout of the record. It's about a story that my father told me about growing up in the segregated South in the early '50s. Growing up in a poor white community, right next to an even poorer latrine-dug black community. A school bus full of white children on a dusty road, in the heat, in the South, and a grown African-American man walking to work. And one of the kids on the school bus leaned his head out the window and spit full on the face of this man. The school bus driver – an illiterate Caucasian, working-class man who has no cultural reason to [react to] this – kind of changes my dad's life. My dad was one of the younger kids on the bus. [The driver] stops the bus, slams on the breaks, goes back and finds the kid who spat in the face of the black man on the road, and said, "You have to apologize to him and with your clean handkerchief, wipe his face – or I will not take you to school." So, he goes up and apologizes and gives his handkerchief to the black man, who is also astonished. ... This story, this sense of wonder: It's not nature, it's not nurture, there's something deep within us that recognizes, even in the South, that this was wrong. This school bus driver is for every other purpose a historically unimportant man ... but how this story, how much of an impact it had, and how it's still having an impact. ... There's this hopefulness inside of us all despite how fucked-up everything is.