Social Justice – Page 2 – The Future is Open

November 30, 2021

A story that needs telling

I’ve been reading The 1619 Project. It’s an enlightening book. The author describes plantations as work camps. I’ve never thought of Monticello, Mount Vernon and the like in the same light as Ravensbruck and Birkenau but they were. Enslaved African Americans were forced to work, brutally treated and in many cases killed to keep them towing the line. They were bred like livestock and treated the same or worse.

I learned in school that Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation but it took the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendment to codify that into United States law. A new era emerged after the Civil War until the the end of the Reconstruction era when federal troops were withdrawn from the southern states. Then all hell broke loose as vigilante rule took over and Blacks and other people of color were systematically subjugated. Voter suppression and intimidation was the norm. Four thousand blacks were lynched between 1880 and 1940. Teenage Emmet Till was brutally murdered in 1955 for smiling at a white woman. People of color really weren’t free until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965.

Native Americans were forced off their lands and put on reservations. Schools were created to forcibly destroy their culture and they the original owners of the Americas were not granted the right to vote in the United States until 1925. Following World War 2 white American servicemen and women qualified for the GI Bill which helped many including my father to attend college and pursue professional lives. The GI Bill was denied to soldiers of color. There is so much that is not understood by whites about people of color and how our society is not color blind at all. Our lives as white people is skewed to benefit us while disenfranchising our brothers and sisters who are darker.

I don’t like the term racist as there is no such thing as race. It is a social construct that was created to justify the repression of people of color. We are all the same race, the human race. Paradoxically we are all prejudiced. It is normal and natural to feel more at home with those that look like us.

I know I’m prejudiced. I don’t want to be prejudiced but I am. I work to overcome that on a daily basis. What’s most distressing in this country is that we have systemic prejudice that many fail to recognize and accept. Many of our presidents owned slaves. When our founding documents were written in the 18th century Black people were enslaved, Native Americans had their land stolen and were routinely murdered.

We have a lot of work ahead of us to truly become the United States of America.

October 1, 2021

Who are they kidding?

I read today that a poll conducted recently that a majority of voters of both persuasions believe that the time has come for secession from the United States of America. Are these folks living in a vacuum? Who do they think provides the fuel for the economy that provides for the common defense and the common good? Forces of the extreme right wing of the Republican party who care nothing about the common good of the country and for that matter, the world are espousing this wrong headed approach to the body politic.

These separatists who decry socialism and advanced society fail to realize that the roads we drive on, the sewer and water systems that support our day to day lives and most of the infrastructure that supports our daily lives is paid for by tax dollars. Many of the so called red states are full of military installations which provide thousands of jobs and no doubt contribute mightily to the wealth of the communities that surround them. If they secede from the union then those jobs go to other states.

Nearly seven hundred twenty thousand Americans are dead from a deadly virus primarily because this same bunch of idiots are interfering with roll-out of the vaccine to mitigate the effects of the virus.

It’s October 1 and where I live the trees are still mostly green. That’s unusual. When I was a boy most of the trees were bright orange on the first day of October. It was common to have a ‘killing frost’ by mid-September. We have had one overnight when the temperature dipped to 38 degrees fahrenheit. The forecast for December this year is for warmer weather than normal. That’s all becasue the climate is changing. The gulf coast of our country has been ravaged by record breaking hurricanes which have left unheard of destruction in their wake.

We need thoughtful leadership from intelligent people. I encourage you not to listen to talking heads spreading lies and misinformation that put the lives of all the world at risk. Be a uniter not a divider.