Tag Archives: race

Reflections on the 44th Inaugural

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In the yard of my childhood years, we had an old-fashioned child’s swing. It was not a department store swing set, but a single plank wooden seat, suspended from a massive 4×4 framework by weathered old steel chains. All of this was enclosed in an overgrown arbor of trees and shrubbery. As I grew older, far from outgrowing the swing, I repaired myself to it more often, and spent happy restorative hours just daydreaming. I wondered about the future and what it might hold for me. I wondered also about the future and what it might hold for all of us.

In those years I devoured books on space exploration and science fiction. These depicted an Earth where everybody could explore wherever they wanted. They depicted an Earth where everybody could join in this together. In my world of the mid-1950’s, the idea that everybody could live in harmony – black, brown, red, white, yellow, people of every race and religion – was truly the futuristic domain of science fiction.
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Rosa Parks 1913 – 2005

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If an updated “Profiles in Courage” (John F. Kennedy, 1956) could somehow be published 50 years later, I believe my heroine Rosa Parks would be in it.

Mrs. Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery Alabama. She had no grand plan for starting a watershed civil rights movement. Waiting for the municipal bus after a hard day’s work, on December 1, 1955, she had planned some community work in the evening; it was not a day to plan to be arrested. But Rosa Parks just got tired of Alabama’s “Jim Crow” system of mistreatment , discrimination and segregation.
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Patterns of History

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HISTORY TEST

Please pause a moment, reflect back, and take the following multiple choice test. The events are actual events from history. They actually happened!!!

Do you remember?

1. The Symbionese Liberation Army was:

    a. A group of crazy black supremacists
    b. A rich white girl
    c. An orchestra musician’s union
    d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

2. Lee Harvey Oswald was:

    a. a deranged white commie dupe assassin
    b. a best-seller by Rachel Carson in 1962
    c. a popular fruit juice drink
    d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

3. Idi Amin was:

    a. a deranged syphilitic Ugandan who murdered 300,000 of his own people
    b. a poisonous Australian sidewinder
    c. a knockoff meditation technique popular in Los Angeles in the 1960’s
    d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

4. The Weathermen were:

    a. a radical terrorist organization dominated by spoiled liberal white kids
    b. a hit song by Bob Dylan
    c. a political reorganization of the National Oceanographic Survey group
    d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

5. The “Unabomber” was:

    a. a crazy white megalomaniac who glorified self-directed anonymous terrorism
    b. a powerful mixed drink of the Harvey Wallbanger genre
    c. a bicycling fad that went seriously astray
    d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

6. Timothy McVeigh was:

    a. a deranged white terrorist who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in June 1997
    b. a discotheque in the Washington DC area
    c. a decoction of wild grasses favored by herbalists and the “natural” movement
    d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

Nope, ..I really don’t see a pattern here to justify profiling, do you?

Let’s send this to as many people as we can. Patterns without a point? Come on, send this to everybody in your address book. Never mind if this sounds like spamming; it is not some political theory, just common sense. Wake up America! There’s one behind every tree!

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