Tag Archives: slavery in America

Open Letter To ALL Elected Republicans

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Economic issues, education, Environmental Issues, guns, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Rants, voting rights

Sometimes the angst builds and one just has to let off a bit of steam.  This is one of those times.  This letter is intended for Republican members of Congress, but also governors, state legislators, and ALL elected representatives who are failing us.

It’s sad that so many people have put their lives in your hands, yet you are playing Russian roulette with them.  You have betrayed the people you claim to represent, worse yet you have betrayed this nation while convincing the masses that you are acting on their behalf while filling your own coffers and laughing all the way to the bank.

Voting rights … as a citizen and taxpayer I demand the two bills that failed last year be re-visited and passed.  You say unfettered gun ownership is a constitutional right?  I SAY voting is a much more important constitutional right!!!  Those guns you are so damn protective of have killed 8,607 people so far this year, more than 300 of them children under the age of 17, and yet you say this is the “price we must pay for freedom”.  Bullshit!

You roll back regulations designed to save lives AND the environment, and then you point the finger of blame everywhere but at yourself when a train carrying deadly chemicals derails or a bank goes under because of a lack of oversight.  Look in the mirror!!!  Therein lies the blame!  Regulations on business exist because people are greedy and the more they have, the more they want and when they want more, they don’t give a damn who they step on to get it.  THIS is part of the purpose of government, but you shirk your duty in the interest of your own bank account!

Too many people in power don’t give one damn about the people of this country.

You can dye your hair, but eventually your roots will start to show.  You can whitewash history, but our roots will out.  American history IS Black history.  The U.S. didn’t exist as an entity until 1776, but African slaves were brought here and put to work as early as 1619, more than a century earlier.  They were beaten, starved, their children taken from them and sold to the highest bidder to be worked literally to death, but today we are supposed to turn a blind eye, to pretend it never happened???

The joke’s on us … on me … on every person in this country who isn’t wealthy.  NO, DAMMIT … Trickle Down economics is a myth, a fairy tale, it DOES NOT WORK!!!  And yet, once again, that is what we are being told.  “Oh, just put more money into the hands of the wealthy corporations and it will trickle down and fill your pot!”  NO, IT WON’T.  It never has and it never will.  WHEN will we stop being told this mythical lie???  WHEN will you politicians realize that we’re smarter than you give us credit for being?  Meanwhile, your pots are overflowing with donations from the likes of Charles Koch, Bernie Marcus, Paul Singer, the DeVos family and more.  Rather reminiscent of that fable that Marie Antoinette once said, when told that people were starving and couldn’t afford bread, “Let them eat cake!”

And then you blame everything that goes wrong on those of us who have compassion, empathy, who care about such things as human lives, the planet, other species – you call us ‘woke’ and make it sound like the dirtiest word in the English language.

You would take away the rights of women, of Black and Asian people, of Jews & Muslims, of any and all who do not fall into that “white, Christian, male” category and turn this nation into something ugly.  Well, if you succeed, you can have your damn country, for I want no part of it!  I don’t share your vision, and neither do the majority of people in this country, but in your eyes, we are naught but tools to be used, manipulated, then thrown away when we are no longer of use to you.  Beware, for when people have nothing left to lose, they fight.  That fight will come and it will be on your shoulders.

Juneteenth Is Now Official, But …

Posted on by under History, Holidays, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Tomorrow is Juneteeth.  If you don’t know what Juneteenth is, please visit my post from last year to refresh your memory.  In short, Juneteenth is “a holiday celebrated on 19 June to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the US. The holiday was first celebrated in Texas, where on that date in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, slaves were declared free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.”  But in this, the era of extreme racism in government, police, and society, it is much, much more than that.

I was so moved that I was speechless, a rarity for me, when President Biden signed a bill, the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, into law yesterday declaring that June 19th is, from this point forward in the United States, a federal holiday.  The bill landed on the President’s desk despite some 14 members of the House of Representatives who objected.  Yes, my friends, 14 people who We the People elected to federal office, to the United States Congress, are still so blinded by bigotry that they refused to honour the day that, at least on paper, Black people won the right to be free and equal in the eyes of this nation.

Those 14 representatives are …

  1. Mo Brooks (Alabama)
  2. Andy Biggs (Arizona)
  3. Andrew Clyde (Georgia)
  4. Scott DesJarlais (Tennessee)
  5. Paul Gosar (Arizona)
  6. Ronnie Jackson (Texas)
  7. Doug LaMalfa (California)
  8. Thomas Massie (Kentucky)
  9. Tom McClintock (California)
  10. Ralph Norman (South Carolina)
  11. Mike Rogers (Alabama)
  12. Matt Rosendale (Montana)
  13. Chip Roy (Texas)
  14. Tom Tiffany (Wisconsin)

Remember their names, for these are some of the most racist, bigoted representatives in the United States Congress today.  Also note that ten of the fourteen are from states SOUTH of the Mason-Dixon line … states that fought on the side of the Confederacy trying to preserve slavery just 150 years ago.

There seem to have been two schools of ‘thought’ (and I use that term loosely) among these fourteen as to why they do not support this bill.  Some said it was because of the bill’s name as ‘Independence Day’, and others objected … believe it or not … to federal workers getting yet another paid holiday!  Remember that members of Congress get numerous, lengthy paid holidays each year, far in excess of what the average worker gets.  A few of the more ignominious comments …

  • “Juneteenth is more debunked Critical Race Theory in action.” – Paul Gosar
  • “… I do not support more days off for federal employees.” – Ronny Jackson
  • “Naming this day ‘National Independence Day’ would create confusion and push Americans to pick one of those two days as their independence day based on their racial identity.” – Thomas Massie
  • “I don’t believe it’s healthy to reach into the dead past, revive its most malevolent conflicts and reintroduce them into our age.” – Tom McClintock
  • “This isn’t an effort to commemorate emancipation, it’s very clearly tied to the larger hard-left agenda to enshrine the racial history of this country as the prime aspect of our national story.” – Matt Rosendale
  • “… needlessly divides our nation on a matter that should instead bring us together by creating a separate Independence Day based on the color of one’s skin.” – Chip Roy

Apparently Mr. McClintock and Mr. Rosendale do not believe in that old adage that if we forget the lessons of history, we are destined to repeat it.  And Mr. Roy must have his head buried in the sand if he doesn’t realize that this nation is already hopelessly divided on matters of race, among other issues.  What a bunch of narrow-minded bigots these 14 white males are, with no sense of history, no sense of humanity, only their own belief in their white supremacy.  Folks, please, vote these jerks out next year … our very lives depend on it.

It’s Time To End The Civil War …

Posted on by under Election 2020, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Among my favourite columnists is Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post … he always seems able to cut through the detritus and get to the heart of the matter, to make sense out of chaos.  His column yesterday is no exception and I thought very worthy of being shared here.  I also highly recommend you check out his link to the 1619 Project, an ongoing project developed by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 with the goal of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States and timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia.

Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy

Eugene-RobinsonBy Eugene Robinson 

Columnist

June 11, 2020 at 4:27 p.m. EDT

It should have happened 155 years ago, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but maybe — just maybe — the Civil War is finally coming to an end. And perhaps Donald Trump, not Jefferson Davis, will go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.

Symbols like flags and monuments matter, because what they symbolize is our vision of ourselves as a nation: the heroes, battles, movements, sacrifices and ideals we honor. So when I see multiracial crowds toppling the statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians, when I see respected military leaders arguing that Army posts should no longer bear the names of Confederate generals, when I see NASCAR banning displays of the Confederate battle flag at its races — witnessing all of this, I let hope triumph over experience and allow myself to imagine that this may indeed be a transformational moment.

Like the Civil War itself, “Lost Cause” symbology is simply and entirely about white supremacy. It has nothing to do with “heritage” or “tradition” or any such gauzy nonsense. The heavily armed “liberate Michigan” mob that invaded the statehouse in Lansing, egged on by President Trump, had no historical reason to be waving the Confederate flag. That banner represents the knee that has been kept on the necks of African Americans not just for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the time Derek Chauvin spent crushing the life out of George Floyd, but for 401 years. 

Lee’s surrender ended nothing, because the nation did not even begin to grapple with white supremacy. Reconstruction was strangled in its infancy; true racial reconciliation was never even attempted. The statue of Davis in Richmond, brought down by protesters Wednesday night, was not erected until 1907. Like almost all of the Lost Cause monuments, it was built during the revanchist era, when Southern whites were celebrating their reestablished dominance over African Americans via repressive Jim Crow laws and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many recall that the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse was taken down in 2015 following the massacre of nine African American worshipers by a white supremacist at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. Few realize that the racist flag had been installed at the statehouse not in 1861 but a century later, in 1961, when black South Carolinians like my parents were agitating for the right to vote.

The killing of Floyd has provoked a national moment of reckoning with police violence and white supremacy. But the position of the Trump administration is that systemic racism does not even exist — that our unexamined and unaddressed racial problems all come down to a few “bad apples” here and there.

Perhaps in an attempt to gain political advantage — and perhaps, as much evidence suggests, because it’s what he truly believes — Trump has used this moment to side with Lost Cause white supremacy. His all-caps tweets for “LAW & ORDER” sound like George Wallace when he was governor of Alabama; his demand for a militarized response to the protests reminds me of Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who attacked nonviolent civil rights protesters with water hoses and vicious dogs.

When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

Trump claimed, ridiculously, that the names are somehow part of the nation’s “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” He may be historically ignorant enough not to know that the generals in question were traitors as famous for the battles they lost as for any of their triumphs; that ultimate victory went to the Union, not the Confederacy; and that the whole point of the rebellion was to deny freedom to African Americans. Or he may know these facts but believe his political base doesn’t.

Just hours later, however, NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. If there is one sporting venue that Trump might think of as a safe space, it would be a NASCAR race — until now. Heck, I might even go watch a race when the pandemic ends.

Trump must be bewildered. Unsubtle appeals to racial animus (remember his “birther” lies) have always worked for him in the past, but now he seems to be flailing. If it turns out that the Lost Cause is finally, truly lost, then so is the president who made himself its champion.