Violence and Civil Rights

From what I have read recently, white people left something out of our history of how black people won civil rights in the 1960s. 

MLK and John Lewis and the people with them were braver than I can understand; they were peaceful and effective to a point. But in the South protest marches were sometimes made by people of color carrying concealed weapons, ready to defend their community. No one beat them or stopped them. The KKK stood aside.

How do a suppressed people get the attention of rich community bosses? Bosses like the status quo. That works fine for them, until unknown citizens set fire to their warehouses at night and boycott their stores (cancel culture) in daylight. Then it's finally time for a change. 

If people are treated badly enough, they will respond with destruction and boycott, something to remember the next time it happens.

Sturgis

 Many years ago Susan and I decided to visit Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickok had been murdered. I intended to buy a Wild Bill T-shirt. 

We drove into the rustic western town in a suitable Ford 3/4 ton pickup and found no souvenir shirts and no bathrooms. The three of us looked around. In those days we had a pet wolf, and he rode on the bench seat between us. 

It turned out that the entire town had a plumbing problem, and everyone had to hold it for a day or two while something got fixed.

Soon we were leaving town, heading for the nearest place that had toilets, a hamlet called Sturgis. I think the drive took about an hour, and we stopped at the first service station we came to and ran inside. The station was like something from the Twilight Zone. Half  the main room was dedicated to the sale of leather jackets. This gas station had stocked hundreds of black jackets. It was eerie. We did our business fast, tried to look friendly and left as quickly as we could. 

Diversity Among Black People

Yesterday Joe Biden told the TV cameras that black people don't have the diversity of Hispanics. It was never his intention, I am sure, to insult black people or to toot a racist dog-whistle. It's just that he can't talk sensibly off the cuff. He's aged out. He needs a script to read.

Some black people, as you know, are Hispanic.

The problem is that Biden's cognitive gears are jamming, and he is about to be elected President during a pandemic and a huge economic downturn. Or Biden might even lose the election because his cognitive deficits during debates turn off voters. 

What the Harvard lads currently dominating the Democratic Party ought to do is get Biden to withdraw and free his delegates. Then nominate a trustworthy DNC employee who is young and competent--perhaps a woman of color. But that won't happen this time around. Maybe in four years.

Death by Voter Suppression

When the translucent eel known as Jerrod Kushner, son of a felon, brainlessly surmised that the coronavirus would have a more deadly impact on blue states than red states, he decided not to help anyone.  That's what has been reported. Let hundreds of thousands die, just another method of voter suppression.   

 tRump decided not to try to help during the pandemic. He abandoned the Republicans of California to their fate.

There are 4,700,000 Republicans registered in California, the most of any state. Florida is second. In California, Republicans are the third largest group of voters (behind the Democrats and the independents). In the end, California is blue.

The President and his mob don't mind who dies, really.  But they prefer the dying be concentrated in states don't support tRump. I look at it this way: I don't vote Republican, and Kushner and tRump are trying, indirectly, to kill me before November. 

John Lewis

Which one of these sentences did John Lewis write?

1. Stand up for what you truly believe.

2.  Vote for the lesser of two evils.

3.  Support the candidate you think others will like. 

4. A penny saved is a penny earned.  

Doubt Hats

In a column for the NY Times, Ross Douthat wrote that the abortion rate among African Americans is five times that among whites. He raised the possibility that Planned Parenthood, one of many abortion providers, is guilty of structural racism. It is reducing the number of black voters, diminishing what Douthat sees as black voting power. 

When abortion was illegal, I knew a young woman whose life became badly marred by an illegal abortion that permanently damaged her health. 

There is something disturbing about the fact that black woman are more apt to abort than white women, but I would argue that the structural racism is in the situations that black women and men can find themselves in. Raising a child in poverty is difficult. Many people of color don't get solid educational or employment opportunities. Changing that will be hard. Shutting down Planned Parenthood is easy but not the answer. Denying choice would revive unsafe abortions. 

Vacation!

Pandemics are learning experiences. For example, I have learned how to extend a pandemic in America so it lasts a year or more. All you have to do is close everything down, then open it, close it, open it, close it, etc. Repeat until you get a new idea. You can supercharge this process by letting each state do its own thing. 

Also, experts at the CDC have taught me how deeply children suffer when schools close. How could anyone have forgotten that? 

We can all recall how we used to suffer when summer came and the auditorium doors closed. Especially that dreaded last day sitting at your desk in early June, surrounded by weeping students suddenly barred from chemistry class, except for the few shiftless scholars (like me) allowed to repeat chemistry in summer school.

Army Service

A friend loaned me the dairy of one of his ancestors, Sergeant Budworth of the Union Army, who fought at Vicksburg, perhaps the central battle of the Civil War.  Much later Budworth wrote: "Came off guard this morning. I drew a canteen and blouse and pair of socks. The blouse is 2 small."

Of course, it was too small. Why did he get a blouse? Was he a woman? 

He wrote: "Orders this morning to be ready for inspection at 9 A.M. We were inspected by a lieut. Colonel of a negro regt. He got through about noon. We then get orders to turn over all the old shelter tents. They had to be condemned. We tore down our tent then they were not condemned. We had to put them up again."

That's the same army I served in. 

Japan

This morning Japan announced that they have lost a total of 1,000 lives to the coronavirus pandemic. The population of the USA is about five times that of Japan, so if we had been losing people at the same rate as Japan, we would have had about 5,000 deaths by now. Instead we have lost 141,000 lives (with no end in sight).

I'm not sure why we are so different, but one possible reason is that many of our citizens refuse to take the precautions urged on us by scientists. The Japanese are more medically compliant. Another possible reason is our system produced a President who is sociopathic and a political party too morally bankrupt to resist the President's indifference to the suffering and death of others. 

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