Yesterday was the surrender at Appomattox

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Or as I call it- VT day - Victory over the traitors.

I was playing Marching through Georgia-Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea!
While we were marching through Georgia!

Can you imagine a black slave, toiling in the field of Georgia, maybe hearing some far off battle noises, then hearing some martial music- but it’s not Dixie?!- then seeing the American flag, and knowing you were then free.

Not free from hard work, sure, but free from being whipped, from watching your women be raped, for the fear of being sold. Free!

2

And yet the battle for real freedom, freedom from being classed as sub-human by many of your countrymen, continues unabated 2-1/2 centuries later.

I am ashamed of my country.

3

Tell me, where would you rather live? And if you are ashamed of your country, what are you doing to make it better?

4

Trying to prevent the racist fascists from taking over. That seems a worthwhile venture.

A standard comment of conservatives is “We’re better than [insert awful country here], so we have no need to improve.” A standard comment of liberal / progressives is “We are [this far] short of perfection and have that much room to improve. Time to get cracking.”

it’s totally a glass half full / half empty POV difference. The Right is happy if they’re better than North Korea. The Left is unhappy if they’re less good than Heaven.

5

So how are other things in 2115?

6

I’m still waiting for men to stop thinking we are their women.

Still waiting and still marching against the SOS after all these years.

7

Wow, this thread certainly took a turn for the worse quick.

I remember, sorta, the Civil War Centennial. It was a big deal back then, although nobody today ever mentions it. Well, maybe when someone in a “recommend a history book” thread mentions Bruce Catton’s epic trilogy. Great books. For their time.

It’s fortuitous that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Right Act were passed during the Centennial. Mostly coincidence because of Kennedy’s death, but the noise from the war over slavery surrounding Congress probably helped push a few over the voting edge.

Perhaps nobody but Lyndon Johnson thought that the country would barely have made progress in the next fifty years. Nevertheless, Johnson was right when he said to Bill Moyers about the bill, “I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.”

Any modern history will tell you that the South was full of loudmouths insisting upon white, I mean state’s rights, and brooking no possible compromise with their vision of a Christian country run with their beliefs and prejudices codified into law. Sounds sickeningly familiar, doesn’t it? The war was inevitable, and everyone who wasn’t loudly pro-war tried to fend it off, usually by increasing pleas for impossible compromises, until reality overtook them. Defeating them was a necessity if anything in our country’s history was.

I’m not suggesting a modern Civil War. Without slavery, there are no neat lines to draw up sides. Yet, defeating the south’s legacy once again is a necessity. Don’t think of yourselves. Think of the children 100 or 150 years from now, smooging that victory through their brain teleports.

8

I wonder if you realize these two sentences do not actually go together. But, hey, let’s address them.

Q1. Where would I rather live than in the United States of America?
A1. This is more complex a question than you seem to think it is.

The United States has quite the variety of places and peoples. As a white male, I think I would likely suffer less from the discrimination than my wife, a female Korean citizen, would if we were to settle in the United States when I finally retire from working.

The next thing besides discrimination would be educational opportunities for her and any children if we were to have children. Only a certain segment of the Ameican population today is unaware of (or purposely ignores) the fact that the cost of higher education in the United States is going sky high and not looking to reverse direction in the near future. As my wife already has a baccalaureate, the next step on the education ladder would be pursuing a master’s, itself not widely known for being all that cheap.

Of course where in the country to live is a big question. We’d have to find an area that strikes a balance of affordable housing, affordable cost of living, proximity to a military base, decent and affordable health care facilities, and a good public transit system.

Where besides America? Well, she and I would have to apply the above filters to each place. So, far, we’ve been looking at some places in Asia, some in the Americas, and some in the Middle East even.

Q2. And if you are ashamed of your country, what are you doing to make it better?

A2. What makes you think Americans who criticize the country are ashamed of the country? Actually, in my real life experience, when someone’s asked me that question, they are convinced I am ashamed of being American. That’s not the case at all. I am proud of the country’s ideals and am actually working for the country to show that the country really does hold to those ideals.

I educate myself on what the current issues are and what is happening now that is contrary to those ideals. I uphold the rule of law, especially the constitution, and support those in all three branches of government who do likewise. I consider every person to be worthy of the protection of the constitution and the laws and campaign when and where I can to get people who hae the same belief into office in those three branches and to have those who do not removed from those offices. Finally, I endeavor to engage in, I hope, polite discourse with those who do not have the same attitudes as I do, hoping to get them aware of our founding ideals and to not be blinded or fooled by those who are actively working against those ideals.

Q3. (Yes, it’s a three-parter.) And what about you? What are you doing to make it better? What was the actual purpose of your question?

Edited to add:

See the acronym below.

VOTED (Victory Over Traitors Every Day).

9

Then four days later, as lilacs in the dooryard bloomed, the only person with the wisdom and skills to make an equitable peace was shot in the head.

10

Did Georgia use to rhyme with jubilee, free, and sea?

11

There are worse cases of poetic license than pronouncing “Georgia” as “Georgee”.

12

Maybe in Korean

13

The Arizona Supreme Court’s recent ruling ruling to allow a total abortion ban was based on a law passed 160 years ago. 48 years before Arizona even became a state and 56 years before women could even vote.

Yay democracy! :roll_eyes:

14

The Southerners I was surrounded by and immersed in, age 7-13. Valdosta GA, and also my grandparents and many cousins and uncles and aunts, the family I knew and the school and the neighbors. It was a mixed bag.

There was a lot of openly spoken belief in equality, and the notion that society had to change to accomodate that equality, and first and foremost the idea or notion that blacks werent’ equal had to die, we had to agree, it was wrong. It wasn’t lip service. There was enthusiasm for the idea. Modern thinking adults wanting to be in a society that does right. All that’s on the one side.

The other side of it is that there was a lot about the black experience and black culture that they didn’t know of, and they weren’t very curious, and when they did encounter it there was a lot of “why do they wanna be doing that, making those sounds, talking that way…”. What we meant by equality was they should have the freedom of integrating with us and being just like us.

I certainly got carried along into that mindset; it’s the one I grew up in. Now, I didn’t like being here, this Valdosta place we’d moved to when I was 7. Los Alamos was nicer. People here seemed mean. Or at least angrier. I did have openly racist neighbors. And there were racist people sprinkled in the mix for sure, but they were being judged and found racist by people who thought racism was illogical, stupid, and hurtfully hostile.

The nonracist liberal white people I grew up with (and as)… in 7th grade, my last grade before we moved again, I was in the top tier of English class. I mean, English and History and Science and Math, they were all broken up into performance tiers, 1 through 4, and ours was the most advanced English class. There were no black people in our class. So our English teacher told us “We can go to the skating rink for our class outing. We couldn’t last year because there were black kids in the class and the person who runs the skating rink won’t allow black guests, but this year it won’t matter so we can go there”. That is what it meant, that there were no black kids in advanced English this year. No sense of responsibility, culpability. I don’t think it was intentionally hostile. Consciously dismissing people from consideration. Just oblivious.

15

D’oh! :man_facepalming: Try 1-1/2 centuries. Which is still a damned long time to make little progress if any net progress.

1800s to 2000s must be 2 centuries, plus some small change between the xx60s and the xx20s. Right? Right??? Bueller?

16

People are allowed to criticize their country. They don’t owe you justification or rationalization.

17

“Georgia” isn’t meant to rhyme with the preceding three lines. It ends each verse and chorus with a separate declarative sound. It’s meant to be a break from the rhyme, for emphasis.

The rhyming scheme for each verse and the chorus of the song is:

A
A
A
G

B
B
B
G

C
C
C
G

D
D
D
G

ETA: and now I see that I’ve bumped an old thread that for some reason popped up in my feed with a blue dot. Oh, well.

18

Good point, and not that old, just a few months.

19

Very cool. Thanks!