Obviously, I disagree, but simply stating "they are wrong. poo poo on them." isn't likely to do a whole wagon load of good.  What we are up against, with this whole race issue, is the veneration of ancestors, or its opposite, the dishonoring of ancestors.  No one, black or white, wants his or her ancestors made out to be stupid or cruel.   Is that not obvious enough?  All of us have ancestors that lived through harder times than we have, and all of us should be proud of them.  All of us have ancestors, somewhere back down the line, that were at one time conquerors raping and pillaging their way across their particular known world, and loving every minute of it, and all of us should be proud of them too.  It's simply false for any of us to view ourselves as descending from only victims, or from only victimizers.

    So there are some who are not likely to respond well to any *insinuation* that there was anything wrong or unethical about enslaving people.  After all, everyone was doing it back then, they say, and inevitably their _particular_ ancestors were especially kindly and paternalistic toward their slaves, which makes it all right, somehow ... well maybe not all right, but all that's in the past, they say, will everybody just shut up about it and get on with life in the present?  Of course in that moment they are thinking that slavery ended after the Civil War.  They are forgetting that lynching, that particularly American form of human sacrifice, continued as a kind of recreational activity throughout the South well into the Twentieth Century.  And it was not just red-neck hay-seeds dragging people behind pickup trucks.  The whole community would turn out in their Sunday best with a picnic lunch, and the local big wigs would be there to give their stamp of approval to the proceedings.  There are pictures of this, I'm told.  The whole respectable core of the community would pose for the group shot: 50 or so smiling white faces and a few black guys swinging from the shade trees.  This was Life in the South in living memory, and the respectable dignitaries in the pictures are the grandparents of the respectable dignitaries today.  The smiling white faces in the lynching pictures are the same smiling white faces that look down from mantle pieces in the finest homes in town.  There's no getting around this truth, though one can understand why some would try to escape it.

But those ARE the finest homes in town and those people have the power to shape what is taught in schools, even into the university level, and so the ugly truth of what terror lies behind the facade of white southern respectability is a big secret here. At least among white people.

A bartender in Richmond told me the story with pride of how, when a professor characterized a certain Confederate Colonel as a "drunkard and a womanizer," his elderly aunt had gone to town and confronted him saying, 'My grandfather was _not_ a drunkard and a womanizer, etc." and she basically brow-beat this professor into publicly rescinding his statement, and changing the way he taught his course.  Thus history is rewritten.

When conservatives look back on the early part of the Twentieth Century as a kind of golden era when minorities knew their places and crime did not exist, they don't take into account that "uppity" blacks knew that they could be summarily executed anytime they annoyed the wrong white person, and they also don't take into account that back then, crimes committed against blacks were not reported as crimes, and so it's quite possible there was just as much murder and mayhem 100 years ago as there is today, but much of it was directed at blacks, and so it "didn't count."
 

6-12-AA5
Recently I heard about an investigation done, I believe, by the General Accounting Office, the agency with the Herculean task of Keeping the Gummint Honest.  The investigators bought fake "Federal Agent" badges through the internet, and found that they could just stride right through airport security, military base security, various gummint agency securities, nuclear power plants, and even into the Capital Building itself by just adopting an officious Cop Attitude and flashing fake badges.  They could announce "We're Armed," as an explanation for why they were walking around airport metal detectors, and no one stopped them, because they had badges.  Can you picture the memo that turns up at security desks throughout the gummint and private bureaucracies?

"You are all USELESS if potential terrorists can walk right by you with guns and fake badges. CHECK THOSE BADGES!  We may conduct a similar test here, and HEADS COULD ROLL!
So tighten up!
signed
Mistuh Baws Man

Do You Yahoo?  HAVE A NICE DAY, OR BE PREPARED TO EXPLAIN WHY NOT."

So this changes everything.   Now real cops are going to have to submit to having their credentials checked and verified before they can enter any secure place.  Boy, that's gonna piss them off.  They love strutting in, their black leather Copismo shined to perfection flashing the badge with the left hand while the right unstraps the pistol.  And who's going to say, at that point, "Uh, excuse me sir, you need to stop right there while we check to see if you are a real officer."?  Till now, nobody tried that crap more than once, not unless they were very old and very rich.  But now, "respect for the badge" has become in itself a "window of vulnerability," and even $7.00 per hour security screen watchers will be authorized, nay expected, to challenge any badge, forcibly restrain apparent cops from entering until they have been checked out, and to be especially wary of anything that looks unfamiliar or says "Federal" this-or-that on it...

The Basic Human Equality Rears Its Ugly Head.  Any game can be faked, and with TV informing everyone, INCLUDING the cops on how to be a cop, well, anybody can be a cop.

Heh heh.

The harder they try to impose order, the more chaos results.

There used to be an elm tree in front of my house in Richmond.  Over the decades, its roots had pushed and broken the concrete of the sidewalk many times, and after repeated repairs and attempts to cut out the roots.
It would seem the concrete was stronger.  It was hard where the wood was soft.  It was cold when the wood was warm.  It was man made, a product of iron and machines and the insatiable human lust for destruction where the wood was just a dumb plant.  And finally, the concrete was On Top.  Must not underestimate the advantages of having gravity on Your Side.  But we all knew the tree would "win" in the end.  It, or another tree like it, would continue to push concrete around till bloody doomsday and beyond, and there was nothing we could do about it, shy of paving the entire world (and there are some who want to do this even now....  Oh, for a plague.)  And regardless, the roots of trees will stir the last crumbs of the last concrete that the last human pours for the last barbecue pit.  Amen

Chaos and tree roots give me hope.
 
 

6-19-AA5
I'm told that the mafia had pix of Hoover in a dress, and used it to control him.  So while he collected dossiers on politically active citizens, he covered for the mafia, insisting they "didn't exist," etc.

Does this blow your mind like it does mine?  Picture a balance scale.  On one side, the mountains of information by which the FBI intimidated virtually the entire country, and on the other side, one picture of Hoover in a dress (maybe more, maybe none at all, but only the insinuation of them.) ... and the balance tips toward that one picture...   That one picture trumped the mountain of dossiers, every gun the feds had, every gun the cops had, every G-Man, however sincere and able, and every politician, even the ones that stayed bought.

The only possible excuse for a secret federal police force with special "supercop" privileges is to fight interstate organized crime: the mafia.  And against the mafia, they were not only ineffective, but all that power and prestige were ultimately turned to the maf's ends.

All those agents might as well just go home, for all the effect they have, when they can be reasonably certain of corruption further up...  And they Can.  They Always Can.

This is like a fable of the information age.  The FBI stands as an archetype of the way information can be used by some Central Control Hierarchy to manipulate, control, and intimidate citizens.  That's really about all the FBI does, besides collecting statistics and maintaining its own army of criminals on public payroll called "informants."  Pretty scary huh?  Well, anytime you get a concentration of power like that, you also get a concentration of  *interest* in somehow getting at that power.  Hence, the Picture.  We can be certain they tried about everything they could to get at Hoover, since he carried so much unquestionable power in his person.  Maybe he was too proud or principled to be bought.  Maybe he turned up his nose at show girls carrying champagne and shopping bags of money... (only because they weren't boys with lingerie... a cheap shot at a dead SOB but what the hey.  Somebody's gotta tell it like it is, even if nobody is listening.)  But when there is that much *interest,*  it finds a crack sooner or later.  Maybe it's not cross dressing.  Maybe it's something else  that'll scandalize the barnyard, panic the herd, and set the hens a-clucking.  Or maybe the guy's unassailable, but then he cares about somebody who's not.  Or look for a different target....  Sooner or later, that much power attracts corruption to it like a magnet.  You can pretty much assume that any organization with a concentration of power has a cancer of corruption, eating its way out from the center.
 
 

Litha at Arcadia

The Invocation:
Fairy Lady, Fairy Lord, Fairy Friends, and Fairy Horde, we have gathered to thank you and bless you for your gifts of Grace and Humor, Flowering Creativity, Liberty, Light, and Pleasure.  Join us now in our celebration.

The Blessing:
Blessed Be the Mother and the Child, the Creative Process, the Creative Force.
May all our creative strands flower and bear fruit,
Doors of perception swing open, possibilities unfold, in synchronous rhythm and harmony.

The Report:
"Saturday night we went up to Matt's circle on the mountain and sang and danced and drank red wine and then the drumming picked up and Terry grabbed hands and everybody joined hands and formed a fast-stepping circle and it was so fast we lost our breath and one guy fell out and it kept going without him and then it was done and we were sprawled out on the ground, sending all the energy back down into the Earth, and it was silent.  Breathing.  I caught something out of the corner of my eye and then it was everywhere, this incredible LIFE I was surrounded by.  I'd had a stray thought about how all the spirits driven off the neighboring lands by deforestation and fires would need some place to go and then suddenly I was able to "see" everywhere these very very old entities and they were silent and pulsing and green and protective and completely ALIVE.  To the north, the wise ones; to the south, the fiery ones; to the east, the breathing ones; to the west, the overflowing ones; in the center, US.  My forehead met with the cool Mother Earth and she kept me steady through the goosebumpy wide-eyed rush of sensation, realization.  She sustained me, as she always has . . ."
    Many thanks to you and to the land.

Blessed Be,
Beth

-30-
 

email:

--- Moongazer <moongazer@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Okay. So they know what our DNA does and what
> it is for. This is going to be a brave new
> world, and we are going to be able to cure
> cancer and mental illness and the common
> cold...
>
> Great. We are going to cure the art right out
> of ourselves. Mental illness and inconvenience
> are the things that make music possible, that
> makes stories interesting, and that makes
> photos and other visual forms of art worth
> looking at. Schumann killed himself because he
> could not get a tune out of his head. He threw
> himself in a river because he could not get it
> to go away. (Brahms later wrote that tune into
> his music, which I thought was a great way to
> get one up on the man who married the woman
> that he loved.) Alice Walker talks to the
> characters in her stories face-to-face. Belioz
> wrote Symphony Fantastique to impress the
> actress that he was obsessed with. Actually, in
> that case I do not which one of them was
> crazier...him for writing and performing this
> to impress her or her for falling for him after
> he wrote for her a work of art in which he
> kills her, he is given capital punishment for
> that crime, and she dances on his grave in the
> form of a witch. (I guess murdered people turn
> into witches where the rest of us, of course,
> become angels.)
>
> Without imperfection, perfection is not
> possible.
>
 

This is really good, and I agree whole heartedly.
 When are you gonna start a web page?  I had lots
of time to think of this, or something close to
it, when I worked in a plant nursery.  In the
nursery, each plant lives in as optimal
conditions as humans can muster.  Thousands of
genetically identical cuttings grow to become
"perfect" standardized plants.
In the real world, though, each plant fights the
others for nutrients and water under the ground,
and for light and space above the ground. They
get sick or broken and have to come back the best
they can.  They deal with floods and droughts,
and no one puts them in a holding house all
winter, either.
A huge variety of genetic material exists in the
green matter in nature, with what you see
representing just the tip of the iceberg.  The
soil is loaded with viable seeds waiting for
their chance.  So the ratios of what comes up are
a little different in each generation, the
annuals coming every year like the melody line of
a song, and the trees and shrubs working a slower
deeper rhythm, all in perfect time with the
motions of a lush and fecund planet.
Most people can't see a vibrant but scarred and
half-broken tree in the woods as perfect.  But
the battle scarred veteran has better stories
than the foppish greenhouse prince any day of the
week.

M