by harrywelty | Posted on June 25, 2020
I have a few saving graces.
1.I am too lazy to tell lies because explaining them away when they are discovered takes too much effort.
2.My mother told me many times when I was little that I shouldn’t cry because my grandfather was shot and he didn’t cry. As a result I am inclined not to cower in fear.
3.I read a lot of history. A lot of it, every day for several hours since I was very young. Or I watch history programs. The best program I’ve seen in the past couple days was an episode of American Masters about the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. I watched it with Claudia, my wife, who has read every one of Morrison’s novels about the black experience few of which have any reference to white lives. And yet the lives of her black characters have suffered like George Floyd in the dregs that white America has left for black America. Her first short novel, The Bluest Eye, is about a dark black child’s obsession with having something white, blue eyes. Her novel, Beloved, is about a mother who so cherishes her children that she slits their throats before they are captured and returned to slavery by white slavers.
I have read none of these books. I read history. And the history is so much worse. That is why, if I believed in God, I would pray to have the Republican Party utterly smashed at the polls this year for allowing itself to become the toy of an ignorant, race-baiting child like Donald Trump.
I was vaccinated against racism because of the reparation white leaders inflicted on the white South but were too cowardly to enforce – integrated public schools. Mild mannered, semi-segregated Kansas accepted integration. It was the exception. When I was in second grade the black children from segregated Buchanan elementary school brought their chairs stacked with their books to Loman Hill Elementary School. I climbed the jungle gym in playground where I had been sent as they were ushered into their new integrated school.
I said I was vaccinated against racism. That doesn’t mean I was free from it. Until I was about 40 my little liberal heart fretted that there might be some reason to worry that black Americans could be intellectually inferior to other races. I am a few months shy of turning 70 as I write this and I have had thirty years of absolute confidence that this is pure bullshit based on the evidence of my eyes and my deep study of history. This codswallop is simply what defeated slave owners wanted the rest of America to believe after they renamed slavery Jim Crow and deprived their black citizens of oxygen like so many George Floyds.
Sadly, that is not what the race baiters of the Republican party like Rush Limbaugh want America to believe. They want White America to think that the anemic solutions to 400 years of white persecution like Affirmative Action are an unconstitutional advantage that hurts white people. Of course, they are also bent out of shape at the prospect of paying 30 million Americans reparations for 400 years of legally enforced misery.
And the Race baiters took over the Grand Old Party. They spent the years after the Civil Rights movement dragging their feet and doing their best to prevent black America from proving itself. Two southern presidents, both Democrats, drove the south into the Republican Party. Harry Truman integrated the Armed Forces and Lyndon Johnson integrated everything else. And Ronald Reagan’s Republicans were glad to have these old Democrats. They helped the Republican Party win elections.
And then they took over the GOP like the ant parasite that needs the ant to be eaten by a bird. To get back into birds the parasite takes over the ant's brain and makes it climb a stalk of grass where it waits for a bird to eat it. That is why Donald Trump’s corruption of Abraham Lincoln merits destruction.
My modest hope is that after the Republican phoenix turns to ash I can help it rise again. Its time to give Abraham Lincoln some peace. He’s been rolling in his grave for far too long.
BTW Here's my favorite president of my lifetime. I always said I liked dependable boring white presidents.
