You are currently browsing all posts tagged with 'slavery'.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 entries.

Hug a Racist Month

  • Posted on April 8, 2010 at 9:24 pm

I would be the first to tell you that I am not a fan of Barack Obama.  For me he is too much of a Republican and not enough of a real Democrat.  I also didn’t like the way he ran his campaign including the way he treated both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.  He also basically implied that Bill Clinton is a racist.  Race was used throughout his campaign and it made me crazy.  No one could say anything against Barack Obama without being called a racist.  I felt this was all wrong during the election.   I really felt it divided our country instead of uniting it.

Leave it to the Republicans to make me slide to the side of President Obama.  Governor McDonnell from the state of Virgina has declared April to be Confederate History month.  I thought the Civil War was over and the slaves were set free.  Yes, the winners got to write the history book and thus get to celebrate their victory.  However, the victory was a victory for our country.  I get tired of hearing about the Civil War.  Back in the eighties I lived in Oklahoma.  Just about every pickup I saw had a Confederate flag hanging in the back window.  That flag is a symbol for racism.  The fight was about slavery.  For a governor in the 21st Century to want to celebrate anything about that war I find it just ridiculous and an amazing step backwards into ignorance.  We have a racial and class divide in this country as it is why would any politician want to push those buttons of hate?

Living in Oklahoma was interesting.  The people were really nice and friendly but some of them were racist.  They loved the University of Oklahoma black football players but they only loved them for winning a game.  They certainly wouldn’t want them dating their daughters.  I could feel it.  They flew their Confederate flags with such pride that I thought the war was still going on.  They would reference the war to me solely because I was from the north.  I, of course, never even thought about the Civil war.  I went to Michigan State University in the seventies.  While I grew up in a small town in Michigan where it would be rare to even know a black person, attending the university allowed me to grow as a person and meet many people of color from all over the country and even the world.  I always felt like I lived under a bubble at MSU as it was sort of like a utopia in the way we all embraced our differences.  I can assure you that many of the people that I met in western Oklahoma thought about the war and when someone from the north was in their midst it was mentioned as though it happened yesterday.  Now I know that many of them lost family and friends in the war and maybe there was never a real “healing” for this but to want to celebrate such a tragedy in our history is a mistake.  Just when a wound is beginning to heal why should we pick at that scab?  I can only believe this is so important this year because Barack Obama dared to become President.  Gov. McDonnell mentions next year as being a 150 year celebration but what is there to celebrate?  The lives lost by both the north and the south?  That scab will never heal unless we all become one as a nation.  We shouldn’t celebrate the north and the south.  We should celebrate America!  If you are so inclined to celebrate April with Confederate History month please hug a racist as they need all the love they can get.

Amazing Grace

  • Posted on January 1, 2010 at 10:30 pm

I just watched the movie, “Amazing Grace”.  This 2006 movie is basically about the efforts of a group of people in England that worked hard to abolish slavery.  The movie centers on William Wilberforce and how he used his conversion to religion and a run in politics to lead to the legal passage of laws to abolish slavery.  The process was arduous and involved the efforts of many people but the underlying theme I felt from the movie was the power to grow an idea even though the numbers are against you.  While many felt defeated many times with great effort they pushed on and eventually convinced others of their ideas.  One person had a great impact on the whole country but the truth is there were many people that helped push the politician, William Wilberforce, through their backing and even their research.

I found it especially interesting to watch the British Parliament sound very much like our own American politicians.  Even though they knew slavery was morally wrong, they found it difficult to stop because of the financial hardship it would bring to the country.   It reminded me of our own recent years of dealing with the issues of torture, war, civil rights, privacy rights and all of the other current issues.  Many politicians know what is right but when it comes down to many of these issues it really is about the money, the money for private corporations.  We are involved in wars that are quite profitable at a time when every other business venture is probably having some kind of financial difficulty, so we continue to keep the people riled up about terrorists, the new “boogey man” and keep sending our young men and women off to war.  I know I make it sound quite simplistic but in my mind it really is, isn’t it?  Haven’t we gone off to many of our wars for corporations, power and control?

In the movie men wanted more time to “contemplate” what to do as they just couldn’t abolish slavery immediately as it would have a huge impact on the economy, so they chose to do nothing!  I see similarities in the current health care debate.  It seems to me that the politicians know what the right thing to do would be but they are still holding out for their corporate masters that enslave them with their financial contributions that keep them in power.  They are slaves to corporations just as the British politicians were slaves to their own corporate masters.  Our American politicians have grown far too comfortable to really understand how most of the citizenry live.  They don’t know that those that don’t have health insurance rarely see a doctor or only do when they are at their wits end.  They don’t care that those that do have health insurance wonder what in the heck their insurance is really paying for when they get their bills!

For me the movie, “Amazing Grace” really reminded me of how timid and selfish politicians can be and how slow things move when men are the only ones making the decisions.  I personally would like to see a real third party form that involves the efforts of many women, the sensible voices of women, the caring women that devote their lives to the young soldiers going off to war and are appalled at any injustice.