"Flashback to the 80's"

OK, so no work is getting done today--my officemate and I are scouting google for random 80's tv sitcoms like Gem, Transformers, He-man & She-Ra (CM seems to re-call a strange tension between those too-yeah, remember it's just a cartoon), Heathcliff, Animaniacs (I think this was the 90's) and Charles in Charge.

Oh, I've got whiplash from this flashback.

Weekend was a little crazy-spent most of it reading about the Chicano Mural movement in California but I did manage to break away for some canoli's in Little Italy for the San Gennarro Feast.

News Item:
Racism is alive and signing autographs

Thought I'd post the complete article for posterity:

Racism is alive and signing autographs
By Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald columnist

MIAMI - Sometimes, we act as if it just dissipated long ago, all the heat, all the hate, gone one milestone day. Like everybody got religion simultaneously, repented their sins and went forth to sin no more. We consider ourselves enlightened, beyond it, so much so that some of us resent you bringing it up. Even the word we use to describe it feels 20th century, like rotary dials.

Racism, the word is. Racism. So frequently misused and overused, you are sometimes faintly embarrassed to use it at all. After all, it's no longer a word that makes anybody say, Oh, my God. It has become sonic wallpaper. Cliche.

Then you read a story from the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger. It says the State Fair is opening soon. And that, along with the fun house and the state championship mule pull, fairgoers can shake hands with or get an autograph from the chief suspect in the Ku Klux Klan's 1964 murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.

Shake hands. Or get an autograph.

For those who don't know: Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner went to Mississippi to register black voters. In the South in 1964, that was a crime sometimes punishable by death.

Seven men were convicted of the murders, but their alleged ringleader, an alleged preacher named Edgar Ray Killen, went free after a jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of conviction. According to the Clarion-Ledger, the juror who held out said she could not bring herself to convict a preacher. The 79-year-old Killen reportedly remains under state investigation for the 40-year-old crime. He has never recanted his hateful views.

Killen was invited to man a booth at the fair by a lawyer named Richard Barrett, head of a white supremacist group. He intends to hand out cards bearing images of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner with a circle around them and a line through them. A legend on the card describes the martyrs as communists who ``invaded'' Mississippi. These are what fairgoers will be encouraged to have Killen sign.

Your immediate urge is to ignore it, to sequester it in that place in the mind we reserve for the atavistic few who didn't get the memo that this fight is over, this hate repudiated so thoroughly that even our word for it has fallen into disrepair.

From where I sit, that urge gives us more credit than we deserve.

Forty years after the bodies of the three were dug out of an earthen dam, racism has not left us. It has become a hide-and-seek thing, a did-you-see-it-or-did-you-just-imagine-it game. We ask earnestly: Is Trent Lott a racist or did he just misspeak? Did he mean it like it sounded, or was he simply insensitive? Hey, he went on BET to apologize. Shouldn't that count for something?

Our confusion is easy to understand in an era when racism wears three-piece suits and racists speak fluent PC. More to the point, an era where racist beliefs are hidden in policy, concealed in practice, their effects visible in statistics and studies, but never in anything so crude as a sign that says ``Whites Only.''

So racists can always plead innocent. Always throw the rock and hide their hands. And the rest of us can continue in the fantasy that this history ended a long time past.

I am not saying no hearts changed 40 years ago. Many did, and God bless them. But many only pretended. Some can't bring themselves to do even that. For proof, go to the fair. Killen and Barrett are progress' dark reflection, a revelation of what three-piece suits too often hide, a reminder that history does not end.
Remember them next time you're tempted to celebrate that milestone day when hate just
disappeared.
(Thanks DG for passing this on!)


I haven't done one of these in awhile but lets welcome it's return (drum roll, please).....Quote of the Day:

"A great marriage is not when the 'perfect couple' comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences." --Dave Meurer, "Daze of Our Wives"