 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma,_Alabama |
History often repeats itself, which is exactly what my father said to me over and over again. He's learning impaired (Dyslexia), so he's always liked plaques, signs, homey knitted samplers with folksy sayings, mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers...anything that reminds him what life should be like. It's annoying, but I also remember almost everything he told me, because he's repeated it so often, too, which is irksome at times. I prefer free-form originality and evolutionary progression; he likes the solidity of comfort and the sentimentality of old routines.
We both like productivity and early mornings when no one else is around, which is why the appearance of hipsters here in Rockland County concerns me so much: if shitheads paid by their companies to relocate to trendy neighborhoods can't afford the city anymore, we're all doomed within the tri-state area, and these are not New Yorkers you mix with. They want conformity and trends; not newness and culture. They are not from here.
It was with this sense of repetition that I saw the events in Tennessee unfold on the evening news for awhile, acting like hicks in these isolated pockets always seem to do; seemingly armed with "the truth" and a mostly white local government armed to the teeth to back her outrageous sense of entitlement. In one of the early scenes from "Selma", Oprah Winfrey's character goes to the county courthouse to register as a voter, a fairly new federal right granted to African-American citizens. She's given a verbal test that even a seasoned historian would fail, a test that does nothing to dim her spirit. That's what hard-won rights granted to free people tend to do.
Armed with the truth, she gathers her community to protest in response to this one illegal act that defies logic, only the expression of a deeply ingrained ignorance that typically signifies inbred ignorance so entrenched, it is nothing short of violent, which is also point of the part. How do you break into the minds of a better, stronger people who use the the very effective tool of passive resistance as a societal tool to create change? You use anger and hatred against them, whipping folks up into a massive mob mentality with no reason or boundaries. That's what I saw on national television: some ugly redneck denying people their civil right to marry, and you must know by now how that goes down with me. It doesn't.
I was reminded of another historical event that affected me greatly; the story of New Yorker Solomon Northup's* nasty capture and subsequent sale south of the Mason-Dixon line, because it was once legal there to buy and sell humans like they're animals. And what can you do to property? Anything you g-ddamn want, which is what a bunch of fucked up retards did, to cover up the fact that they couldn't labor under a hot sun (like an African can), or do it efficiently (like poor folk always do), or turn a profit on a land they emigrated to from another land (like every American immigrant before them has had to do). There's no talking to people that insane.
It's not that the people of the north were always so righteous. Solomon took his name from the upstate farmer who set him free. He was also the gentleman who came looking for him when word got back to his hometown and family that he'd been illegally tricked into capture, like any gentleman worth his weight in salt would. After that, it was on. The Northups convinced Solomon to write down his true account the year he returned home, while it was still fresh in his mind, but also as part of his testimony in a legal proceeding that went on for years, transcending state boundaries, because that's the mindset of the truly righteous in this world: we don't ever give up, and we don't ever give in.
We became their willing collaborators, constructing the Underground Railroad** to help families on their road to freedom, and we fought a bloody Civil War on the basis of those freedoms, rights that are the legal right for every free American citizen, which we will do again, so it is in this vein that I will write this one more time to you, Southerner: Don't tread on me. Ever. Bitch.
Your homework, fuck-up:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Northup
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad
The law, shithead:
