Something I Noticed While Shopping Today

[Mike Taylor]

There are little babies out there who are going to grow up in a world where a black U.S. President is a reality. Not that I didn't know it on some level before, but it really struck me as I was watching a mom with her little girl at McDonald's. Ain't that something?

My momma went to nursing school in Birmingham AL during the middle of the Civil Rights movement, when Dr. King and his supporters were protesting discrimination and segregation. She knew the wife of one of the three men that burned down the church in Birmingham where the little girls were killed. A week after my Grandpa Carroll and a black employee of his attended a chainsaw convention in Alabama (they were learning about new products for Grandpa to sell at his Service Station), the hotel where the black employee had stayed was bombed.

Not that there isn't a lot of work still to be done, but damn if things haven't come a long way.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

But yet, you've got people like that old fossil who gave the benediction saying "white should embrace what's right."

I guess it never occurred to him that the reason black people are no longer enslaved to white people is because of white people feeling that slavery was abhorrent, and being willing to fight and die in a war in support of that idea.

And black people are no longer sitting in the back of buses, drinking from separate drinking fountains and attending separate schools because of white people joining blacks in the struggle for civil rights, when doing so could mean arrest, beatings, ostracism...or even death.

Shit, Barack Obama would not be President today if it weren't for millions of votes for him cast by white people.

Yeah, I understand black people recieved horrendous treatment at the hands of white people. Why must I be lumped in with those white people instead of the ones who did something about it?

Yeah, we have come a long way, but in other ways we've gotten absolutely nowhere.

[PuckishOne]

Sorry guys...I'm not going to let this go where it's inevitably going, which is to Helena Handbasket's place. Please feel free to discuss any and all social and political issues at Fratching (http://www.fratching.com), but not here (not even in Off Topic).