How do you celebrate President’s Day? Other than mattress sales, I mean. Most holidays have a theme of some kind, something you’re supposed to contemplate as you go about your day off, but President’s Day is just celebrating these two vastly different men’s lives. It isn’t even their birthday. But what is the one thing they had in common? Politics. And so…
Three quotes that sum up our moment in history:
- “The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”- attributed to Davis X Machina, at Balloon Juice. And the reason for this is…
- “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” (Origin unknown) (I would argue “Equality or even relative decrease of privilege feels like…”)
- And for the upper echelons of conservatism: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything” – Bruce Springsteen
The lady in this next one lets the mask drop and shows what she really believes in. She says it was taken out of context, but what context she gives us doesn’t make it better.
Next, Fred Clark reminds us what true righteousness means:
Then we have an example of how White America has denied black Americans as much of the wealth of the land and the full benefit of being American as possible:
How The GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to A Million Black WWII veterans
“Fun fact”, mentioned in the article: New Deal programs were also deliberately structured to exclude as many black people as possible.
And finally, something from back in the Fall, to remind us what “ready for school” means these days.