The Other Sunday Funnies Welcome to a new feature on If This Be Treason. The Other Sunday Funnies isn’t what comes buried in the advertising…
Posts published in “Bigotry”
Never fear, this isn’t about Paula Deen. She’s just some kind of weird canary in a coal mine. It’s the coal mine that should bother us.
You see, what I find so freaking not understandable in the second decade of the 21st century, nearly fifty years after the civil rights law and the beginning of desegregation in the South, is how anyone could think a “plantation party” would be a good idea. She said she wanted to dress-up “little” black people, I guess to pretend she was back in some idealized version of the Olde South in all it’s glory as depicted in the first half of the first half of Gone With the Wind–you know, before Atlanta burned and Miss Scarlet was reduced to (gasp!) eating a carrot dug out of the ground with her own two hands because there were no darkies to dig it out for her.
Hate.
It occurs to me more and more that hate is at the root of the problems we’re having with our politics. And it’s not only the other guy who’s sowing hate. We’re doing it too.
Left or right, our politics are all based on hate. This would seem to indicate that whatever afflicts us isn’t going to be solved with left/right politics. First we must apply the antidote to hate throughout our society before we can even think about moving forward. Indeed, that would be the first step of our forward motion.
In a hopeful and uplifting video explaining the voter rights brouhaha that swept our nation during the last couple of elections, President William Barber of the North Carolina Conference of the NAACP, observes, “Poor people can’t compete with the rich lobbyist, so they have to have access to the ballot in order to shape the balance of power.”
httpv://youtu.be/YmtVVmessCo
Amen to that.
Certainly that’s not unknown to most, if not all, of those who sit in our state legislatures, even outside of Dixie, and attempt to turn back the pages to the days of Jim Crow.
These days, Facebook is where a lot of us do our politicking. Like most soap boxes, we do a lot of preaching to the choir there, but that’s okay for reinforcement is a good thing. What we’re hoping for, of course, is that our arguments, expressed in the cute little graphics we “like” and “share,” will be so brilliant that we’ll bring some fence-sitters over to our way of thinking or, better yet, help some certified tea baggers see the error of their ways.
The trouble is, we’re not going to win anyone over if what we post merely sounds good but upon examination doesn’t represent truth. If it’s not truth, it’s a lie.
Editor’s note: How about a little political satire. Here’s a send up of the planning session to prepare the Mittmeister for his little visit to…
If I’d died when the World Trade Center fell nine years ago, right about now I’d be rising from my grave in anger. I’d descend on followers of the Tea Party and the other Islamaphobes who’re making an issue of the “Mosque” that isn’t a mosque, but is planned to be a cultural center open to all faiths. I would raise my voice, if I still had one after lying nine years dead, and I would shout at the top of my lungs, making sure that all who heard me understood my anger and wrath.