Four days ago, on Saturday, August 26, in the early afternoon, a heavily armed, 21-year-old white supremacist in a tactical vest and mask, who had written a number of racist manifestos and had swastikas painted on his rifle, murdered three Black Americans at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida. He had apparently intended to attack Edward Waters University, a historically Black institution, but students who saw him put on tactical gear warned a security guard, who chased him off and alerted a sheriff’s deputy.
Oh my dear God, I cannot read beyond the first paragraph. I live in Ireland where gun-related incidents are very, very rare, especially since the Good Friday Agreement, whereby the IRA and other organisations laid down their weapons and released us all from the hell of the Troubles, 1969 to 1994.
I will come back and read the rest later, but my Heart and Prayers go out to all those in the United States who suffer from gun violence. May it end soon, I pray, may it end soon....
It seems the right-wing has become so desperate to hold onto power at this point that they're prepared to lie and cheat *publicly* and *openly* -- and ignore any laws and rulings that they don't like. The very opposite of how a democracy should work!
The current version of the Republican Party is just a continuation of the January 6 insurrection. The world has changed and they don’t like it. People have come to America from all over the world to seek their fortune and to live in freedom. But they aren’t just coming from Europe anymore. The new immigrates, like all who have come before them, work hard and are entrepreneurial. Men and women are building new technologies and new medicines. But the old, white, Christian male power structure is fighting against the changes. They are more than willing to give up democracy, justice, and any notion of equality. Lies, cheating, and violence are all that they have left.
Strength, vigilance, courage, and truth are all on our side. Stay the course.
It is incumbent on all of us to work to register voters--young voters, voters of color, voters with disabilities--all voters, and then to make sure that, come November, they all vote, whether in person at the polls or by mail. We need to volunteer to go for training to work at our polls and to uphold the rights of all of our citizens to vote. We need to tell all of our legislators to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We need to write to encourage voters to exercise their rights, whether through letter-writing or post-card writing campaigns or phone calling or texting or canvassing. There is something that each of us can do. If we want to keep our democracy, we must find our niche and go to work. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
Your statement that the math tells the story is, I hope, the clarion call to all Democrats to vote for Biden/Harris in numbers that far exceed the 2020 vote. Younger voters will make the difference. They are so mad about the end of Roe vs Wade and the climate deniers that they will come out in force. Grey haired attempts to stop this movement will not succeed , as we have seen in state after state when it came to a vote, not a legislative coup. Racism, although generational, is now diluted by the educated youth. It’s the McConnells, Graham’s, and Tubervilles, and their like that will now see their voters flock to more democratic, minority candidates. Biden is speaking to them, empowering them, hiring them. We have to help him achieve that goal.
I have never forgot what David Brooks said when he was asked to be a TV commentator for the march of athletes into the stadium during a past Summer Olympics. He said he always enjoyed watching the athletes march in by country. There would be white Europeans, distinguishable Asians, Black Africans, Latinos, and so forth. Then the USA athletes would come in, and it looked like they had taken all the other countries and mixed them all together to make the Americans. Our strength is our diversity.
"Stoehr calls these white supremacists 'Realamericans' who believe they should rule and, if they can’t do so lawfully, believe they are justified in taking the law into their own hands." They are the complete opposite of true Americans. We are living in the days of the mid-1930's in Germany. What are WE going to do about it?
Democrats need to VIGOROUSLY PUSH VOTER REGISTRATION and MAIL-IN BALLOTS. The LATTER is streamlined in Maryland which permits PERMANENT Registration for MAIL-IN BALLOTS -- good so long as you VOTE. The League of Women Voters produces a SUPERB VOTERS GUIDE with backgrounds on Candidates to GUIDE the AT-HOME VOTER. IT'S A MODEL FOR ALL STATES.
Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the Black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972), Selected Poems (1953), Harlem Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of Jamaica (1912), among many other books of poetry and prose.
The son of peasant farmers, McKay was infused with pride in his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters—including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to write verse in Jamaican dialect. (PoetryFoundation)
Sickening. The more they lose, the more radical the changes they propose. And after the hurricane had made landfall in Florida and passed into Georgia, Biden was commending the people on the ground for preparation and assuring people that they would not be forsaken.
The hurricane was a huge gift to De Santis. He wasn't doing well on the campaign trail and he had an excuse to come home and manage response to the storm. By taking charge, he is showing himself to be a competent and compassionate governor.
My fear is that this show of competence will boost his appeal to non-Trump Republicans and other voters. I tend to be a worry wart, so I'll wait to see what other readers think.
How can there be so much hate and intolerance in a nation so many claim is a “Christian nation”? I’m not saying America is a Christian nation, but the fundamental teachings of Jesus revolve around “Loving thy neighbor”. Full stop. End of story.
Time to face facts. The "Republican" Party is now just a terrorist front organization.
Oh my dear God, I cannot read beyond the first paragraph. I live in Ireland where gun-related incidents are very, very rare, especially since the Good Friday Agreement, whereby the IRA and other organisations laid down their weapons and released us all from the hell of the Troubles, 1969 to 1994.
I will come back and read the rest later, but my Heart and Prayers go out to all those in the United States who suffer from gun violence. May it end soon, I pray, may it end soon....
It seems the right-wing has become so desperate to hold onto power at this point that they're prepared to lie and cheat *publicly* and *openly* -- and ignore any laws and rulings that they don't like. The very opposite of how a democracy should work!
The current version of the Republican Party is just a continuation of the January 6 insurrection. The world has changed and they don’t like it. People have come to America from all over the world to seek their fortune and to live in freedom. But they aren’t just coming from Europe anymore. The new immigrates, like all who have come before them, work hard and are entrepreneurial. Men and women are building new technologies and new medicines. But the old, white, Christian male power structure is fighting against the changes. They are more than willing to give up democracy, justice, and any notion of equality. Lies, cheating, and violence are all that they have left.
Strength, vigilance, courage, and truth are all on our side. Stay the course.
It is incumbent on all of us to work to register voters--young voters, voters of color, voters with disabilities--all voters, and then to make sure that, come November, they all vote, whether in person at the polls or by mail. We need to volunteer to go for training to work at our polls and to uphold the rights of all of our citizens to vote. We need to tell all of our legislators to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We need to write to encourage voters to exercise their rights, whether through letter-writing or post-card writing campaigns or phone calling or texting or canvassing. There is something that each of us can do. If we want to keep our democracy, we must find our niche and go to work. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
Your statement that the math tells the story is, I hope, the clarion call to all Democrats to vote for Biden/Harris in numbers that far exceed the 2020 vote. Younger voters will make the difference. They are so mad about the end of Roe vs Wade and the climate deniers that they will come out in force. Grey haired attempts to stop this movement will not succeed , as we have seen in state after state when it came to a vote, not a legislative coup. Racism, although generational, is now diluted by the educated youth. It’s the McConnells, Graham’s, and Tubervilles, and their like that will now see their voters flock to more democratic, minority candidates. Biden is speaking to them, empowering them, hiring them. We have to help him achieve that goal.
I have never forgot what David Brooks said when he was asked to be a TV commentator for the march of athletes into the stadium during a past Summer Olympics. He said he always enjoyed watching the athletes march in by country. There would be white Europeans, distinguishable Asians, Black Africans, Latinos, and so forth. Then the USA athletes would come in, and it looked like they had taken all the other countries and mixed them all together to make the Americans. Our strength is our diversity.
"Stoehr calls these white supremacists 'Realamericans' who believe they should rule and, if they can’t do so lawfully, believe they are justified in taking the law into their own hands." They are the complete opposite of true Americans. We are living in the days of the mid-1930's in Germany. What are WE going to do about it?
Democrats need to VIGOROUSLY PUSH VOTER REGISTRATION and MAIL-IN BALLOTS. The LATTER is streamlined in Maryland which permits PERMANENT Registration for MAIL-IN BALLOTS -- good so long as you VOTE. The League of Women Voters produces a SUPERB VOTERS GUIDE with backgrounds on Candidates to GUIDE the AT-HOME VOTER. IT'S A MODEL FOR ALL STATES.
America, wake up! Stop this madness.
Thx Professor for the history up to today. I can’t be more ashamed....
Coretta Scott King famously commented that every generation has to replay its role of advancing black voting rights…
Heather just outlined this generations multifaceted challenge…very effectively.
Very very sadly THIS GENERATION’S challenge is especially ugly and hate filled and our very Republic is at stake.
If We Must Die
BY CLAUDE MCKAY
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay
1889–1948
Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the Black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972), Selected Poems (1953), Harlem Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of Jamaica (1912), among many other books of poetry and prose.
The son of peasant farmers, McKay was infused with pride in his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters—including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to write verse in Jamaican dialect. (PoetryFoundation)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44694/if-we-must-die
Sickening. The more they lose, the more radical the changes they propose. And after the hurricane had made landfall in Florida and passed into Georgia, Biden was commending the people on the ground for preparation and assuring people that they would not be forsaken.
The hurricane was a huge gift to De Santis. He wasn't doing well on the campaign trail and he had an excuse to come home and manage response to the storm. By taking charge, he is showing himself to be a competent and compassionate governor.
My fear is that this show of competence will boost his appeal to non-Trump Republicans and other voters. I tend to be a worry wart, so I'll wait to see what other readers think.
How can there be so much hate and intolerance in a nation so many claim is a “Christian nation”? I’m not saying America is a Christian nation, but the fundamental teachings of Jesus revolve around “Loving thy neighbor”. Full stop. End of story.