Like the grandfatherly peasant – wise and grizzled – in the middle of a war zone who just wants to get his donkey across to the other side of the village while protecting his sweet innocent granddaughter. One of those black & white movies. She’s smoking hot, of course, and bullets are flying overhead. Coming from both sides and there’s nothing I can do. Where the hell is our hero? – JDW
Bill O’Reilly✔@BillOReilly · Jun 24, 2019
Slavery reparations is a far-left favorite because it does a number of things.
It reinforces the radical belief that the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited.
The Sassiest Semite@LittleMissLizz
Ok but the United States was founded by racist white men who installed a system whereby white guys would run everything and blacks, women and others would be exploited so…7:51 PM – Jun 24, 2019
Let’s start with some backstory from Wikipedia.
The 2010 United States elections were held on Tuesday, November 2, 2010, in the middle of Democratic President Barack Obama’s first term. During this midterm election year, all 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 37 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate were contested, along with 39 state and territorial governorships, 46 state legislatures, four territorial legislatures and numerous state and local offices. Approximately 82.5 million people voted.
The Republican Party won major victories in many national and state level elections, with many seats switching to Republican Party control. Although the President’s party usually loses congressional, statewide and local seats in midterm elections, the 2010 midterm election featured some of the biggest losses since the Great Depression. The Republican Party captured a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, gaining 63 seats in the largest single-election shift in House seats since 1948 and the largest midterm election shift since the 1938 midterm elections.
Republicans also gained six seats in the U.S. Senate and 680 seats in state legislative races, breaking the previous majority record of 628 set by Democrats in the post-Watergate elections of 1974. The 2010 elections resulted in Republican control of 26 state legislatures and 29 of the 50 state governorships. Due to the large overall gains by the Republican Party in national and state offices, the 2010 elections have come to be known by some as the Second Republican Revolution.
The very next morning, first thing, the following public missive appeared.
An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum
by Tim Wise November 03, 2010 · 7:59 AM EDT
For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.
And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty ass beer you favor.
Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this…
You need to drink up.
And quickly.
And heavily.
Because your time is limited.
Real damned limited.
So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.
The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.
Not much more now.
Tick, tock.
Tick, tock.
Tick.
Tock.
I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong.
You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.
‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.
There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.
There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,” – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.
But they lost.
And you will lose.
So make a note of it.
Tweet it to yourself.
Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.
It is coming, and soon.
This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.
It is math.
Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.
The kind of math that proves how your kind — mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like — are dying.
You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass — even if it takes four sequels to make it happen — but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.
Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.
Our ankles survive.
You do not.
Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity–they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in 3-D to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.
And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.
Because you’re on the endangered list.
And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.
In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.
There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” — a bunch whose white contingent was top-heavy with ethical miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.
It’s OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.
Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.
Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.
And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement — hell you’ve all but done that now — thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.
Like I said, this is math. And numbers don’t lie.
Bottom line, this too shall pass.
So enjoy your tax cuts a while longer.
Go buy whatever you people buy when your taxes get cut: a new car or two, a bigger house, an island. Whatever.
Go back to trading your derivatives, engaging in rampant financial speculation that produces nothing of value, that turns the whole world into your personal casino. Whatever.
Play your hand, and for the love of God play it big. Real big. As in, shoot for the moon big. As in, try to privatize Social Security, and health care, and everything else. Whatever.
At least that way everyone will be able to see what you’re really about.
We’ve been trying to tell them, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes, so “Gobig or go home,” Bubba.
“Git ‘er Done.”
“Cowboy up,” or whatever other stupid catch phrase strikes your fancy.
Just promise you’ll do more than talk this time.
Please, or as one of your celluloid heroes might put it, “make my day.”
Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.
They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion.
They are like the tortoise to your hare.
They are like the San Francisco Giants, to your New York Yankees: a bunch that loses year after year after year, until they finally win.
You have had this confidence before, remember?
You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, those you thought you had cowed and defeated are still here.
Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.
They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.
You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatsoever about them. And this, will surely prove politically fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.
It means you will take their greatest strength — perseverance — and make of it a weakness, called losing.
But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know howto lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.
And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: a skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.
You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.
But they are not.
And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.
And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don’t need guns.
We just have to be patient.
And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well…
Do you hear it?
The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?
Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
So know this.
If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…
Payback, thy name is…
Temporary.
TIM WISE
Wow. Where to fuckin’ start? All old white people are not conservative. Know that for a fact. That’s just another kind of tribalism, folks. This ain’t about label or age or skin color, never has been. It’s about power and money and money is power.
Used to be the Commies, then it was the blacks, now it’s the migrants. The other. Them.
This is rich versus poor. And elections barely matter, not with two credibly accused sex offenders – activists, too – on the Supreme Court. Gerrymandering is a local problem, they just opined, which is exactly the problem. Not to mention – two words – Merrick Garland. Just imagine if you actually lived in a democracy where one woman’s vote counted for another man’s vote. Wouldn’t that be sweet?
If you are still having trouble figuring shit out, understand Justice Clarence Thomas is whiter than I am and Sarah Huckabee Sanders is all man. In the worst way possible.
And frankly, my feelings are a little hurt by that unnecessary “Leave It To Beaver” comment.
I not only watched the show, I lived the life.
And I wasn’t taught to hate.
Tick, tock.
Tick, tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Donkey died but I still have hopes for the granddaughter.
Epilogue: I discovered Tim Wise on MSBC. Plugging his fifteen-year-old book and appearing, apparently, in support of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent testimony to Congress. Wise didn’t make me feel guilty, any more than Bill O’Reilly makes me feel like no debt is owed. Coates hurts a little.
In White Like Me, Tim Wise offers a highly personal examination of the ways in which racial privilege shapes the lives of most white Americans, overtly racist or not, to the detriment of people of color, themselves, and society. The book shows the breadth and depth of the phenomenon within institutions such as education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and healthcare. By critically assessing the magnitude of racial privilege and its enormous costs, Wise provides a rich memoir that will inspire activists, educators, or anyone interested in understanding the way that race continues to shape the experiences of people in the U.S. Using stories instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and scholarly, analytical and accessible.
Anyway, I didn’t read the book. I don’t think I like the guy. But I did find this.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/