Soap Box

Disclaimer: I am ranting.

You are forewarned.

Still with me?

Sometimes I just shake my head. Do you ever think about the prejudice, injustice, oppression in our past? Not a long time ago. Recent past. In my lifetime.

I shake my head and wonder "what were we thinking?" And frankly, I still do.

When I was in high school, there was a restaurant on Lake D'Arbonne where blacks sat on one side and whites sat on the other. My high school days may seem like a long time ago. They weren't. Segregation was the social norm. Blacks were considered inferior to whites and were treated as such. In my lifetime.

In my hometown, blacks were relegated to the balcony at the local movie theater. They bought their tickets and entered at a separate entrance from the whites. I also remember my oldest brother telling the story of hauling all the old textbooks from his high school over to the black high school once they were worn out or outdated.

What was wrong with us? Yeah, I was just a kid, but we all thought that was okay?

Fortunately the Supreme Court in Brown vs Board of Education did away with some of that inequality in 1954, but it was long after 1954 when the first black child entered my 3rd grade classroom. And I guess even Brown vs Board of Education couldn't resolve all the prejudice.

Obviously Lake D'Arbonne didn't get the message until something like 1980.

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I remember accompanying a field trip when Randi was at A. E. Phillips. One of the children in her class was handicapped and in a wheel chair. Thankfully, she and her classmates thought nothing of it. One of the kids was always assigned to this child to assist by pushing his wheelchair or pulling him in the wagon. They considered him normal because he was. When we walked into the Civic Center in Monroe, heads turned to look at this child in the wheelchair. What a pity. All I could think was how grateful I was that my child never thought of the handicapped child as different. Because he wasn't. This was 1992.

The Americans with Disabilities Act became effective in 1992. It seems before that if you were physically handicapped you were surely mentally handicapped as well. It's true. That was our thought process. If you can call that a thoughtful process.

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I remember when interracial marriage was illegal. Seeing a mixed race couple on the street was a real head-turner and maybe even warranted a comment about how awful it was. Finally in 1967, the Supreme Court brought us out of the dark ages and ruled the ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. I don't think I have the ability to decide who anyone else should marry. I don't think you do either. Much less consider it a crime.

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Women, remember when you couldn't vote? There probably aren't many alive today who do, but it wasn't that long ago. It may seem that the right to vote was inevitable, but not so fast. At the end of the Civil War, giving women the right to vote was unthinkable. They had no need to vote. They were represented by their husbands who voted for them.

Between 1909 and 1912, black women, working women, and immigrants joined white reformers and won the right to vote in Oregon, California, and Washington.

Think about that geographically.

The 19th amendment was finally passed by the House and Senate in 1919. Even after every other state ratified it, several states went to court to try to stop it.

The Supreme Court finally dismissed it in 1922.

Several states still waited decades to ratify it. Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina between 1969 and 1971 and Mississippi not until 1984!

Think about that geographically.

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Still with me?

On the topic of geography and the Civil War. Did you know that the first African slaves arrived on our soil in 1619? I have to say that actually is a long time ago. However, the 13th Amendment freeing all slaves didn't happen for centuries. Literally.

We actually thought having slaves was okay. For 250 years. And worth dying for. There were over 600,000 deaths in that war.

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Do you look back on all these events in awe of our audacity? We privileged white conservatives who know what's best for everyone on Earth.

Ironically, at any given moment it seems we temporarily set aside our bias against one issue and replace it with our bias against another. After all, we only have so much time to solve all the world's ills, people. You know, whatever the bigotry of the day is or what our current media has convinced us it is. We've taken turns over the centuries with witches, Catholics, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims, blacks, Jews.

Now, here's what I really want to say . . . despite all this history, I believe that most of us are just well-meaning worriers.

Well-meaning worriers who are simply manipulated by the media, by our neighbor, by an authority figure. I don't think we're all warriors for any particular cause. We're just ordinary people wanting the very best for our family and our country and ourselves. Out of fear or ignorance or both, we become irrational and unreasonable. Even reckless.

I'm a worrier extraordinaire. I am often resistant to change, but . . .

I'm not Black. I'm not gay. I'm not Muslim. I'd like to think I'm rational, but what do I really know?

Whether it's immigration, gay marriage, abortion, segregation, universal healthcare . . . Why would I think I can look from the outside and decide what is best for someone I know nothing about? Someone I really can't even identify with.

I think history has proven we aren't very good at it. Mercifully, the Supreme Court steps in and rights our stupidity. Or fear. Or ignorance.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King, Jr.