We have seen recent attacks upon the 1965 Voting Rights Act!

All I could think was:

CAN YOU IMAGINE ATTACKS UPON THE 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT?

Here is the 15^th Amendment to the United States Constitution for chrissakes:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[1]

[edit]
 

How can one challenge this imperative?

Well, recently a Supreme Court Justice did just that:

WASHINGTON, DC — There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyers’ lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/27/1646891/scalia-voting-rights-act-is-perpetuation-of-racial-entitlement/

I can certainly get into recent attacks upon legislation dealing with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rand Paul is the new sweetheart of CPAC and....

There is also plenty of real-world evidence that free markets were an enemy of racism. Especially in the South, state governments did not simply allow businesses to discriminate — they often requireddiscrimination.  The landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional, involved a Louisiana law that punished railroad companies if they did not segregate their passengers.  There were similar laws into the 1960s in many Southern states requiring segregation of interstate bus customers — hence, the Freedom Rider campaign, in which blacks used the whites-only lunch counter at the Greyhound station.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/rand-paul-and-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964/

Oh Curly Rand attempted to 'walk this back' but damn!

HOW HAVE WE ENDED UP WHERE WE ARE NOW?

Our history is supposed to be red, white and blue.

But we are stuck in some PC loop: We are now Red/Blue.

How exactly have we ended up where we are now?

Well every single lame-brained opiner would tell us that our problem lies in education; as if education were some sort of panacea.

I would like to venture into this area of discussion.

Since this examination will take awhile, I will attempt not to jump around too much.

Maybe, just maybe, the Blues might come to some realization about where these Reds come from.

We all have the same genes; regardless of the opinions of folks like John C. Calhoun and Justice Taney.

We all live in the middle of the same goddamn continent.

We all love ribs and baseball and football and little children and we cheer for the 'little guy'.

We all love to cheer for the winners and boo the losers and we all attempt to grab onto as much money as we can to get on with our lives.

We all wish our children to fare well and do better than not just survive in the veil of tears!

We all wish our games to have rules and that those rules are applied so that all participants reach a level playing field.

We all are grateful for the interstate highway system.

We all are grateful that giant grocery stores that provide coffee and grains and fruits and veggies from across the globe at a decent price.

We all are grateful that we might push on a switch and be in light during the dark nights.

We all are grateful that with the click of a mouse or the push of a thumb the universe of knowledge is made available; a universe of knowledge that makes the Library of Alexandria a mere footnote in history!

I would like to discuss these matters and I shall begin this discussion with revisionism, with education, and with propaganda.

Miss Milly’s burning passion was ensuring that Southern youngsters learned the “correct” version of what the war was all about and why it had happened—a version carefully vetted to exclude “lies” and “distortions” perpetrated by anti-Southern textbook authors. To that end, in 1920 she wrote a book entitled “The Truths of History”—a compendium of cherry-picked facts, friendly opinions, and quotes taken out of context, sprinkled with nuggets of information history books have often found convenient to ignore. Among other things, “The Truths of History” asserts that Abraham Lincoln was a mediocre intellect, that the South’s interest in expanding slavery to Western states was its benevolent desire to acquire territory for the slaves it planned to free, and that the Ku Klux Klan was a peaceful group whose only goal was maintaining public order. One of Rutherford’s “authorities” on slavery was British writer William Makepeace Thackeray, who visited Richmond on a tour of the Southern states during the 1850s and sent home a buoyant description of the slaves who attended him: “So free, so happy! I saw them dressed on Sunday in their Sunday best—far better dressed than English tenants of the working class are in their holiday attire."

There are repercussions to this type of message, to this type of education and to this type of thinking.

If you take the time to at least scan the entire Salon article you will see the Pudge Luntz's of the world at work.

We were not involved in a Civil War one hundred and fifty years ago. We experienced the War Between the States!

Slavery was not 'the cause' of this war or even a substantial contributing cause of this 150 year old conflict.

Economic considerations along with the North's quest for greater power over the South was a substantial contributing cause of this war.

The North's quest for greater centralized government was a substantial contributing cause for this war.

This quest for power lied behind the North's quest to stem the advance of slavery into this nation's territories; the South merely wished to allow slavery in the territories so that when it freed the slaves there would be a source of land to give those slaves.

I am going to examine more of the particulars contained in this revisionism/propaganda at a later time.

But my point here is that there are repercussions to this uniquely Southern approach to history.

The following sitcom scene arose during some Civil Rights panel discussion at the recent CPAC abomination.

Scott Terry, 30, rose from his seat to question the discussion leader, K. Carl Smith, from the Frederick Douglass Republicans, over the role of race in the Republican Party. Terry said that the growth of diversity in the party and outreach to black conservatives has been "at the expense of young, white, Southern males like myself."

"I think my demographic is being systematically disenfranchised," Terry said.

Smith responded by telling a story about a letter that abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass wrote to his former slaveowner forgiving him for holding him in servitude.

"For giving him shelter and food?" asked Terry, as some members of the audience gasped and others laughed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/cpac-panel-on-race_n_2886132.html?ref=topbar

If you even pause to wonder where the Louis Farrakhans of this world came from; think about some of things said at that panel discussion.

Before I begin my analysis, let me remind you of my history which I have described in depth over the last four or five years.

In Kindergarten and in the First Grade I recall a morbid looking woman taking us to a corner of the classroom and telling us that the world would end over the week-end.

In the fourth and fifth grades I recall when 90% of the class would leave the school in order to pray in their local churches—every Thursday?

Jews and Roman Catholics were left behind. And I was far too young to understand which was which and why we just sat there!

I learned that the Chinese communists made children the informants on their own parents.

I learned that the Russian commies had commanded that there be no free press.

I learned that the Southern United States hated Negroes.

I learned that Andrew Jackson hated American Indians.

(I shall add to this line of thought later)

But I also went to Catechism and I learned that there was a great god who lived in the sky and he a beard and he knew everything about me; even when I relieved myself in the bathroom and...

And I also watched TV and I learned about other countries and about men who dressed in drag and about supermen and....

Anyway, I found my way to University because I had become rather well at taking standardized tests and because tuition was a hundred bucks and you could purchase used texts.

And my world changed; and my world view changed and I discovered that there were at least 360 perspectives on any issue!

Now consider this a prologue of sorts.

If education is an issue, if education of our youth is important and if you believe that education can have a substantial contributing factor upon issues that face us today; there are three variables that I think have a significant impact upon our futures as a nation and as a world.

HOME SCHOOLING

TEXTBOOKS

UNIVERSAL TESTING

I will be discussing these headings in the future.

I would only underline what has been written fifty years ago and most probably 3000 years or so prior to that date.

THERE IS SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS?

DO YOU MR. JONES? 

Previously blogged at:

http://onceuponaparadigm.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/6935/#comment-6754