I have lived in Georgia all of my life. Throughout my childhood, my family joyfully vacationed each summer in Jacksonville Beach, Florida at the now defunct Silver Sea Motel. What wonderful memories.
And I have always had a little love affair with the state just south of us. Beaches on both sides! Oranges! Disney! Cruise Departure! Sunshine! Coconut sunscreen fragrance! Escape!
But no more.
“Governor” Ron DeSantis, with his agenda of hatred and exclusion for anyone who doesn’t look and think like him, has created what I believe is as potentially dangerous as Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany.
And like with Hitler, millions of the Blind to Truth are following his down-with-democracy spiral.
DeSantis: In the sunshine state (and if he gets his way, in the nation) we don’t want Gays. And down with Drag Queens. We don’t like the history of Black People, or even Black People as far as that is concerned. Hispanics? Nah. A Woman’s Right to Control Her Body? Are you kidding? And common sense gun laws? Absolutely not!
Thank goodness we have leaders who will courageously warn us of the horrors of DeSantis and his ilk.
The Hill
My African-American husband HR and I will not be going to Florida anytime soon. It’s too dangerous.
If you think Tantrum Trump is an unhinged assault on our democracy, just take a closer look at Demented DeSantis, an hour or so south of where Robert and I live in Savannah, Georgia.
After assaulting the inclusion of gay people into society, DeSantis now wants to kick out Black people.
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
“We are often taught in schools that Lincoln freed the slaves, but we are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children, or money to buy any of it.”
“Narratives collected from formerly enslaved people for the 1930s Federal Writers Project reveal the horrors of mass starvation, of ‘liberated’ Black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields, before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die.”
“‘With the advent of emancipation,’ writes the historian Keri Leigh Merritt, ‘Blacks became the only race in the US ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital.’” p. 464 (with documentation).
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
There are similarities between the Post-Civil War Reconstruction atrocities and the Post-2020 Election Insurrection.
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“The number of voters supporting Trump, a white nationalist President, increased when he ran for a second term. And when Trump lost, some of his supporters led an insurrection in the nation’s Capitol, seeking, just as white mobs had done repeatedly during Reconstruction, to overturn and delegitimize an election won by a multiracial coalition of voters.
Then, in response to well-organized Black, Latino and Indigenous voters helping turn heavily Republican states such as Georgia and Arizona blue, Republicans began a coordinated effort to introduce and pass hundreds of bills that would make it harder for millions of Americans to vote.
Some have called these efforts—which came not even a year after the death of civil rights icon John Lewis, who in the 1960’s nearly lost his life to secure voting rights for Black Americans—the worst attack on voting in more than fifty years.” p. 455-456
And did you see the anti-democracy, white nationalist ex-President’s comments about all this in a speech the other day?
“On Thursday, former President Donald Trump told conservative radio host Wendy Bell that if he were to return to the Oval Office he would grant pardons and also apologize to participants in the January 6 insurrection. Trump promised that if ‘I decide to run, and if I win, I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons…with an apology to many.’” Slate
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
A major contributor to the prosperity of the United States …
“The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans, just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s indigenous people.
Though our high school history books seldom make this plain, slavery and the hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known ad Jim Crow were, above all else, systems of economic exploitation. To borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father.” p. 458
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening TRUTH found in The 1619 Project. (I encourage you to read the book!)
Let’s take a closer look at the historical, racist and almost always overlooked hypocrisy of the 2nd Amendment.
“ A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The scholar Carl T. Bogus writes in a law review article, “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment”:
“As a Virginian, Madison knew that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the South, was slave control. His use of the word ‘security’ in the Second Amendment is consistent with his writing the amendment, for the specific purpose of assuring the southern states, and particularly his constituents in Virginia, that the federal government would not undermine their security against slave insurrection by disarming the militia.” (p. 257, The 1619 Project)
”The second amendment, ratified in 1791, codified for white citizens the right to bear arms and to protect themselves. If there were any doubts about who these rights pertained to, they were put to rest in 1800, when Virginia governor James Monroe called out several regiments of the state’s militia to thwart, before it could begin, a widespread revolt planned by an enslaved man named Gabriel, and then to hunt him and the other participants down.”
“As the historian Herbert Aptheker wrote in ‘American Negro Slave Revolts,’ as word of Gabriel’s revolt spread, the ‘nation from Massachusetts to Mississippi was terror-stricken.’ The response was to double down and make more explicit through legislation the prohibitions on Black people owning guns.”
“One Virginian wrote in the local newspaper that ‘we must reenact all those rigorous laws which experience has proved necessary to keep slavery within bounds. In a word, if we will keep a ferocious monster in our country, we must keep him in chains.’” (p. 257. Full documentation available in the Notes section of the book.)
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The 2nd Amendment continues to be misinterpreted and misconstrued today by far-right extremists, the NRA (and the politicians they own), as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just up the road from Robert and me … Daniel Defense — the Gun Death and Murder Company which supplied the assault weapon used in the Texas Uvalde massacre.
Can’t afford two grand? No problem. Three months interest free financing!
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Is there any answer to all this centuries-long deadly injustice?
If so, I surmise it will be found in voting out those politicians who continue to sustain laws (and introduce new ones) which enable potential domestic mass terrorists. Who continue to revel in the glory of guns. Who place the value of the dollar above (far above) the value of human life. Who refuse to even entertain the idea of common sense gun laws.
NealEnJoy 