Quantcast
Channel: Pax on both houses
Viewing all 30151 articles
Browse latest View live

Rainwater Harvesting

$
0
0
Image may contain: plant, tree, grass, bridge and outdoor
Alan: This same idea can be modified to make good use of "grey water" from your kitchen sink drain.




Lindsey Graham Makes Anti-Trump, Pro-Biden Campaign Ad

"Tom Tomorrow And This Modern World": Donald Trump, Crisis Management Genius

$
0
0
This Modern World—week of May 21 | Advice & Fun | Bend | The ...
Roger Stone: Members Of Trump's Inner Circle Are Unusually Likely To Be Convicted Felons
Donald Trump, Felon: Re-Visiting Trump University
Trump Ordered By Judge To Pay $2 Million To Eight Charities For Illegal Use Of Foundation

Guess Who... "I Whine. I Blame. I Take No Responsibility"

$
0
0
 I Whine. I Blame. I Take No Responsibility | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

A Comprehensive Review Of Trump's Racism

General James Mattis Describes Trump As A Near-Nazi Turncoat Enemy Of The American People

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/06/general-james-mattis-describes-trump-as.html

Video: "If You Don't Think Trump And Trumpistas Are Hypocritical, Dishonest And Stupid, You Will!"

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/04/if-you-dont-think-trump-and-trumpistas.html

"The Divinity Of Donald Trump"
The Daily Show
"A Video Collage Of Trump's Arrogance: If You Are Even Vestigially Normal, You Will Sicken"

"The Daily Show" Lets Trump Cultists Reveal Their Own Stupidity And Obsequious Boot-Licking

"Jaw-Dropping Stupidity: 3 Short Videos That Will Change Your View Of American Politics Forever"

"The Exquisite Stupidity Of Trump Supporters"

Trump's Vicious -- Even Sadistic - Cruelty

"Conservative Cruelty: Donald Trump And The Relentless Normalization Of Monstrosity"

A Critical Mass Of American "Conservatives" Are Stupid, Ignorant, Hateful And Cruel

"Trump's Cruelty Is Not A Marginal Aberration. Trump's Cruelty Is The Point"

"Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On Trump, Toxic Christianity And Cruelty As A Moral Obligation"

"The United States Of Barbaria": It Comes Down To Cruelty...

The Perfect Paradigm For "The United States Of Barbaria"

Christian Conservatives, The Republican Party, And Deliberate Cruelty As A Source Of Laughter

Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On Trump, Toxic Christianity And Cruelty As A Moral Obligation

"The Cruelty Is the Point": Trump And Many Of His Followers Delight In The Suffering Of Enemies

In The End, We Choose Between Cruelty And Kindness

Trump's America Is A Deliberately Cruel Place And "Christian""Conservatives" Are The Cruelest

Tennessee Williams' Critique Of Cruelty Should Be Included In The World's Sacred Scripture

Best Pax Posts About Trump's Cruelty, Mendacity And Seduction Of "Conservative""Christians"

"Cruelty Is The Point," An Update On Trump's Policies And His White Christian Base

For Trump And Trumpistas Cruelty (AKA Hellish Torment) Is The Point

"Trump Administration Argues That Caged Migrant Kids Don't Deserve Toothpaste And Soap"

Momma Said There'd Be Days Like This: "Cruelty Is The Point"

Family Separation And The Deportation Of Parents Constitute Kidnapping And Human Trafficking

New England Journal Of Medicine Determines The Lethality Of Trump's Family Separation Policy

Trump's Cruelty Is Not A Marginal Aberration. Trump's Cruelty Is The Point

"When Hate Came To El Paso," Introduced By A Central American Civil Rights Worker

My Own Contact With Family Separation, And The Young Girl Who Died

(The Story Of UNC-CH Public Health Professor John Hatch)

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-own-contact-with-family-separation.html

"Frog Hospital's" Fred Owens Asks: "Are Trump's Days Numbered?"

"It Has Now Become Clear Exactly How Republicans Might Try To Overturn Biden's Victory In November"

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/05/its-now-become-clear-exactly-how.html

"Will He Go? Amherst Law Professor Fears A Meltdown This November," Vox

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/06/will-he-go-law-professor-fears-meltdown.html

Trump Will Go Full-Throttle Fascist Following The First Major Terror Attack.
Putin Knows This. (He Also Knows How To Hack The United States.)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/01/trump-will-go-full-throttle-fascist.html

You Still Don't Get It? Trump Colludes By The INACTION Of NOT Obstructing Putin's Meddling




Rattan Lal, Recipient of 2020 World Food Prize

$
0
0
Lal selected as 2020 World Food Prize Laureate | 2020-06-11 | Agri ...
Rattan Lal, Recipient of 2020 World Food Prize: 

https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/2020_lal/?fbclid=IwAR0HrWp35miuA7ZyF-X4D3ICpe_0li-D1AMfc0d25VMqPAyqPQPcALDwU5c  

Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize, 1970: Founder Of World Food Prize: 

Although Borlaug's pivotal role in the Green Revolution is fraught with controversy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Criticisms_and_his_view_of_critics - he was "named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential minds of the 20th century." 



Quotations Accumulated Over A Life-Time

Theodore Roosevelt Addresses A Dangerous Truth

$
0
0
97 Of The Best Motivational Business Quotes & Memes | CLMB ...

Although Teddy tells the truth, this same truth comes with a deadly caution:

"The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves." 
G. K. Chesterton   Toronto, 1930 

G.K. Chesterton On "The Coming Peril"





Apokatastasis Homepage Quotations Collected Over A Lifetime

$
0
0

 Quotations

What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilsim inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the supersensual.  Hannah Arendt

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.   Einstein

There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating.    Denis de Rougemont

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.    G. K. Chesterton   Toronto, 1930




The problem is not bad politics, but a bad way of life.   Wendell Berry

When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied: "I think it would be a good idea."

We know to the extent we love.    St. Augustine of Hippo

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word "success" - is our national disease.                          William James

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . .  The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
Thomas Merton. "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964


Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success."  He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.  If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this:  Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and
form, but at all costs avoid one thing:  success."

"Authority has simply been abused too long in the Catholic church, and for many people it just becomes utterly stupid and intolerable to have to put up with the kind of jackassing around that is imposed in God's name. It is an insult to God himself and in the end it can only discredit all idea of authority and obedience. There comes a point where they simply forfeit the right to be listened to."
Thomas Merton in a letter to W. H. Ferry, dated January 19, 1967, 23 months before Merton's death.


You are fed up with words and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.  This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of
meaning left in it.  And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make meaning be there again by magic... 


The Christian is one whose life has sprung from a particular spiritual seed: the blood of martyrs, who, without offering forcible resistance, laid down their lives rather than submit to unjust laws... That is to say, the Christian is bound, like the martyrs, to obey God rather than the state whenever the state tries to usurp powers that do not and cannot belong to it.




The present position which we, the educated and well-to-do classes occupy, is that of the Old Man of the Sea, riding on the poor man's back; only, unlike the Old Man of the Sea, we are very sorry for the poor man, very sorry; and we will do almost anything for the poor man's relief. We will not only supply him with food sufficient to keep him on his legs, but we will teach and instruct him and point out to him the beauties of the landscape; we will discourse sweet music to him and give him abundance of good advice. Yes, we will do almost anything for the poor man, anything but get off his back. Tolstoy

It is true that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable, not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite distinct form that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at all train a man for practicing the other... It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else...on thirty thousand as on two thousand a year.

The need for financial security was too deeply engrained. That singular fear is probably the greatest obstacle to moral action in today's society. There are arguments that one can live simply on a large salary while using the excess for good works, but we have never seen them lived out.
Janet and Rob Aldridge who quit Lockheed after 25 years. Prior to his resignation, Aldridge was in charge of designing the Maneuvering Re-entry Vehicle (MARV) for the Trident missile.

The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.
There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it. G.K. Chesterton

"There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not.
Nothing was forbidden me." Autobiography: Surprised by Joy - C. S. Lewis

Robert Burns' ... instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated...  Education ought to be a searchilight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centred entirely on himself... 
The only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.  

"In helping us to confront, understand, and oppose the global economy, the old political alignments have become virtually useless. (The global economy) persists because ... multinational corporations (have) discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people's economy, you don't need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. In a totalitarian economy, any political liberties that people might retain simply cease to matter." Another Turn of the Crank, by Wendell Berry  (Viewed mythically, the "Anti-Christ" is not a person at all, but the aggregate of impersonal socio-economic forces that erode the value and conscious meaning of free persons. If Christ embodies fully-developed human personhood, then The Machine is the anti-Christ, no matter how efficiently The Machine operates. Any God whose nature coheres with the parameters of freedom, would eventually "uproot" any System based on "automatic well-being," even if that well-being were the envy of the material world. Thoughtless surrender to "systems" that "do good" -- while simultaneously eroding one's personal responsibility to engage "the good" -- may be the (paradoxical) method by which "Smiley Face" paves the road to hell. Mere Materialism can not insure the survival of our species. We do not live by bread alone: every attempt to do so is ultimately suicidal.  A.A.)

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.    Hannah Arendt

At a time when a large part of humankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worth while to understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to escape, at last, from the brutality of antiquity. As soon as we discard it licentiousness returns, as is impressively exemplified by life in modern cities.    Carl Gustav Jung

1700 years ago Romans packed the Colisseum to cheer while wild animals ate human beings. This casual slaughter was, arguably, the ancient world's most sought-after entertainment. Royalty, nobility, professionals, artisans, laborers and peasants prized "a good seat at the games."

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," John Conroy (author of "Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts") interviews victims of torture as well as the torturers themselves. Conroy observes that the latter have a remarkable ability for rationalization, and describes most of them as cordial, likeable people.     http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679419187/ref=pd_cp_sr/103-2905432-4740659

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.    Hannah Arendt

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.                                                                                                               Hannah Arendt

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." Paulo Freire

It is no easy matter to reduce to obedience a man who does not wish to command.                                                                                               Rousseau

Life is suffering.   The Buddha's First Noble Truth

The medical campaign to eliminate pain overlooks the connection between pain and happiness. As we decrease our sensitivity to pain we also decrease our ability to experience the simple joys and pleasures of life. The result is that stronger and stronger stimuli - drugs, violence, horror - are needed to provide people in an anesthetic society with a sense of being alive. Increasingly, pain-killing promises an artificually painless life and turns people into unfeeling spectators of their own decaying selves. The very idea of having pain killed by somebody else, rather than facing it, was alien to traditional cultures because pain was a part of man's participation in a marred universe. Its meaning was cosmic and mythic, not individual and technical. Pain was the experience of the soul's evolution, and the soul was present all over the body. The doctor could not eliminate the need to suffer without doing away the patient. Ivan Illich

The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete. But Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn't hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human; for his feet (which were bare) were webbed and hard and cold-blooded like a duck's. But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth. And three things happened at once. First, the sweet, heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes. Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins." Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic. "One word, Ma'am" he said coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.     C. S. Lewis

"Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had such a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St. Catherine's to do some bird ringing. I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?
As I stared down, seeming to see every creature's ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased for ever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled though them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds."
Rain Upon Godshill, J. B. Priestley

I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences. 
Thomas Mann

It is characteristic that Einstein and Planck had the greatest admiration for Kant's work, agreeing with his view that philosophy should be the basis of all sciences. 
Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, "Reality and Scientific Truth"

We are convinced that theories do not matter... Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, anyone can discuss it...  Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist... now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. But there are some people nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most important thing about man is still his view of the universe... We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.                                                                                                              G. K. Chesterton

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox... All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical... The word "heresy" not only means no longer "being wrong"; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right, it practically means being wrong... (This) means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right... The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to insist that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox... General theories are everywhere contemned... We will have no generalizations... We are more and more to discuss art, politics, literature. A man's opinon on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinon on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe, for if he does, he will have a religion and be lost. Everything matters, except everything.    G. K. Chesterton 

...that process, already so destructive in our fashion-following super-civilization, by which everything is turned into a vogue -- even art which should be the great destroyer of all fashions, not their pimp. Everyone reads James. Then everyone switches to Eliot, to Proust, to Kafka -- to the communists in one decade -- to the homosexuals in another -- until the new writing begins to sound like the advertising patter in the smart magazines which echoes the changing chatter of the chic. It sometimes seems as though only Robert Frost were old enough and cantankerous enough and magnificient enough to be himself and remain himself and thus be disrespectfully and entirely new in this age of stylish novelties.   Archibald McLeish

The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path to the deepest mystery is the path of love.    Andre Malraux

The destiny of man is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world ... we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. 
  Radio broadcast to America
                 Receiving an honorary degree from the University of Rochester
  June 16, 1941

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
                               Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander," 1964

'You are not responsible' sang the sirens of Liberation. 'Whatever you do that does not bring you joy --- from living in the suburbs and having babies to hanging out in bars and being promiscuous to spending your days in a job that bores you --- is not your fault. They -- men, society, your mothers, your fathers --  made you do it.' What can be more tempting than the notion that no decision taken in your life for which you may harbor some regret was a decision actually taken by you for yourself? And thus the whining began, cast, to be sure, in the language of social justice, and revolutionary determination, but whining all the same. So it went  -- and went with flying success -- in those early years. Now it's three decades later. Young women are being as mercilessly exploited as young men in the white-shoe law firms, girl marines slog through the mud at Parris Island, and females train for the attempt to land airplanes on aircraft carriers.... Successful careers turn out to be a source not of liberation but of unending worry and demand.
  From "Liberating Germaine Greer," a review by Midge Decter "First Things," 10/99

Modern culture discourages meaningful work. Even occupations that appear meaningful are infected with fear, compulsiveness and wasteful haste. This dark trinity conspires to pre-empt peace, both personal and corporate. We have deified "The Good Job," and are too busy cultivating career to ponder the detrimental context in which we work. There is never time nor energy to mount meaningful resistance. We have become willing agents of organizations animated by invidious obsession with mere survival. Once survival is insured, these same organizations strategize their metastatic expansion. Occasionally, "modern work" supplies a real sense of accomplishment. However, the "driven" nature of modern accomplishment creates a neo-caste culture comprised of "the overworked" and "the underemployed." Our lives are intrinsically out of balance, and we are determined to exacerbate the disharmony. We have sanctified market forces that define money and material standard-of-living as meaningful measures of human value. Property is more highly prized than human life. It is our common lot to serve an essentially heartless System, collaborating in progressive dehumanization, accelerated resource consumption and ominous erosion of the ecological matrix. We are all clients in the brothel of modernity. Denial of collusion is widespread, especially among university-trained professionals who benefit most from the rising valuation of intellectual skills at the expense of The Sacred Heart. Inability to perceive the meretriciousness of our alliances is a measure of The Machine's dominance.  Alan Archibald

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton   1911

La verdad, si no es entera, se convierte en aliada de lo falso.  (The truth, if not entire, becomes an ally of falsehood.)   Javier Sábada

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.   George Orwell

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held... But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another, slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"... Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally opposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision no Big Brother is required... As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared is those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with the equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy... In 1984, Huxley added people who are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.     Neil Postman    "Amusing Ourselves to Death," 1985


In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.     Wendell Berry

If conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy "the needs" it creates among society's members.                                                                                                                                 Ivan Illich paraphrase

The only escape from this destiny of victimization has been to "succeed," that is, to "make it" into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so "mobile" as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood.   Wendell Berry

It seems to me there are very dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition. I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and irresponsibility. If our affluent society ever breaks down and the facade is taken away, what are we going to have left?    Thomas Merton

This change (this metanoia) is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves.  To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.     Merton

The real function of discipline is not to provide us with maps, but to sharpen our own sense of direction so that when we really get going we can travel without maps.   Merton

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.   Merton 

A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what it has no desire to cure, what it seeks to bring to full potency, in order that it may cause the death of its victim.    Merton

The night became very dark.  The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor.  Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside.  What a thing it is
to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligent perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.  It will talk as long as it wants, the rain.  As long as it talks I am going to listen.    Merton

You are fed up with words and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.  This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of
meaning left in it.  And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make meaning be there again by magic...     Merton

Gangsters, for their own profit, corner a basic necessity by controlling supplies. Educators and doctors and social workers today...gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to serve.   Ivan Illich

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven... The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.   Adolf Hitler

The victors will not be asked if they told the truth.   Adolf Hitler

Generally, it is states that make war, and larger states make larger and longer war with greater casualites, despite the fact that they sell themselves as offering greater security and peace.     Kirkpatrick Sale

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald (the Scottish fantasist) had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin, what as boys we called "tinny." It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books..... The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson --- "Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores."  C. S. Lewis

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's "own" or "real" life: the truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending : what one calls one's "real life" is a phantom of one's own imagination.   C. S. Lewis




In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.    Ivan Illich 

The essential contribution Gandhi made to the 20th century thought was his insistence on the need for a lower standard of living... He maintained that the essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation. He preached a higher standard of living and maintained that a lower level of material well-being was a necessary pre-requisite.   Ronald Duncan

Beyond the point of satisfying need, redundant capacity becomes a burden and not a gain. Greed, the attempt to fill an empty spirit with possessions, is a great producer of depersonalization. Our preoccupation with labor saving, beyond the elimination of soul-destroying drudgery, is no less counterproductive. To have without doing corrodes the soul: it is precisely in investing life, love and labor that we constitute the world as personal... Generosity of the spirit personalizes as greed depersonalizes. Erazim Kohak




When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.  Hannah Arendt

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity.                                                                                                                                            Hannah Arendt

Always distinguish between need and want.  
William Wellington Archibald and Mildred Mary Noll Archibald

More than you need is never enough.  Alan Archibald

The people of the West refused to make the distinction between gluttony and the good life.                                                                                               E. F. Schumacher

It was wants that made man poor.   E. F. Schumacher

My greatest skill has been to want but little.   Thoreau

Money is the thief of man.     Hindu saying

Don't seek consolation.     Brother David, St. Leo's Benedictine Monastery, Florida

Give me neither poverty nor wealth. Provide me with the food I need. If I have too much, I shall deny thee and say "Who is Lord?"  Proverbs 30:8-9
             
It is a strange thing to see with what sort of feverish ardor Americans pursue well-being and how they show themselves constantly tormented by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest route that can lead to it... In addition to the goods that (the American) possesses...he imagines a thousand others that death will prevent him from enjoying if he does not hasten.  Alexis de Tocqueville  (Even though the population of the United States was only 13 million when 25 year old Tocqueville visited in 1830, he observed that democratic values often encouraged conformity. Tocqueville was especially concerned that the American obsession with individuality would transmute into destructive selfishness: if people thought only of themselves and their families, they could become so disengaged from political practice as to be vulnerable to a kind of "democratic despotism." In Tocqueville's view, American democracy made it possible to devolve into majoritarian tyranny mediated by an enveloping central government which would blanket the populace in a set of complicated rules. Those who mediated these complicated rules would treat citizens like children or blindly industrious animals.)

It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of "the scientific idea of man" and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state.   Jacques Maritain

Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate or experience existentially in various ways something like a general "order of Being." The essence and meaning of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear. Alongside the general miracle of Being - both as a part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a special reiteration of it and a rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it - stands the miracle of the human spirit, of human existence. Into the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being, then, there sounds the impassioned voice of the order of human freedom, of life, of spirit. The subtly structured world of meaningful and hopeful human life, opening new vistas of freedom and carrying  man to a deeper experience of Being, the countless remarkable intellectual (mystical, religious, scientific) and moral systems, that special way in which the order of Being both re-creates and, at the same time, lends its own meaning to mythology (in earlier times) and artistic creation (today, i.e., in the historical period), in short the way in which man becomes man in the finest sense of the word - all of this constitutes the "order of life,""the order of the spirit,""the order of human work." Together, it all constitutes an objectivized expression of that "second creation of the world," which is human experience. I would say that this "order of life" is a kind of "legitimate son" of "the order of Being," because it grows out of an indestructible faith in the latter's meaning and a fearless confrontation with its mystery. Over and against this passionate order, which is the work of people created "in God's image," there constantly recurs its evil caricature and misshapen protagonist, "the bastard son of Being," the offspring of indifference to the meaning of Being and vindictive fear of its mystery: the chilling work of man as "the image of the devil": the order of homogenization by violence, perfectly organized impotence and centrally directed desolation and boredom, in which man is conceived as a cybernetic unit without free will, without the power to reason for himself, without a unique life of his own, and where that monstrous ideal, order, is a euphemism for the graveyard. (I refer you to Fromm's excellent analysis of fascism.) Thus against "the order of life," sustained by a longing for meaning and experience of the mystery of Being, there stands this "order of death," a monument to non-sense, an executioner of
mystery, a materialization of nothingness.
                                                         Vaclav Havel "Letters to Olga"  (from prison)

Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So is the computer's emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and store unprecedented quantities of information. In specialized contexts, the value of calculation, speed, and voluminous information may go uncontested. But the "message" of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and professional levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. I would argue that this is, on the face of it, nonsense. Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a nuclear catastrophe occurs, it shall not be because of inadequate information... If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information.                                                                                                                           Neil Postman

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less "showily". Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.                                                                           Anne Sulllivan  (Helen Keller's teacher)

School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man's trap. It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce and school the world out of existence.              Jacques Ellul

There are two ways to release energy: the creation of bonds or their destruction. Violence feeds on the easy accessibility of dissociative energy. Alan Archibald 

I have come to believe that compulsory government schooling  -- while pretending to protect children from child labor  -- IS child labor. Furthermore, compulsory government schooling is a form of child labor that eliminates the very childhood which child labor laws were devised to protect. Einstein observed that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Similarly, contemplation is more important than achievement. Without contemplation as the springboard for motivation, inspiration, and activity, achievement is mostly busy work - useful in strictly delineated ways, but ultimately depersonalizing. By keeping young people "on task," compulsory government schooling salts the ground of contemplation, insuring that critical questions concerning context, meaning, matrix and value are never asked. The task in hand isn't so much the determination of "what we need to do," but what we need to undo.   Alan Archibald

Governments mostly don't do much. And you've also got to understand the level of incompetence out there. Nobody knows what they're doing. They just pose and act as if they know and walk through life and get away with it. And so, attack government. Get at them and you find they know nothing. Most politicians are half people. Talk to them. They don't have anything on their minds but themselves. They don't have any real knowledge of anything. They're untrustworthy and they see everything (in terms of) what they could do for themselves.    Jimmy Breslin

I just wish they'd give me one speck of proof that this world of theirs couldn't have been set up and handled better by a half dozen idiots bound hand and foot at the bottom of a ten mile well.     Kenneth Patchen



Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Almost always, great men are bad men.   Lord Acton

"Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country."  Acton

"Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will."  Acton

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others."  Acton

"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."  Acton

"Definition of Liberty: (1) Security for minorities; (2) Reason reigning over reason, not will over will; (3) Duty to God unhindered by man; (4) Reason before will; (5) Right above might."  Acton

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities." Acton

"Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin."  Acton



The first thing you do when you want to be elected is to prostitute yourself. You show me a man with courage and conviction and I'll show you a loser.   
Ray Kroc, founder of MacDonald's

The secret to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you can do anything.                                 Television executive counselling newcomer Daniel Schorr, 1953

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who want to be somebody, and those who want to do something.    Erik Sevareid

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.                                                                                                                                   Henry Kissinger

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.  Henry Kissinger


The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.    Chief Seattle to President Pierce

A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.                                                                                         Oscar Wilde

Cynics are only happy to make the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.  George Meredith

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.  C. G. Jung

I wasn't yet aware that most of the world's population would rather go hungry than deny food to a stranger.   Brian M. Schwartz, "A World of Villages"

Perhaps it would be possible for the Negro to become reconciled to his plight if he could be made to believe that his sufferings were for some remote, high sacrificial end; but sharing the culture that condemns him and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms rolling in his soul.   Richard Wright

I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me
because they never understand Black love is Black wealth
and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.
Nikki Giovanni

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.   Martin Luther King Jr.

People are as you see them on the streets. The other thing is a lie.    Albert Camus

The white man seems tone-deaf to the total orchestration of humanity.     Malcolm X

You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor man. You are handing over to him what is his. For what has been given ... for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself.     St. Ambrose   340 - 397 A.D.  Bishop of Milan

He who has more than he needs has stolen it from his brother.     St. Francis of Assisi

Las cosas no son del dueno. Son de el que las necesite.
(Things don't belong to their owner. They belong to the person who needs them.)                                      Conny Pena Vado's version of a Nicaraguan saying

Human law has the true nature of law only insofar as it corresponds to right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence.     Thomas Aquinas

Here is a startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is a casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischeif; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other.     John Erskine, Scot, 1695-1768

To expect truth to emerge from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.    Hannah Arendt

To be truly wise, you must blunt your cleverness.    Lao Tzu

It is the fate of humankind to outsmart itself.   New York state billboard

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.                                                                                                             Krishnamurti

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.                 Daniel J. Boorstin

Clear prose represents the absence of thought.   Marshall McLuhan

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.  Thorton Wilder

With pen and pencil we're learning to say
Nothing, more cleverly, every day.    William Allingham

Who knows if Shakespeare might not have thought less if he had read more.                                                                                                    Edward Young

Professionals built the Titanic; amateurs the ark.

Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.    Thornton Wilder

It is amazing how complete the delusion that beauty is goodness.     Tolstoy

Suffering is the source of all consciousness.  Dostoyevsky

Unearned suffering is redemptive.    Martin Luther King Jr.

We always act as if something had an even greater price than life... but what is that something?    Antoine de St. Exupery  --- More Saint Exupery

Most of our problems arise from the human inability to sit still in a room.  Blaise Pascal

You can learn a lot from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.    Dr. Seuss

He will get to the goal first who stands stillest.    Thoreau

The profoundest truths are paradoxical.    Lao Tzu

Learning makes one fit company for oneself.   Thomas Fuller

To be happy at home is the end of all human activity.   Samuel Johnson

Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than sins of lust.    Piers Paul Reid

The truth is we are all caught in an economic system which is heartless. 
                                                                                 Woodrow Wilson
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.                                                                                                       J. K. Galbraith

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.     J. K. Galbraith

The greater the wealth, the thicker the dirt. This indubitably describes a tendency of our time.    J. K. Galbraith

There's an observable relationship between "the filthy rich" and "the squeaky clean."
       Alan Archibald

An immaculate house is the sure sign of a misspent life.
                                                                              Janet Archibald's refrigerator magnet

His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean.    Bob Dylan

   Intentional activity is always based on belief. Whether human beings subscribe to animist totems, to squabbling deities atop Mount Olympus, to the transcendental Father God of Judeo-Christianity, the agnosticism of Buddhism, the atheism of Jainism, the Golden Calf of free market capitalism, Hinduism's lingam and yoni or the nouveaux Trinity ("sex, drugs and rock-and-roll"), belief is essentially religious. All core values intend to "re-ligate" the primordial rent in the human spirit. ("re-ligare" = "re-ligion")
  Recognizing that Belief is inevitable -- whether one's belief is "sacred" or "secular,""religious" or "political,""philosophical" or "theological" -- obliges us to re-value all cultural phenomena as attempts to ligate this existential breach.
   Without this re-valuation -- without recognition that our belief-always attempt to ligate this existential rent - the military-industrial-educational complex becomes the "default value system."
  In turn, this System grows increasingly autonomous and arrogates to itself "the terms" of every debate. In consequence, meaningful debate is overwhelmed by the brute force of bureau-institutional fascism predicated on unipolar Materialism. (See Arendt above.)
  Simultaneously, Materialism places itself beyond debate while acquisitive citizens prostrate themselves as obsequiously-scripted Consumer Units. Inexorably, the compulsive acquisition of "mere things" results in such deep narcotization that people lose their ability to formulate meaningful criticism.
  When the unipolar Materialist trap is definitively sprung, we will all serve - simultaneously - as inmates and wardens.              
  William Blake observed that "we become what we perceive." Spellbound by the unacknowledged Deity whose intentions we serve but fail to limn, we deify things and reify people. At stake is the "God" in whose image humankind remakes itself.
   Alan Archibald                     

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment. In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.     Samuel Gompers    a founder of the U.S. Labor Movement

"It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor.  This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to do it without their consent.  Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as here assumed...  Labor is prior to and independent of capital.  Capital is only the fruit of labor, could never have existed if labor had not first existed.  Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration....  Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things ought to belong to those whose labor has produced them.  But it has happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others, without labor, have enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.  This is wrong, and should not continue.  To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of any good government."                              Abraham Lincoln

"Those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.  And, inasmuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People.  We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven.  We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity.  We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming an preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!  It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.... I do by this proclamation designate and set apart the 30th day of April, 1863 as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer."                                                                                                                              Abraham Lincoln

Anyone who's not a liberal at 16 has no heart. Anyone who's still a liberal at 60 has no head.                                                                                          Benjamin Disraeli

The sun, with all the planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.   
Galileo Galilei  1564 - 1642

Natural history is the antidote for piety.   Gregory Bateson

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.  The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.   Betty Friedan 

Happy are they who can hear their detractions and put them to mending.    Shakespeare

Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that he knows nothing.    Plato

I often hear that right and wrong are up to the individual. Of course, that is nonsense. Right and wrong are not up to us. If right and wrong were up to us, that would make Hitler right because he thought he was right. And he was not right. Right and wrong exist. They are invisible realities that we discover. We do not invent them.   

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone... it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.     Rebecca West

The last temptation and the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.     T. S. Eliot

It is not enough to do good. One must do it the right way.   John Viscount Morley

The fullest life is impossible without an immovable belief in a Living Law in obedience to which the whole universe moves.   Gandhi

We have met the enemy and he is us.   Pogo

Failure to understand what is demanded of us is the source of anxiety.  

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it. 
                                               Louis Erdrich (B: 1954), Chippewa poet and author

Tell the truth but tell it slant -
The truth must dazzle gradually -
Or every man be blind. Emily Dickinson

There is nothing as powerful as truth - and often nothing so strange. 
Daniel Webster

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.                                                                                                                             Shakespeare

Things happen in life so fantastic that no imagination could have invented them.                                                                                           Isaac Bashevis Singer

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.  Joseph Campbell
(America's obsession with the mere protraction of life prevents the transformation that attends the perception of death as an ally rather than a bogey.)

Death is the key that unlocks the door to our true happiness. Mozart

The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.   Ann Landers   

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.                                                                                         Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.                                                                                  Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1879-1958  
Where your heart is, there also will your treasure be.  Y'eshua the Nazarene

What I do is live.
How I pray is breathe.
What I wear is pants.   Thomas Merton

You have heard that (our forefathers) were told, "Love your neighbour and hate your enemy." But what I tell you is this: Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors; only so can you be children of your heavenly Father, who causes the sun to rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the innocent and the wicked. If you love only those who love you, what reward can you expect? Even the tax-collectors do as much...

I am awake.   Gautama Buddha


                                                      

Discussion Of Educational Method With Waldorf Educator Whitney MacDonald, A Good Friend

$
0
0
The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological ...

Dear Whitney,

I really like your poem. 

It's the best homage to George Floyd I've read.


If you would like me to change anything (or perhaps "take down" your poem), please let me know.

Your effort to re-vision Waldorf Education is, I think, very important - and, below, I have annotated "Digital Change As Societal Change."

I remember our last meeting very well, although, I must say that - with only a dozen years of life left - it is spooky to hear you say that our Ixtapa encounter took place 2 or 3 years ago. Seems like "the proverbial yesterday." (I turn 73 on August 20.)

Without getting maudlin, it's hard to express my gratitude for your kind words and for hearing you say that you "love my work" and even incorporate some of my thought into your own labors.

The life of a scholar-intellectual-writer is lonely, and it is very encouraging to have your positive feedback. (A few years ago, a close "friend" told me - to my face - that my writing was a "waste of time.")

Here's an essay that covers some bedrock educational philosophy, which -- if this line of thinking has not already been incorporated at some "backdrop level" of your "group thinking" -- might be useful. 

Instruction And Education Aim At Antipodes


And here is a more specific essay -- aimed at the cultivation of good citizenship. It too may be of use.

Teaching Civics And American History: Humankind's Race Between Education And Catastrophe

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/11/teaching-civics-and-american-history.html


This last essay is probably too removed from the "unified educational field" that Waldorf seeks, but I'll include it just in case.

"Proposed Cross Border Charter School"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/03/proposed-cross-border-charter-school.html 

I have interposed my comments in the document below:

Digital change as a societal change


We live in a digital world that has become indispensable. Whether we encounter it with uncertainty or enthusiasm is of secondary importance. Robin Schmidt introduces us to this emerging world from a cultural-historical point of view, without bias and with a gift for philosophical reflection. There are signs of a return to the archaic, to a kind of platonic condition using ‘bachelor machines’ with a tendency towards the "filter bubble" and in permanent "un-do mode. But the Leader of the Cultural Impulse Research Centre at the Goetheanum does not leave us alone with this. He sees pedagogical support in Rudolf Steiner’s idea of the “protecting hand” in connection with learning as described in the "Meditativ erarbeitende Menschenkunde” (Meditative Study of Man). – "Despite, About, With and By" using information and communication technology (ICT).


Technology appears destructive, if you look at it from a cultural-historical perspective, It seems to disturb our present culture. With each of these interruptions, however, something new challenges us, opening up new cultural possibilities. This may lead to tensions everyone senses, but at the same time we react intensively, either with uncertainty or enthusiasm.

"Tools For Conviviality." Ivan Illich's Best Book?


Beat Honegger, professor at the School of Education in Schwyz, typifies various spontaneous reactions to digital change (1). On the one hand, there are people who say that children and young people must be protected from the digital media; then there is the person, who ignores this change; then there is an approach, that says that children and young people must be taught media within a pedagogical context, so that they can learn how to deal with it competently; then some say, “we use the media creatively and integrate them into everyday life,” because digital media are simply a part of our everyday educational lives. At the other end of the spectrum, one can make out the 'enthusiasts' who envision the future with humanoid robots making teachers superfluous.

The Internet addiction expert Bert te Wildt (2) recently pointed out in a discussion that the addiction potential of digital media lies not only with the offspring of "enthusiasts", but also with the principal "prohibitionists", since forbidding turns the children and young people it wants to safeguard into dissenters and thus also gambles away the possibility for a pedagogical design. He pointed out, for example, that in connection with the task of learning to deal with digital media, with regard to preventing addiction, we need a different kind of thinking, one that does not move on the scale from prohibition to enthusiasm, but one that evokes creativity: a kind of thinking that can deal with ambivalences, contradictions and constantly changing rules.

The emergence of a new world
However, digital change doesn’t only deal with new media, but in terms of cultural history, we participate in the emergence of a new, different way of life. We have become the inhabitants of a virtual, digital world arising next to the one we were born in, influencing the way we are together and the way in which we communicate with each other. The foundation on which our society was based, has been transferred to the digital. We use it to regulate the water supply as well as the most important political decisions. It is not only a world that is increasingly penetrated by digital devices, but also the other way round: we inhabit a digital world. This has increasingly become the most significant environment as against the urban or the natural environment.

"What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the supersensual."  Hannah Arendt

Apokatastasis Homepage Quotations Collected Over A Lifetime


As a result, an interesting phenomenon can be observed: the digital world in which everything important seems to happen, has not only taken over a child’s first field of experience, but also of young people. The material world appears to them as a derived phenomenon, making it increasingly necessary to pave the way into experiencing the world of the senses. The world of objects is seen as another world, and seems to work differently in comparison to the digital. We might see small children "swiping" on a book or a window pane to get to another image. Or you might hear young people saying: "I have to go away for a moment, there's lunch now." Actual existence, being “here” seems to be sensed as "being in the digital world”. To be “away”, in contrast, means saying good bye to the digital, in order to get something to eat in the other world. This means, that the time I spend in the ‘good old reality’ is increasingly experienced as "being away."

Alan: Speaking of the role of eating...

I always think of the eucharist as "The Sacrament of The Table," people gathering to break bread and drink wine, thus contining the age-old conversation of meaning and value.

"Frog Hospital" And "Pax On Both Houses" Discuss Fred Owen's "The Quotidian"

The Phenotypic Expression Of Religion Matters More Than Its Dogmatic Genotype

Maria Montessori wrote a book about the Eucharist.

"The Mass Explained To Children"
Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori On War, Peace And Education


A fundamental mental change is taking place: 98% of the current generation of 20-25-year-olds, who attend a university to become teachers, were already equipped with a smartphone in their early youth. This means that the feeling of being online is a permanent and normal state of mind. (3)

In the next 10 to 15 years – if we imagine this development stepping up - a situation will have arisen, in which particular consequences will probably begin to take hold. We can expect the next, third generation of children, following the one for whom "online" is a normal state of mind, to grow up under conditions that make it impossible to perceive the difference between online and offline.

NPR: Tracking Down Deep Fake Videos

The new world of technology 100 years ago
There is an interesting parallel to the time when the first Waldorf School was founded. In 1919, the third generation of proletarian children was ready for school. The industrial revolution had put them in a similarly changed situation, as the children of the coming generation.

The philosophers of that time watched this with concern: materialistic science had created a world through technology that functioned entirely according to the law of the material. People, who spend their lives in cities and factories, educated in schools which functioned like factories, will in the long run begin to see themselves as machines.


Rudolf Steiner, like other thinkers of his day, described this conviction as a problem caused by the materialistic, scientific world view. Steiner uses the word “view” here, as Fichte used it, drawing attention to its generative quality. This understanding leads to creating the world according to the thoughts, with which I interpret the world around us. One can see how Steiner battled the problem, by following the development of his work. First he began to develop a theory of knowledge, which would lead to beholding the world in a different way, thereby changing one’s world view. (4). In a second step he transformed this into an expanded understanding of art. In this way, natural science was replaced by "spiritual science".

Pseudo-Success And The Un-Doing Of America

Materialism and The Magnum Mysterium

Three losses due to the industrial environment
Overviewing cultural history, one can deduce three great "losses" as a consequence of the step into the urban living environment. The first is the loss of the relation to one’s natural environment with its seasonal changes, the second is the loss of one’s social integration, as it was shaped by the class-based society, and finally the loss of one’s relationship to religion, to God.

Some perceived this as the 'Decline of the West” in the context of loss, others saw in it the dawning of an age of liberation. The fundamental change in values, which ultimately identified the individual as the centre of culture, became clearer. For the urban environment, the individual becomes the focus of social values: everything revolves around the ego, everything that does not serve the individual is considered to be outdated.

Thus three great tasks challenge and challenged pedagogy: How can one design a school, a culture, that enables the social life of a school to place the emerging ‘I’ (x) in its centre. It would be guided by the understanding of a child’s individual development, but would also offer parents and teachers a dynamic field for their own development. Secondly: how can a relationship be formed through the individuals replacing that, which religion once provided; and how can the lost relation to nature be replaced by an activity that places the ‘I’ at the starting point? Three fields, which lie at the foundation of the Waldorf educational concept of 1919.

Life in the digital world
What is characteristic of the digital world, that is now emerging? It can be characterized as an imaginary world – meaning that it is located between the real and the fictitious. It bases on the fact that we refer to something by completing the meaning. Every emoji, every WhatsApp message, as long as it is short, cannot actually be understood by what it is or what it contains, because the meaning lies in the certainty, that the receiver understands the sign as the author meant it.

In this sense, we live in a world of creations of consciousness; the digital world is actually a world of continuous conscious creation, producing images, references, messages, which are such that other people can read, understand and refer to them.

Michel Maffesoli (5), a French sociologist, calls this a “life in imaginary”. It is the return of the archaic. By this he refers to the cultures, such as the ancient Egyptian, that lie before the Greek classical period. Not only does imagery return to us, but also the feeling that time follows cycles. The reappearance of polytheism is also interpreted as the return of the archaic. 

Alan: Professor Marshall McLuhan (who was a media celebrity for about a decade when I was a young man... even playing himself in the Woody Allen movie, "Annie Hall") was the first (and arguably most notable) historian-philosopher of technological change and its effect on human consciousness. 

Although McLuhan (who taught at my alma mater, the University of Toronto) has passed "out of fashion," he is still, I think, a very fertile resource for contemplating the interface of technology and consciousness. (I will mention parenthetically that both McLuhan and I consider G.K. Chesterton among the most seminal thinkers who have pondered the transition from pre-electric culture to post-electric culture.) 

Here is one of my favorite Chesterton quotes: "The Coming Peril": http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/gk-chesterton-on-coming-peril.html

Marshall McLuhan and the Idea of Retribalization

Bread And Circuses: The Role Of  Television And Other Screen Pastimes
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/02/following-essay-was-written-c.html

The subject as an object
One can add that life in imaginary also leads, as it did in the ancient Egyptian culture, to the fact, that the content of consciousness is not conceived by the subject, but that man is a thought of the Gods, and is constantly watched by them. Today, our digital devices think us, we are under constant supervision. A selfie is basically a minor example. I look at myself, I observe myself, I control myself, I administrate myself. I have a watchful eye in relation to myself: I follow caffeine levels, blood sugar, fatigue, how I can save time, where I can find next best possible tweet... This constant self-control is triggered by the requirement to optimise myself. Instead of being exploited by others, as Byung-Chul Han (6) states, I exploit my own resources by following the demands of self-optimisation as a starting point. Thus the body becomes the object, a ‘thing’ with which I can maintain an instrumental relationship.

Neils Bohr On Physics, Subjectivity, Objectivity And The Uses Of Religion In A Secular World

Reprise: "Not Only Is The Universe Queerer Than We Think..." J.B.S. Haldane


"Bachelor Machines"
The second level of loss is related to the biographical dimension. According to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (7), digital machines are actually "bachelor machines", they keep us in the state of an inexperienced human being, who still has his life ahead of him, who has not yet committed himself, who does not yet want to commit himself, who continually upholds the option to decide this way or that, open. Digital life is a life in "possibilities". But if I stay in an environment of possibilities, there will never be commitment. Nothing will be realised. There is no biography in the literal sense: our life can’t be touched, nor do we leave our mark on life, by living a life of "Un-Do-Mode". In word processing I can ‘undo’ my last action by pressing the Un-Do-button. Biography, however, takes place in realisation: My life’s text comes about by writing it irreversibly.

It is actually a Platonic state, because Plato always wanted to think back to the place before the ideas were falsified and clouded by experience. Thus digital life can basically be understood as a Platonic life, that puts us in a prenatal state, that does not allow us to have experiences that have been "inscribed". Today's young adults - they give you this impression - are actually always like "just before”, ie. before life really starts: "Oh, I don't know yet... Now I'll do that, but only as a ‘project'..."

Alan: While attending Aquinas Institute in the early sixties, two of my priest-teachers (independent of one another) took me aside to ask if I'd been reading Plato because "you think just like him."

In the filter bubble
The third dimension of loss has to do with the relationship to the other, whereby the other appears in his or her otherness, his or her singular existence. Baudrillard describes digital communication very vividly as a life in the "hell of the same", because we move in a world that only shows us what we already know and like. We never come to anything else, but we always return to ourselves. I find myself in a filter bubble, in which, thanks to the algorithms, I only see what I like and agree with in my Facebook profile; or when I shop on Amazon, I am shown the items I already like. This actually puts my individuality at stake. Because, I, that which is me, takes on its being, when I am exposed to otherness.

Alan: This "hell of the same" is a very real phenomenon.

However, it is born of silo-ing ourselves along with other like-minded people, and then - comfortably ensconced in Digital world - we seldom incarnate, we seldom value what Christian theology calls The Incarnation - "the Word made Flesh." 

"God so loved the world that he sent his only son into it."

The entire thrust of Divine Creativity is "into the world,""into the flesh."

But "Christian""conservatism" is in an ungodly hurry to abandon the flesh, to get back to The Word, thus mistaking "God's" fundamental impulse moving into the world, taking up residence in the world, becoming the world - and becoming it every more fully, ever more lovingly.

Thomas Merton: "Our Job Is To Love Others Without Stopping To Inquire If They Are Worthy"


I think "Christian""conservatives" are in their ungodly hurry because they think God "on high""does it all" for them. 


Did He not provide them with the bible to answer every question? 

And thus shielded by their unfailing belief in Providence, they render themselves impotent; indeed, from their vantage, God obliges them to be impotent by requiring them to have faith in Him alone. 


And having faith in God alone, they are aware, however dimly, that they don't really intend to DO anything. 


Global warming? 


Why, there's no need for concerted human effort; God is an unfailing benefactor of his people.  


Well, how about concerted scientific effort to minimize the ravages of COVID 19? 


Why, if God wants me to live, he will protect me as surely as he protected the Ancient Jews who daubed lamb's blood on their lintels to keep the plague at bay. (Never mind that God did NOT protect the Jews from several centuries of slavery at Pharoah's harsh hands.)


And so "faithful rationalization" has become a certain recipe for irresponsibility: "I need not do anything but have faith; and if I have faith God will take care of my every need."



"Faith, Hope, Charity And Divine Desperation"

"First Stone: It Is Not Enough To Do What Is Right..."
Sola Fide

The Tragedy Of Modern Medicine And The Seduction Of "Faith Alone" ("Sola Fide")


Waldorf Education under the Condition of a Digital Living Environment
If the digital world were to become our normal environment, what would pedagogy look like?  What would happen to a pedagogy that is dedicated to an education towards freedom?

Being in the body is a cultural achievement
In the following I would like to sketch four levels, make four suggestions in view of a pedagogy, that would begin to look for its bearings within the context of these conditions.

Alan: Do you know "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire? If not, I encourage you to check it out. One of the enduringly great insights of Freire is that he starts from the vantage of the oppressed, asserting and assuming that all real learning must include all people right from the get-go. 

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people ...
"But you've been told many times before, Messiahs pointed to the door, and no one had the guts to leave the temple."
"I'm Free"

To me it is clear that "the classroom" is an annex to "the temple."

Admittedly, the temple and the classroom have their place.

But it appears that our challenge as people -- and as educators -- is to "get out of the classroom" as often as possible. 

And not only out of the classroom, but into the homes, into the workplaces and the lives of poor people, oppressed people, marginalized people.

And not by the lark of "drive-by slumming," but by becoming deeply insinuated in the ongoing lives of particular poor families.

Just as "foreign exchange students" become part of the households with whom they have lived, let us devise ways to "move in" with families who can only feed us rice and beans; families "on the edge" whose "edginess" imparts (paradoxical) vitality, rootedness, and extended family enmeshment, all of which make it impossible to stay hunkered down in one's silo. 

In effect, to stay in one's temple, convinced they are God's faithful servants.

I know I'm repeating the first of the next two posts. 

But I  believe the nub of something crucial is contained in "Cross Border Schooling" yet doubt I have enough remaining time to "work it out."


I also believe it is time for enlightened educators to promote, to anticipate and to ponder the best way to enact "Obligatory National Service." 

Peter Moyer has always been keen on erecting a "Statue of Responsibility" to bookend the "Statue of Liberty," and I think Obligatory National Service -- early in one's life -- is the best and most efficacious way to imprint upon Americans the foundational importance of rendering service to others, regardless their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or worthiness. https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/04/fr-thomas-merton-explains-in-16-words.html

"Proposal For Two Years Obligatory National Service"
Billionaire Capitalist Nick Hanauer: Why Money Doesn't Trickle ...

"Pope Francis says we should avoid being led by devotion to idols and magical ideas; instead we should have faith and let in and be guided by those at the margins"

https://catholicclimatemovement.global/pope-francis-says-we-should-avoid-being-led-by-devotion-to-idols-and-magical-ideas-instead-we-should-have-faith-and-let-in-and-be-guided-by-those-at-the-margins/


First, taking into account the conditions of rapid changes in the living conditions of the digital world, one would have to begin to accept them as the outset for a productive design. At the moment, the discourse on digital media is often shaped by the postmodern perspective of loss, a critique, that still assumes that one has the possibility to choose another world that is not digitally based. Instead of accusing kids and lamenting about the fact that the world has become like this, I would raise the question: how can we shape "inclusion", how can we include ourselves, and yet, how can we by pedagogical means enable to participate in life on earth? In other words - and this is my first point - we can no longer regard being in the body as granted by nature and natural development, but should begin to make it a question of culture and in this way kindle a pedagogical issue.

Pedagogy of the protecting hand
The second question: How can the Waldorf educator approach the issue in concrete terms? I think it worthwhile to start with the motifs Steiner mentioned in his second lecture in the “Meditative study of Man” (GA 302a), as opposed to taking up established Waldorf pedagogical traditions, which of course also were once new discoveries and contributions to developing issues. The motifs of the second lecture draw attention to the "reverence for everything that precedes a child" on the one hand of a polarity, and a teacher’s "enthusiasm" for the world on the other. And then he develops the gesture of a "protecting hand”.  What would a "protecting hand pedagogy" look like in view of the digital world? What would the teacher’s enthusiasm for the present world look like? Where does a feeling of "this world is actually wrong and should look quite different" undermine the enthusiasm to allow young people to find their footing in today’s world? “A protecting hand" does not mean protecting children from the world. But: How do we accompany these young people with a "protecting hand" into today's world, as it is? In such inner exercises regarding inner attitudes, I see great potential for pedagogical ideas and designs contributing to solutions in the changed situation.

Alan: I am not sure where to insert the following observation, so I'll put it here. 

One way to look at "digital life" -- and "digital possibility" -- is to conceive one's cellphone as "the world's largest library... which I keep in my pocket." 

In similar vein, a monk's fundamental work (and at bedrock I think of myself as a monk) is 1.) scholarship, 2.) song and 3.) agricultural labor. (Monks also eat together, which is a great good, but this necessity is not part of their "work" as a "chosen mission.")

If we inculcate the understanding that digital devices (which I often call "screens") are essentially libraries that enable studious exploration and even preservation of the world, we perform a great service. 

However, digital space is essentially two dimensional and this relative simplification of reality impels us to embody a kind of simple-mindedness which tends to result in watered-down visions of Reality -- Reality 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and so on. 
(Borges wrote a brilliant one page short story about a town in the Argentine pampas that is increasingly prosperous. At decade intervals the town fathers contract with a cartographer to make a new and more precise map. Finally, the town is prosperous enough that it creates a map that is draped everywhere in a ratio of 1 to 1 so that the entire town is entirely covered by the map. I won't tell you how the story ends... The tale is titled "Del Rigor en la Ciencia," or "On Exactitude in Science.")

Enveloped by these simplified visions of reality, we more or less isolate ourselves from the multidimensionality of Reality, often becoming "sophisticated simpletons" - and worse, simpletons who get irritated with the complexity of multi-dimensional Reality, multi-dimensional enfleshment, multidimensional incarnation.  


And so we take shelter in our simplified, streamlined silos, dependable redoubts against the fullness and complexity of Creation-Incarnation where everything "is complicated."

What, exactly, are we sheltering from when we flee to our silos?

C.S. Lewis says “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.”

Just as the "peace" that my generations' parents longed for is now routinely perceived as a boring threat -- a "roaring silence" menace -- we have come to rely on our neatly-tailored, narrowly-siloed and highly-simplified cyber-lives as "the way life is supposed to be," with the result that we are ever more easily irritated by reality's uncontrollable "interruptions."

In my lifetime, history's evolving trajectory has gone something like this:

First, peace -- as understood for millennia -- became a silently howling menace.

Then, Reality became such an irritant that we decided to defend - tooth and nail - against its intrusion.


At any cost, Reality was to be kept at bay.

Despite, About, With and By - digital media learning
Thirdly, in my opinion, the question of ICT Learning (Information and Communication Technologies Learning) at school needs to be tackled fourfold:
It needs reflections on (a) "learning despite ICT ", it needs (b) "learning about ICT ", it needs (c) "learning to cope with ICT " and it needs (d) "learning by using ICT ".

(a) Learning despite ICT. The question from a teacher's point of view is: what is the value of being together in a classroom? Why should we be present for example, when it becomes clear that for certain forms of learning, i.e. "blended learning" or "flipped classroom" would perhaps be more efficient than the current learning operations? Is there still a case for it being worthwhile to be together with the pupils?

In view of such and similar developments, the question from a teacher's perspective arises: can we re-address the meaning of school under these conditions? A primary school in Germany has introduced an ad hoc subject "Talking to Each Other”. It was a spontaneous reaction to communicative behaviour in the playgrounds of that school where children stand in a circle and send each other WhatsApp messages, without being able to  write complete sentences. An experienced sixth grade Waldorf teacher told me that he can no longer use the didactic structure, he used for his last class. He became aware of a structural change in the way children think. This he called algorithmic thinking: before the children get involved, they ask if there is not an easier way to solve the problem, implicating that in such a case it wouldn’t be necessary to embark on a common didactic search.

From the student's perspective, too, there are shifts that require a new set-up. One experienced class teacher told me that this time, like never before, he had the greatest difficulty teaching children how to write with a fountain pen. When a quill was used, there was a certain interest to see how people wrote in past times. In our conversation we came to the conclusion that present day children do not see any grownups using fountain pens for their hand written work. From a child’s point of view  point of view writing with a fountain pen may therefore seem like learning a cultural technique from the past, as it was with quills. Writing by hand has become a cultural technique that does not lead them into the adult world, as fountain pen writing used to do, especially when they know that their teacher has his iPad in his schoolbag.

(b) “Learning about ICT". This is about clarifying and minimizing potential dangers. Looking at the teacher’s tasks, one can ask, if they can still fulfil their protective role. For them, this means first of all: do they know what is "going on" in the ICT field, so that they can exercise their supervisory duty? In the worst case, are they able to recognize a student's ICT activity when it is on the verge of turning criminal? If they cannot, such teachers are basically violating their duty of supervision. Teachers today need a minimum level of “knowledge about ICT”.

From a pupil's perspective, a kind of elementary digital "traffic education" is necessary. A ban on smartphones at school may at first provide a shelter from such dangers as cyberbullying. But it also brings problems with it: the educational issue is then simply delegated to the way to and from school. Even at home one can hardly expect active education in this sense. In my opinion it is necessary, that we should create spaces for adults and even smaller children to get to know the digital world together and “learn about ICT”, its limits and dangers.

(c) “Learning to use ICT”: Learning to cope with ICT spreads over the whole field of media education. Edwin Hübner has shaped the productive distinction between direct and indirect media education. Indirect media pedagogy means: which non-medial (school) activities promote a sovereign personality to find a genuine way of dealing with these media? In the field of direct media education, one can ask, what skills and knowledge should young people have acquired in dealing with ICT,  when they leave school? What knowledge and skills enable their sovereignty? Do pupils get to know the technical basics, functions, programming and application of software in such a way that they really understand them? Do they learn to question critically, how digital media work, how to analyse and evaluate images and news? Do pupils learn how to use ICT in an adult manner? Who is going to show them, in concrete terms, how to use ICT for working and not just for "chatting"? 15 years ago, this applied only to mathematics and natural sciences, but today art, languages and the humanities are included.

(d) How can one develop “learning by using digital media”? That is a question of didactics in their relation to ICT. How can I teach history, how can I teach English by using ICT, not just augmenting former techniques, but using ITC didactically to lead to better results in a certain subject. This is a very difficult question, which cannot be simply answered.

The idea of using only laptops, iPads or smartphones in class, fitted with learning software or colourful presentations to make history lessons better from a didactic point of view has scientifically been proved wrong. The decisive factor, if and how ICT is used in teaching, as we know today, is closely related to the teachers’ convictions about ICT, about learning and good teaching.

A specific category of teaching competence is increasingly being considered: what is required to achieve better learning results through ICT? (An example of the academic research in this field is known as 'Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge', TPACK). Here, too, initial examples can be given on the basis of empirical research: In physics, students should learn the relationship between acceleration and gravity. An example: They use their own smartphones or those from the school, on which an app has been installed, to record the data from the gyroscope (acceleration sensor). Then the students use the swing in the playground, with their smartphones in their pockets. The data is then read and evaluated, formulas reconstructed and so everyone could finally calculate, who was swinging how high. The accompanying research showed that the much better learning effect, compared to learning on the model in the classroom, was not primarily due to increased motivation, (because the children were allowed to use smartphones), but to physical experience and their own involvement in the experiment and in its reconstruction. This is perhaps a very early example of “subject learning by using digital media”, but it shows how didactic perspectives can be created and used to validate the use of ICT for each subject in view of its own teaching objectives.

Shaping Digital Change
The fourth aspect to which I would like to draw attention in concluding this article, focuses on the criteria for shaping digital change. The cultural shaping of the industrial revolution was gradually guided by the unconditional dignity of the individual, sometimes modified after making horrific mistakes. It was towards this dignity within society, that the shaping of the essential institutions in Western countries began to orientate themselves. In its wake pedagogy began to focus on the development of the individual.

Now we can ask ourselves, in what way does the digital world continually generate new ideas and designs, thereby deceiving and disrupting the foundations of our individual culture? If digital change is not completely rejected and contested, which is quite understandable from the just mentioned point of view, it may be necessary to consider a change in values that gives cultural and educational concerns a new orientation. In this way it would enable us to actively participate in the shaping of digital change.

Translated by Ronald Templeton


Robin Schmidt studied philosophy and cultural history, then educational science (focus on adult education) with philosophy as a teaching subject. Robin Schmidt has been head of the “Cultural Impulse Research Centre” (“Forschungsstelle Kulturimpuls”) since 2001 and is currently working on the project "Humanism of a Digital Modernity". Since 2016 he has also been a research fellow at the University of Education of Northwestern Switzerland, with a research project on teaching and learning in digital change.

Literature
(1) Honegger, Beat: „Mehr als 0 und 1. Schule in einer digitalisierten Welt.“ Hep Verlag. 2017. ("More than 0 and 1. school in a digitized world.”)
(2) Te Wildt, Bert: Digital Junkies. Internetabhängigkeit und ihre Folgen für uns und unsere Kinder. (Digital Junkies. Internet dependency and its consequences for us and our children). Droemer TB. 2016
(3)  ZHAW, Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Departement Angewandte Psychologie (Hrsg.) (2017): JAMES. Jugend | Aktivitäten | Medien – Erhebung Schweiz 2016. Ergebnisbericht zur JAMES-Studie 2016. (ZHAW, Zurich University of Applied Sciences Department of Applied Psychology (Hrsg.) (2017): JAMES. Youth | Activities | Media Survey Switzerland 2016. Report on the JAMES Study 2016.)
Lorenz, Ramona; Bos, Wilfried; Endberg, Manuela; Eickelmann, Birgit; Grafe, Silke und Vahrenhold, Jan (Hrsg.) (2017): Schule digital – der Länderindikator 2017. (School digital - the country indicator 2017) Münster: Waxmann.
(4)  Steiner, Rudolf: „Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung.“ (“The Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe’s World Conception”) Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung. 2001.
(5) Maffesoli, Michel (2014): Die Zeit kehrt wieder: Lob der Postmoderne. (Time returns: Praise of Postmodernism) Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
(6) Han, Byung-Chul (2014): Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken. (Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Power Techniques) 5. Auflage Aufl. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
(7) Baudrillard, Jean (1992): Transparenz des Bösen: ein Essay über extreme Phänomene. (Transparency of Evil: an Essay on Extreme Phenomena). Berlin: Merve Verl. (= Internationaler Merve Diskurs 169).

(x) Translator’s footnote: The ‘I’ is seen here as the opposite of the self centred ego.

Summary of a talk on September 22, 2017 at the Goetheanum within the framework of the conference of the Pedagogical Section "Digital Time - Pedagogy - Perspectives"
Edited by Walter Riethmüller, shortened by Katharina Stemann
First published in: Lehrerrundbrief (teacher’s newsletter) 107, Educational Research Centre at the Federation of Free Waldorf Schools in Germany, 2018.




On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 1:15 PM whitney macdonald wrote:

Dear Alan,
Wow.  Great work.  As I told you, I don’t often respond but I do love your work.  War vs. the slow torture of economic oppression: I wrote a poem inspired by the George Floyd murder based on this idea.
All the best to you,
Whitney

PS- We met serendipitously a couple of years back at Ixpata.  You posed a question some thing like: If machines (computers) do everything they say that they can do, what will be left to give human beings a sense of dignity?  As a teacher who is trying to teach in a way that will meet the needs children for the future, I carry that question constantly.  There is a small cadre of us who are beginning to reimagine the Waldorf curriculum.  It’s an interesting process.  If you have the time, I will attach an article from a Swiss thinker who is asking this question.  Quite interesting, I think.  It’s translated from German so some of the phrasing is a bit odd sounding but the gist is there.  I think you will find it it thought provoking. I had a conversation yesterday with him, the author, and a friend who is an expert in curative education, primarily working with developmentally disabled people (he runs a Camp Hill community if you are familiar).  We are planning to continue the conversation at regular intervals.  Keeps me out of trouble. :-)


George Floyd

George went quick
Eight minutes 
Four hundred and eighty seconds
A time lapse
In numbers I can count
But how many seconds does it take
To crush the dreams 
To extinguish the spark 
In the eye
Of a young black child
Who dreams
Of being  
A doctor
A teacher
A father
A man
How many seconds does it take 
Before that mother
Arms around her newborn son 
Starts to worry 
Starts to count the days 
Until she gets that call
Or sees that video
That video that sped it up
For all of us to see
Life slowly crushed 
A white man 
On his neck
Every day
Every 
Black 
Man

On Jun 13, 2020, at 11:49 AM, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:


 

"Why Adolf Eichmann's Final Message Remains So Profoundly Unsettling," The Guardian

Dear Maria and Danny,

On a recent walk, I mentioned the systematic ways that we all participate in "structural evil" and how anyone who thinks s/he is among "the blameless" or "the unimpeachably innocent" has not examined the consumingly tentacular nature of systematic wrongdoing.



The article below concerning Zoom's treachery in China is a case in point.

Orthodox Christianity dealt with this knotty problem of ubiquitous wrong-doing through the doctrine of Original Sin, making clear that EVERYONE is born with an inevitable impulse to commit "sin"... whose original New Testamental reference is "hamartia," a Greek word to describe an archer "missing the mark." (Notably, "Original Sin" is actually celebrated in the Easter Exsultet, the most unusual prayer of the liturgical year. https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-easter-exsultet-evil-celebrated-as.html)

It is, I think, easier to deal with our inevitable shortcomings by recognizing them for what they are, and then doing what we can to make progress without ever fixating on perfection.

The bloody aftermath of the French Revolution, brought to fever pitch by Robespierre's Reign of Terror, resulted (as I see it) from the revolutionary belief that the overthrow of Evil Monarchy and co-related marginalization of the "damnable church" justified the (often bloody) conviction that "being a revolutionary" was an indubitable, unimpeachable good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

Mommy and I will go to our graves in clear acknowledgement that the Sandinista government - which we supported and championed -betrayed its people in ways that were despicable, authoritarian and profoundly self-seeking. Daniel Ortega, our one-time hero, continues to do all these villainous things.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (for whom I have high regard) identified an seldom acknowledged phenomenon (first set forth by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus) which he called "enantiodromia" based on his observation that any behavior "pushed far enough" -- including, for example, revolutionary behavior -- results in a rather sudden transformation when any behavioral impulse taken too far morphs into its opposite.

Oxford Reference:

enantiodromia

QUICK REFERENCE

The principle attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (?535–?475bc) according to which everything eventually changes into its opposite. In analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) described it as ‘the principle which governs all cycles of natural life, from the smallest to the greatest’ (Collected Works, 7, paragraph 112). [From Greek enantios opposite + dromos course + -ia indicating a condition or quality]
One of my "Top 5" quotation-insights is from Trappist monk Thomas Merton:

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary.The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton


I believe Trump cultists are, at bottom, perfectionists who have been "blinded by the light."

If you study the essential "ideals" of Trumpistas -- many of them ostentatiously-but-superficially "Christian" people -- you will see that these stunted human beings are essentially "too true to be good," a psycho-spiritual state largely attributable to their insistence on incandescent-but-non-contextualized principles that have resulted in personal behavior that embodies the polar opposites of what they formally profess. And so, freedom, liberty, truth, justice and personal responsibility transmute into a moral portrait as hideous as the one Dorian Gray kept in the attic. 

A brilliant expression of this "unacknowledged shadow side" is voiced by Rebecca Hamilton, a staunch opponent of abortion: 

5 Pro-Life Votes: The Supreme Court Can Overtuen Roe Now
(This is a remarkable piece of writing!)



And behind the Pharisaic sham...



Enter the relentless search for ways to prove that "certain" people -- but certainly not people like me! -- are undeserving.


Alan: Conservatives would LOVE to be loving, kind and generous... 
if only these traits did not encourage n'er-do-wells and parasites to persist in irresponsibility 
and despicable refusal to take care of themselves.

To close on The Cornerstone of Hopefulness, consider these other observations by Merton.

"You are fed up with words and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.  This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it.  And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make meaning be there again by magic..."

"Do not depend on the hope of results.  When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real.  In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."  
***
The great good news of The Apocalyse has begun to unfold.  

Revelation is at hand. (The two Greek words that comprise "apocalypse" mean "lifting the veil.") 

And as the veil lifts we realize (like the curtain being pulled back on The Wizard of Oz), that it has been the ruling class -- propagating and perpetuating full-spectrum trumpery -- that has held humankind in thrall.

It is this same Ruling Class Trumpery that has always kept its knee on George Floyd's neck.  


"The cry for peace will be a cry in the wilderness, so long as the spirit of nonviolence does not dominate millions of men and women.
An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict... An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects. … The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil — man's greed.
"Non-Violence — The Greatest Force" in The World Tomorrow (5 October 1926)

The greed of "The 1%" -- now revealed in the biblical abomination of Donald Trump -- has imposed a hugely disproportionate amount of unnecessary misery on the longsuffering people of our world.  

"The Love Of Money Is The Root Of All Evil" - An Open Invitation To Christian Conservatives

And although "perfection" is an illusion-to-be-shunned (at least in the light of its commonplace misunderstanding), human life can be markedly better than the cesspool in which we flounder.

Yuuuvvvvvooooooo!!!

Daddy man

PS Blessedly, Western Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia already demonstrate a categorically better way of life. But here in the "United" States, where we have built an American Dream of private opulence and public squalor, the veil is lifting. 


American Conservatives Are The Apotheosis Of Pharisaism. (Conservatives, Please Weigh In)

The Pharisee Party And The Devolution Of GOP Leaders Into Oligarchs Who Despise Democracy

The Pharisees Are Always With Us: A Field Guide



Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts At China's Request

Teleconferencing company Zoom acknowledged it shut down the accounts of several activists and online commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre ...
NPRYesterday
















bookmark_border
share
more_vert


Zoom Promises To Do Better After Banning Tiananmen Square Protests—Then Builds Tech To Help China’s Censorship

Zoom reinstates accounts of Tiananmen Square commemoration organizers, but is creating tech to ensure mainland Chinese users can be censored.
ForbesYesterday
















bookmark_border
share
more_vert

The Sacred Heart

Tulsa Race Massacre Of 1921: "The Single Worst Incident Of Racial Violence In American History"

$
0
0
 Not Hiroshima.  Tulsa. Google "Tulsa Race Massacre" | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

Tulsa race massacre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Tulsa massacre)
Jump to navigationJump to search
Tulsa race massacre
Part of the Nadir of American race relations
TulsaRaceRiot-1921.png
Homes and businesses burned in Greenwood
LocationGreenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.
Coordinates36°09′34″N 95°59′11″WCoordinates36°09′34″N 95°59′11″W
DateMay 31 – June 1, 1921
TargetBlack residents, their homes and businesses
WeaponsGuns, explosives, incendiary devices, some dropped from airplanes[1]:196
Deaths36 total; 26 black and 10 white (1921 records)
150–200 black and 50 white (1921 estimate by W.F. White)[2]
39 confirmed, 75–100 to 150–300 estimated (2001 commission)[3]
Injured800+
183 serious injuries[3]
exact number unknown
PerpetratorsWhite American mob and[4][5][6][7][8]:8, 10 the United States National Guard[1]:193, 196
The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921[9][10][11][12][13][14] took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in TulsaOklahoma.[1] It has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history."[15] The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street".
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and as many as 6,000 black residents were interned at large facilities, many for several days.[16][17] The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead, but the American Red Cross declined to provide an estimate. A 2001 state commission examination of events was able to confirm 36 dead, 26 black and 10 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates and other records.[1]:114 The commission gave overall estimates from 75–100 to 150–300 dead.[1]:13, 23
The massacre began over Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody. A subsequent gathering of angry local whites outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held, and the spread of rumors he had been lynched, alarmed the local black population, some of whom arrived at the courthouse armed. Shots were fired and 12 people were killed: 10 white and 2 black.[18] As news of these deaths spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded.[2] White rioters rampaged through the black neighborhood that night and morning killing men and burning and looting stores and homes, and only around noon the next day Oklahoma National Guard troops managed to get control of the situation by declaring martial law. About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $32.25 million in 2019). Their property was never recovered nor were they compensated for it.
Many survivors left Tulsa, while black and white residents who stayed in the city were silent for decades about the terror, violence, and losses of this event. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories.
In 1996, seventy-five years after the massacre, a bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Members were appointed to investigate events, interview survivors, hear testimony from the public, and prepare a report of events. There was an effort toward public education about these events through the process. The Commission's final report, published in 2001, said that the city had conspired with the mob of white citizens against black citizens; it recommended a program of reparations to survivors and their descendants.[1] The state passed legislation to establish some scholarships for descendants of survivors, encourage economic development of Greenwood, and develop a memorial park in Tulsa to the massacre victims. The park was dedicated in 2010. In 2020, the massacre became part of the Oklahoma school curriculum.[19]

Background


A map of Tulsa in 1920. The Greenwood District was in northern Tulsa.
In 1921, Oklahoma had a racially, socially and politically tense atmosphere. The First World War had ended in 1918 with the return of many ex-servicemen. The American Civil War was still in living memory, even though it had ended in 1865. Civil rights for disenfranchised peoples were lacking and the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent (primarily through the wildly popular movie Birth of a Nation released 1916). Tulsa, as a booming oil city, supported a large number of affluent, educated and professional African Americans. This combination of factors played a part in the rising tensions which were to culminate in the coming events.
The territory of Northern Oklahoma had been established for resettlement of Native Americans from the Southeast, some of whom had owned slaves.[20] Other areas had received many settlers from the South whose families had been slaveholders before the Civil War. Oklahoma was admitted as a state on November 16, 1907. The newly created state legislature passed racial segregation laws, commonly known as Jim Crow laws, as its first order of business. The 1907 Oklahoma Constitution did not call for strict segregation; delegates feared that, should they include such restrictions, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt would veto the document. Still, the very first law passed by the new legislature segregated all rail travel, and voter registration rules effectively disenfranchised most blacks. That meant they were also barred from serving on juries or in local office. These laws were enforced until after passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Major cities passed additional restrictions.[21][page needed]
In the early 20th century, lynchings were common in Oklahoma as part of a continuing effort to assert and maintain white supremacy.[22][23][21][page needed] Between the declaration of statehood and the massacre thirteen years later, at least 31 persons were lynched in Oklahoma; 26 were black, and nearly all were men or boys. During the twenty years following the massacre, the number of known lynchings statewide fell to two.[24]
On August 4, 1916, Tulsa passed an ordinance that mandated residential segregation by forbidding blacks or whites from residing on any block where three-fourths or more of the residents were of the other race. Although the United States Supreme Court declared such an ordinance unconstitutional the following year, Tulsa and many other border and Southern cities continued to establish and enforce segregation for the next three decades.[25][21]:1-42
As returning veterans tried to reenter the labor market following World War I, social tensions and anti-black sentiment increased in cities where job competition was high. At the same time, black veterans pushed to have their civil rights enforced, believing they had earned full citizenship by military service. In what became known as the "Red Summer" of 1919, industrial cities across the Midwest and Northeast experienced severe race riots in which whites, sometimes including local authorities, attacked black communities. In Chicago and some other cities, blacks defended themselves for the first time with force but were often outnumbered.
Northeastern Oklahoma was in an economic slump that increased unemployment. Since 1915, the Ku Klux Klan had been growing in urban chapters across the country. Its first significant appearance in Oklahoma occurred on August 12, 1921.[22] By the end of 1921, Tulsa had 3,200 residents in the Klan by one estimate.[22] The city's population was 72,000 in 1920.[26]
Greenwood was a district in Tulsa organized in 1906 following Booker T. Washington's 1905 tour of Arkansas, Indian Territory and Oklahoma. It was a namesake of the Greenwood District that Washington had established as his own demonstration in Tuskegee, Alabama, five years earlier. Greenwood became so prosperous that it came to be known as "the Negro Wall Street" (now commonly referred to as "the Black Wall Street").[27] Blacks had created their own businesses and services in this enclave, including several grocers, two newspapers, two movie theaters, nightclubs, and numerous churches. Black professionals, including doctors, dentists, lawyers, and clergy, served their peers. Most blacks lived together in the district and during his trip to Tulsa in 1905, Washington encouraged the co-operation, economic independence and excellence being demonstrated there. Greenwood residents selected their own leaders and raised capital there to support economic growth. In the surrounding areas of northeastern Oklahoma, blacks also enjoyed relative prosperity and participated in the oil boom.[27]

Monday, May 30, 1921 – Memorial Day

Encounter in the elevator

It is alleged that at some time about or after 4 p.m., 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner employed at a Main Street shine parlor, entered the only elevator of the nearby Drexel Building at 319 South Main Street to use the top-floor restroom, which was restricted to black people. He encountered Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator on duty. The two likely knew each other at least by sight, as this building was the only one nearby with a restroom which Rowland had express permission to use, and the elevator operated by Page was the only one in the building. A clerk at Renberg's, a clothing store on the first floor of the Drexel, heard what sounded like a woman's scream and saw a young black man rushing from the building. The clerk went to the elevator and found Page in what he said was a distraught state. Thinking she had been assaulted, he summoned the authorities.[1]:37-102
The 2001 Oklahoma Commission Final Report notes that it was unusual for both Rowland and Page to be working downtown on Memorial Day, when most stores and businesses were closed. It suggests that Rowland had a simple accident, such as tripping and steadying himself against the girl, or perhaps they had a quarrel.[1]:37-102
Whether – and to what extent – Dick Rowland and Sarah Page knew each other has long been a matter of speculation. It seems reasonable that they would have least been able to recognize each other on sight, as Rowland would have regularly ridden in Page's elevator on his way to and from the restroom. Others, however, have speculated that the pair might have been lovers – a dangerous and potentially deadly taboo, but not an impossibility. Whether they knew each other or not, it is clear that both Dick Rowland and Sarah Page were downtown on Monday, May 30, 1921 – although this, too, is cloaked in some mystery. On Memorial Day, most – but not all – stores and businesses in Tulsa were closed. Yet, both Rowland and Page were apparently working that day. Yet in the days and years that followed, many who knew Dick Rowland agreed on one thing: that he would never have been capable of rape.
A common explanation often offered is that Dick Rowland tripped as he got onto the elevator and, as he tried to catch his fall, he grabbed onto the arm of Sarah Page, who then screamed.[1]:57

Brief investigation

Although the police likely questioned Page, no written account of her statement has been found. It is generally accepted that the police determined that what happened between the two teenagers was something less than an assault. The authorities conducted a low-key investigation rather than launching a man-hunt for her alleged assailant. Afterward, Page told the police that she would not press charges.[21][page needed]
Regardless of whether assault had occurred, Rowland had reason to be fearful. At the time, such an accusation alone put him at risk for attack by angry mobs of white people. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Rowland fled to his mother's house in the Greenwood neighborhood.[1]:37-102

Identity of the black rioters

On June 3, the Morning Tulsa Daily World reported major points of their interview with Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver concerning the events leading up to the Tulsa riot. Cleaver was deputy sheriff for Okmulgee County and not under the supervision of the city police department; his duties mainly involved enforcing law among the "colored people" of Greenwood but he also operated a business as a private investigator. He had previously been dismissed as a city police investigator for assisting county officers with a drug raid at Gurley's Hotel but not reporting his involvement to his superiors.[28] He had considerable land holdings and suffered tremendous financial damages as a result of the riot. Among his holdings were several residential properties and Cleaver Hall, a large community gathering place and function hall. He reported personally evicting a number of armed criminals who had taken to barricading themselves within properties he owned. Upon eviction, they merely moved to Cleaver Hall. Cleaver reported that the majority of violence started at Cleaver Hall along with the rioters barricaded inside. Charles Page offered to build him a new home.[4]
The Morning Tulsa Daily World stated, "Cleaver named Will Robinson, a dope peddler and all around bad negro, as the leader of the armed blacks. He has also the names of three others who were in the armed gang at the court house. The rest of the negroes participating in the fight, he says, were former servicemen who had an exaggerated idea of their own importance... They did not belong here, had no regular employment and were simply a floating element with seemingly no ambition in life but to foment trouble."[4] O. W. Gurley, owner of Gurley's Hotel, identified the following men by name as arming themselves and gathering in his hotel: Will Robinson, Peg Leg Taylor, Bud Bassett, Henry Van Dyke, Chester Ross, Jake Mayes, O. B. Mann, John Suplesox, Fatty, Jack Scott, Lee Mable, John Bowman and W. S. Weaver.[5]

Tuesday, May 31, 1921

Suspect arrested


One of the news articles that contributed to tensions in Tulsa
On the morning after the incident, Detective Henry Carmichael and Henry C. Pack, a black patrolman, located Rowland on Greenwood Avenue and detained him. Pack was one of two black officers on the city's police force, which then included about 45 officers.[21][page needed] Rowland was initially taken to the Tulsa city jail at First and Main. Late that day, Police Commissioner J. M. Adkison said he had received an anonymous telephone call threatening Rowland's life. He ordered Rowland transferred to the more secure jail on the top floor of the Tulsa County Courthouse.[29]
Rowland was well known among attorneys and other legal professionals within the city, many of whom knew Rowland through his work as a shoeshiner. Some witnesses later recounted hearing several attorneys defend Rowland in their conversations with one another. One of the men said, "Why, I know that boy, and have known him a good while. That's not in him."[30]

Newspaper coverage

The Tulsa Tribune, one of two white-owned papers published in Tulsa, broke the story in that afternoon's edition with the headline: "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator", describing the alleged incident. According to some witnesses, the same edition of the Tribune included an editorial warning of a potential lynching of Rowland, titled "To Lynch Negro Tonight". The paper was known at the time to have a "sensationalist" style of news writing. All original copies of that issue of the paper have apparently been destroyed, and the relevant page is missing from the microfilm copy.[31] The Tulsa Race Riot Commission in 1997 offered a reward for a copy of the editorial, which went unclaimed.[31] Other newspapers of the time like the Black Dispatch and the Tulsa World did not call attention to any such editorial after the event.[31] So, the exact content of the column — and whether it existed at all — remains in dispute.[31][32][33][1]:55-9

Stand-off at the courthouse

The afternoon edition of the Tribune hit the streets shortly after 3 p.m., and soon news spread of a potential lynching. By 4 p.m., local authorities were on alert. White residents began congregating at and near the Tulsa County Courthouse. By sunset at 7:34 p.m., the several hundred white residents assembled outside the courthouse appeared to have the makings of a lynch mob. Willard M. McCullough, the newly elected sheriff of Tulsa County, was determined to avoid events such as the 1920 lynching of white murder suspect Roy Belton in Tulsa, which had occurred during the term of his predecessor.[34] The sheriff took steps to ensure the safety of Rowland. McCullough organized his deputies into a defensive formation around Rowland, who was terrified.[failed verification] One of Scott Ellsworth's references in the 2001 commission report::72 The Guthrie Daily Leader reported that Rowland had been taken to the county jail before crowds started to gather.[35] The sheriff positioned six of his men, armed with rifles and shotguns, on the roof of the courthouse. He disabled the building's elevator, and had his remaining men barricade themselves at the top of the stairs with orders to shoot any intruders on sight. The sheriff went outside and tried to talk the crowd into going home, but to no avail. According to an account by Scott Ellsworth, the sheriff was "hooted down".[1]:37–102
About 8:20 p.m., three white men entered the courthouse, demanding that Rowland be turned over to them. Although vastly outnumbered by the growing crowd out on the street, Sheriff McCullough turned the men away.[21]:81
A few blocks away on Greenwood Avenue, members of the black community gathered to discuss the situation at Gurley's Hotel.[4][5][6] Given the recent lynching of Belton, a white man accused of murder, they believed that Rowland was greatly at risk. Many black residents were determined to prevent the crowd from lynching Rowland, but they were divided about tactics. Young World War I veterans prepared for a battle by collecting guns and ammunition. Older, more prosperous men feared a destructive confrontation that likely would cost them dearly.[21][page needed] O. W. Gurley gave a sworn statement to the Grand Jury that he tried to convince the men that there would be no lynching but that they had responded that Sheriff McCullough had personally told them their presence was required.[5] About 9:30 p.m., a group of approximately 50–60 black men, armed with rifles and shotguns, arrived at the jail to support the sheriff and his deputies in defending Rowland from the mob. Corroborated by ten witnesses, attorney James Luther submitted to the grand jury that they were following the orders of Sheriff McCullough who publicly denied he gave any orders:
I saw a car full of negroes driving through the streets with guns; I saw Bill McCullough and told him those negroes would cause trouble; McCullough tried to talk to them, and they got out and stood in single file. W. G. Daggs was killed near Boulder and Sixth street. I was under the impression that a man with authority could have stopped and disarmed them. I saw Chief of Police on south side of court house on top step, talking; I did not see any officer except the Chief; I walked in the court house and met McCullough in about 15 feet of his door; I told him these negroes were going to make trouble, and he said he had told them to go home; he went out and told the whites to go home, and one said "they said you told them to come up here." McCullough said "I did not" and a negro said you did tell us to come.[5][6]

Taking up arms

Having seen the armed blacks, some of the more than 1,000 whites who had been at the courthouse went home for their own guns. Others headed for the National Guard armory at Sixth Street and Norfolk Avenue, where they planned to arm themselves. The armory contained a supply of small arms and ammunition. Major James Bell of the 180th Infantry Regiment had already learned of the mounting situation downtown and the possibility of a break-in which he consequently took measures to prevent. He called the commanders of the three National Guard units in Tulsa, who ordered all the Guard members to put on their uniforms and report quickly to the armory. When a group of whites arrived and began pulling at the grating over a window, Bell went outside to confront the crowd of 300 to 400 men. Bell told them that the Guard members inside were armed and prepared to shoot anyone who tried to enter. After this show of force, the crowd withdrew from the armory.[21][page needed]
At the courthouse, the crowd had swollen to nearly 2,000, many of them now armed. Several local leaders, including Reverend Charles W. Kerr, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, tried to dissuade mob action. The chief of police, John A. Gustafson, later claimed that he tried to talk the crowd into going home.[1]:37-102
Anxiety on Greenwood Avenue was rising. Many blacks worried about the safety of Rowland. Small groups of armed black men ventured toward the courthouse in automobiles, partly for reconnaissance, and to demonstrate they were prepared to take necessary action to protect Rowland.[1]:37-102
Many white men interpreted these actions as a "Negro uprising" and became concerned. Eyewitnesses reported gunshots, presumably fired into the air, increasing in frequency during the evening.[1]:37-102

Second offer

In Greenwood, rumors began to fly—in particular, a report that whites were storming the courthouse. Shortly after 10 pm, a second, larger group of approximately 75 armed black men decided to go to the courthouse. They offered their support to the sheriff, who declined their help. According to witnesses, a white man is alleged to have told one of the armed black men to surrender his pistol. The man refused, and a shot was fired. That first shot may have been accidental, or meant as a warning; it was a catalyst for an exchange of gunfire.[36]

Riot

The gunshots triggered an almost immediate response by whites in the crowd, many of whom fired on the blacks, who then fired back at the whites. The first "battle" was said to last a few seconds or so, but took a toll, as ten whites and two blacks lay dead or dying in the street.[34] The black contingent retreated toward Greenwood. A rolling gunfight ensued. The armed white mob pursued the armed black mob toward Greenwood, with many stopping to loot local stores for additional weapons and ammunition. Along the way, bystanders, many of whom were leaving a movie theater after a show, were caught off guard by the mobs and fled. Panic set in as the white mob began firing on any black people in the crowd. The white mob also shot and killed at least one white man in the confusion.[1]:37-102
At around 11 p.m., members of the National Guard unit began to assemble at the armory to organize a plan to subdue the rioters. Several groups were deployed downtown to set up guard at the courthouse, police station, and other public facilities. Members of the local chapter of the American Legion joined in on patrols of the streets. The forces appeared to have been deployed to protect the white districts adjacent to Greenwood. The National Guard rounded up numerous black people and took them to the Convention Hall on Brady Street for detention.[1]:37–102
Many prominent white Tulsans also participated in the riot,[citation needed] including Tulsa founder and Ku Klux Klan member W. Tate Brady, who participated in the riot as a night watchman[37]This Land Press reported that W. Tate Brady had in 1917 participated and led the tarring and feathering of a group of men. The article stated that police, "delivered the convicted men into the custody of the black-robed Knights of Liberty." The provided document attached to the article states, "I believe the circumstantial evidence is sufficient to prevent any of them from wanting to give anyone any trouble in the way of lawsuits...all made the same statement with emphasis that Tate Brady put on the tar and feathers in the 'name of the women and children of Belgium.' The same is true as to the part that Chief of Police Ed Lucas took. Not all the witnesses said they would swear in court as to...[document incomplete]". The since uncovered remainder of the document continues, "It is a question as to what extent I could go in establishing beyond a doubt the persons in the mob since their disguise with the robes and masks was complete. I doubt if I could do it in a court in Oklahoma at this time."[38][39][40] In the Tulsa Daily World article about the incident, the victims were reported to be suspected German spies, referred to as I.W.W.'s.[41] Harlows Weekly also explains the contemporary connection between Belgium, the I.W.W. and the Knights of Liberty. The article sympathetically explains the actions as economically and politically motivated rather than racially motivated.[42][43] A Kansas detective reported over 200 members of the I.W.W. and their affiliates migrated to Oklahoma to organize an open rebellion among the working class against the war effort planned for November 1, 1917. It was reported that police beat the I.W.W. members before delivering them to the Knights of Liberty.[44] The Tulsa Daily World reported that none of the policemen could identify any of the hooded men. The Tulsa Daily World article states that the policemen were kidnapped, forced to drive the prisoners to a ravine and forced to watch the entire ordeal at gunpoint.[45] Previous reports regarding Brady's character seem favorable and he hired black employees in his businesses.[46] Brady married a Cherokee woman and fought for Cherokee claims against the U.S. government.[47]
At around midnight, white rioters again assembled outside the courthouse. It was a smaller group but more organized and determined. They shouted in support of a lynching. When they attempted to storm the building, the sheriff and his deputies turned them away and dispersed them.[citation needed]

Wednesday, June 1, 1921

Throughout the early morning hours, groups of armed whites and blacks squared off in gunfights. At this point the fighting was concentrated along sections of the Frisco tracks, a dividing line between the black and white commercial districts. A rumor circulated that more blacks were coming by train from Muskogee to help with an invasion of Tulsa. At one point, passengers on an incoming train were forced to take cover on the floor of the train cars, as they had arrived in the midst of crossfire, with the train taking hits on both sides.[21][page needed]
Small groups of whites made brief forays by car into Greenwood, indiscriminately firing into businesses and residences. They often received return fire. Meanwhile, white rioters threw lighted oil rags into several buildings along Archer Street, igniting them.[21][page needed]

Fires begin


Fires burning along Archer and Greenwood during the Tulsa race riot of 1921
At around 1 a.m., the white mob began setting fires, mainly in businesses on commercial Archer Street at the southern edge of the Greenwood district. As crews from the Tulsa Fire Department arrived to put out fires, they were turned away at gunpoint.[21][page needed][failed verification] Scott Elsworth makes the same claim,[1]:66 but his reference makes no mention of firefighters.:19 Parrish gave only praise for the national guard.[48]:20 Another reference Elsworth gives to support the claim of holding firefighters at gunpoint is only a summary of events in which they suppressed the firing of guns by the rioters and disarmed them of their firearms.[49] Yet another of his references states that they were fired upon by the white mob, "It would mean a fireman's life to turn a stream of water on one of those negro buildings. They shot at us all morning when we were trying to do something but none of my men were hit. There is not a chance in the world to get through that mob into the negro district."[35]:4 By 4 a.m., an estimated two dozen black-owned businesses had been set ablaze.
As news traveled among Greenwood residents in the early morning hours, many began to take up arms in defense of their neighborhood, while others began a mass exodus from the city.[50] Throughout the night both sides continued fighting, sometimes only sporadically.

Daybreak

Upon sunrise, around 5 a.m., a train whistle sounded (Hirsch said it was a siren). Some rioters believed this sound to be a signal for the rioters to launch an all-out assault on Greenwood. A white man stepped out from behind the Frisco depot and was fatally shot by a sniper in Greenwood. Crowds of rioters poured from their shelter, on foot and by car, into the streets of the black neighborhood. Five white men in a car led the charge, but were killed by a fusillade of gunfire before they had traveled one block.[21][page needed]
Overwhelmed by the sheer number of white attackers, the blacks retreated north on Greenwood Avenue to the edge of town. Chaos ensued as terrified residents fled. The rioters shot indiscriminately and killed many residents along the way. Splitting into small groups, they began breaking into houses and buildings, looting. Several residents later testified the rioters broke into occupied homes and ordered the residents out to the street, where they could be driven or forced to walk to detention centers.[21][page needed]
A rumor spread among the rioters that the new Mount Zion Baptist Church was being used as a fortress and armory. Purportedly twenty caskets full of rifles had been delivered to the church, though no evidence was ever found.[21]:107

Attack by air

Numerous eyewitnesses described airplanes carrying white assailants, who fired rifles and dropped firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The privately owned aircraft were dispatched from the nearby Curtiss-Southwest Field outside Tulsa.[51]
Law enforcement officials later said that the planes were to provide reconnaissance and protect against a "Negro uprising."[51] Law enforcement personnel were thought to be aboard at least some flights.[1][page needed] Eyewitness accounts, such as testimony from the survivors during Commission hearings and a manuscript by eyewitness and attorney Buck Colbert Franklin discovered in 2015, said that on the morning of June 1, at least "a dozen or more" planes circled the neighborhood and dropped "burning turpentine balls" on an office building, a hotel, a filling station and multiple other buildings. Men also fired rifles at young and old black residents, gunning them down in the street.[8][51]
Richard S. Warner concluded in his submission to The Oklahoma Commission that contrary to later reports by claimed eyewitnesses of seeing explosions, there was no reliable evidence to support such attacks.[1]:107 Warner noted that while a number of newspapers targeted at black readers heavily reported the use of nitroglycerin, turpentine and rifles from the planes, many cited anonymous sources or second-hand accounts.[1]:107 Beryl Ford, one of the preeminent historians of the disaster, concluded from his large collection of photographs that there was no evidence of any building damaged by explosions.[1]:106 Danney Goble commended Warner on his efforts and supported his conclusions.[1]:6 State representative Don Ross (born in Tulsa in 1941), however, dissented from the evidence presented in the report concluding that bombs were in fact dropped from planes during the violence.[1]:prologue, viii

New eyewitness account

In 2015, a previously unknown written eyewitness account of the events of May 31, 1921 was discovered and subsequently obtained by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The 10-page typewritten manuscript was authored by noted Oklahoma attorney Buck Colbert Franklin.[52][8]
Notable quotes include:
Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes – now a dozen or more in number – still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.
Planes circling in mid-air: They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top.
The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught fire from the top.
I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. 'Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?' I asked myself. 'Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?'
Franklin stated that every time he saw a white man shot, he "felt happy"[8]:8 and he "swelled with pride and hope for the race."[8]:6
Franklin reported seeing multiple machine guns firing at night and hearing 'thousands and thousands of guns' being fired simultaneously from all directions.[8]:4 He states that he was arrested by "a thousand boys, it seemed,...firing their guns every step they took."[8]:8

Other whites

As unrest spread to other parts of the city, many middle class white families who employed black people in their homes as live-in cooks and servants were accosted by white rioters. They demanded the families turn over their employees to be taken to detention centers around the city. Many white families complied, and those who refused were subjected to attacks and vandalism in turn.[1]:37–102[page range too broad]

Arrival of National Guard troops


National Guard with wounded
Adjutant General Charles Barrett of the Oklahoma National Guard arrived with 109 troops from Oklahoma City by special train about 9:15 a.m.. Ordered in by the governor, he could not legally act until he had contacted all the appropriate local authorities, including the mayor T. D. Evans, the sheriff, and the police chief. Meanwhile, his troops paused to eat breakfast. Barrett summoned reinforcements from several other Oklahoma cities.
By this time, thousands of black residents had fled the city; another 4,000 persons had been rounded up and detained at various centers. Under the martial law established that day, the detainees were required to carry identification cards.[1]:123-32 As many as 6,000 black Greenwood residents were interned at three local facilities: Convention Hall, now known as the Brady Theater, the Tulsa County Fairgrounds (then located about a mile northeast of Greenwood), and McNulty Park (a baseball stadium at Tenth Street and Elgin Avenue).[16][53][1]:83, 177
Barrett declared martial law at 11:49 a.m.,[21][page needed] and by noon the troops had managed to suppress most of the remaining violence. A 1921 letter from an officer of the Service Company, Third Infantry, Oklahoma National Guard, who arrived May 31, 1921, reported numerous events related to suppression of the riot:
  • taking about 30–40 blacks into custody;
  • putting a machine gun on a truck and taking it on patrol;
  • being fired on from Negro snipers from the "Church" and returning fire;[citation needed]
  • being fired on by white men;
  • turning the prisoners over to deputies to take them to police headquarters;
  • being fired upon again by negroes and having two NCOs slightly wounded;
  • searching for negroes and firearms;
  • detailing a NCO to take 170 Negroes to the civil authorities; and
  • delivering an additional 150 Negroes to the Convention Hall.[49]

Stockpiled ammunition

Captain John W. McCune reported that stockpiled ammunition within the burning structures began to explode which may have further contributed to casualties.[54]

End of martial law

Martial law was withdrawn Friday afternoon, June 4, 1921 under Field Order No. 7.[55]

Aftermath


Little Africa on Fire. Tulsa Race Riot, June 1, 1921 Apparently taken from the roof of the Hotel Tulsa on 3rd St. between Boston Ave. and Cincinnati Ave. The first row of buildings is along 2nd St. The smoke cloud on the left (Cincinnati Ave. and the Frisco Tracks) is identified in the Tulsa Tribune version of this photo as being where the fire started.

Casualties

The massacre was covered by national newspapers and the reported number of deaths varies widely. On June 1, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune reported that nine white people and 68 black people had died in the riot, but shortly afterwards it changed this number to a total of 176 dead. The next day, the same paper reported the count as nine white people and 21 black people. The Los Angeles Express headline said "175 Killed, Many Wounded".[56] The New York Times said that 77 people had been killed, including 68 black people, but it later lowered the total to 33. The Richmond Times Dispatch of Virginia reported that 85 people (including 25 white people) were killed; it also reported that the Police Chief had reported to Governor Robertson that the total was 75; and that a Police Major put the figure at 175.[57] The Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics count put the number of deaths at 36 (26 black and 10 white).[21]:118 very few people, if any, died as a direct result of the fire. Official state records recorded only five deaths by conflagration for the entire state in the year of 1921.[58]
Walter Francis White of the N.A.A.C.P. traveled to Tulsa from New York and reported that, although officials and undertakers said that the fatalities numbered ten white and 21 colored, he estimated the number of the dead to be 50 whites and between 150 and 200 Negroes;[59] he also reported that ten white men were killed on Tuesday; six white men drove into the black section and never came out, and thirteen whites were killed on Wednesday; he reported that a major of the Salvation Army in Tulsa, O.T. Johnson said that 37 negroes were employed as gravediggers to bury 120 negroes in individual graves without coffins on Friday and Saturday.[60] The Oklahoma Commission described Johnson's statement being 150 graves and over three dozen diggers.[1]:121 Ground penetrating radar was used to investigate the sites purported to contain these mass graves. Multiple eyewitness reports and 'oral histories' suggested the graves could have been dug at three different cemeteries across the city. The sites were examined and no evidence of ground disturbance indicative of mass graves was found. However, at one site, ground disturbance was found in a five-meter squared area, but cemetery records indicate that three graves had been dug and bodies buried within this envelope before the riot.[1]:131
Oklahoma's 2001 Commission into the riot provides multiple contradicting estimates. D. Goble estimates 100–300 (also stating right after that no one was prosecuted even though nearly a hundred were indicted),[1]:13 and J. H. Franklin and S. Ellsworth only estimate at least 75–100 and describe some of the higher estimates as dubious as the low estimates.[1]:23 C. Snow was able to confirm 39 casualties all listed as male although four were unidentifiable. 26 were black and 13 were white.[1]:114 The thirteen white fatalities were all taken to hospitals.[1]:117 Eleven of them had come from outside of Oklahoma and possibly as many as half were petroleum industry workers.[1]:115-6 Only eight of the confirmed 26 black fatalities were brought to hospitals,[1]:117 and as hospitals were segregated, and with the black Frissell Memorial Hospital having burned down, the only place the black injured were treated was at the basement of Morningside Hospital.[1]:116 Several hundred were injured.[1]:116

Red Cross

The Red Cross, in their preliminary overview, mentioned wide-ranging external estimates of 55 to 300 dead however due to the hurried nature of undocumented burials declined to suggest an estimate of their own stating, "The number of dead is a matter of conjecture."[3]:3 The Red Cross registered 8,624 persons, recorded 1,256 residences burned and a further 215 residences looted as a part of their relief effort.[3]:Condensed Report: p. 4, 12 183 people were hospitalized, mostly for gunshot wounds or burns(they differentiate in their records on the basis of triage category not the type of wound) while a further 531 required first aid or surgical treatment with an estimated 10,000 persons left homeless. 8 miscarriages were attributed to be a result of the tragedy. 19 died in care between June 1 and the 30th of December.[3]:Condensed Report: p. 20

Property losses


Taken from the southeast corner of the roof of Booker T. Washington High School, this panorama shows much of the damage within a day or so of the riot and fires. The road running laterally through the center of the image is Greenwood Avenue; the road slanting from the center to the left is Easton; and the road slanting off to the right is Frankfort.

Residential block burned down

"All that was left of his home", photograph, June 1, 1921
The commercial section of Greenwood was destroyed. Losses included 191 businesses, a junior high school, several churches, and the only hospital in the district. The Red Cross reported that 1,256 houses were burned and another 215 were looted but not burned. The Tulsa Real Estate Exchange estimated property losses amounted to US$1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property[1]:189 (equivalent to a total of $32 million in 2019).
The Red Cross estimated that 10,000 people, mostly black, were made homeless by the destruction. Over the next year, local citizens filed more than US$1.8 million (equivalent to $26 million in 2019) in riot-related claims against the city by June 6, 1922.[21][page needed]

Public Safety Committee

By June 6, the Associated Press reported that a citizens' Public Safety Committee had been established, made up of 250 white men who vowed to protect the city and put down any more disturbance. A white man was shot and killed that day after he failed to stop as ordered by a National Guardsman.[61]

Rebuilding

Governor James B. A. Robertson had gone to Tulsa during the riot to ensure order was restored. Before returning to the capital, he ordered an inquiry of events, especially of the City and Sheriff's Office. He called for a Grand Jury to be empaneled, and Judge Valjean Biddison said that its investigation would begin June 8. The jury was picked by June 9. Judge Biddison expected that the State Attorney General would call numerous witnesses, both black and white, given the large scale of the riot.[62]
State Attorney General S.P. Freeling initiated the investigation, and witnesses were heard over 12 days. In the end, the all-white jury attributed the riot to the black mobs, while noting that law enforcement officials had failed in preventing the riot. A total of 27 cases were brought before the court, and the jury indicted more than 85 individuals. In the end, no one was convicted of charges for the deaths, injuries or property damage.[63]
On June 3, a large group of over 1,000 businessmen and civic leaders met, resolving to form a committee to raise funds and aid in rebuilding Greenwood. Judge J. Martin, a former mayor of Tulsa, was chosen as the chairman of the group. He said at the mass meeting:
Tulsa can only redeem herself from the country-wide shame and humiliation into which she is today plunged by complete restitution and rehabilitation of the destroyed black belt. The rest of the United States must know that the real citizenship of Tulsa weeps at this unspeakable crime and will make good the damage, so far as it can be done, to the last penny.[62]
Despite this promise of funding, many blacks spent the winter of 1921–1922 in tents as they worked to rebuild.
Charles Page was commended for his philanthropic efforts in the wake of the riot in the assistance of 'destitute blacks.'[64]
A group of influential white developers persuaded the city to pass a fire ordinance that would have prohibited many blacks from rebuilding in Greenwood. Their intention was to redevelop Greenwood for more business and industrial use, and force blacks further to the edge of the city for residences. The case was litigated and appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court by Buck Colbert Franklin, where the ordinance was ruled as unconstitutional. Most of the promised funding was never raised for the black residents, and they struggled to rebuild after the violence. Willows, the regional director of the Red Cross noted this in his report, explaining his slow initial progress to facilitate the rehabilitation of the refugees. The fire code was officially intended to prevent another tragedy by banning wooden frame construction houses in place of previously burnt homes. A concession was granted to allow temporary wooden frame dwellings while a new building which would meet the more restrictive fire code was being constructed. This was quickly halted as residents within two weeks had started to erect full sized wooden frame dwellings in contravention of the agreement. It took a further two-month delay securing the court decision to reinstate the previous fire code. Willows heavily criticized the Tulsa city officials for interfering in his efforts for their role in the Public Welfare Committee which first sought to rezone the "burned area" as industrial or construct a union station in its place with no consideration for the refugees. Then again for the dissolution of the Public Welfare Committee in favor of the formation of the Reconstruction Committee which simply failed to formulate a single plan, leaving the displaced residents prohibited from beginning reconstruction efforts for several months.[3]:22–25

Tulsa Union Depot

Despite the Red Cross' best efforts to assist with reconstruction of Greenwood's residential area, the considerably altered present-day layout of the district and its surrounding neighborhoods and the extensive redevelopment of Greenwood by people unaffiliated with the neighborhood prior to the riot stand as proof that the Red Cross relief efforts had limited success.[3]:22-23
Tulsa's main industries at the time of the riot were banking (BOK Financial Corporation), administrative (PennWellONEOK), and engineering (Skelly Oil) services for oil companies, earning Tulsa the title of "Oil Capital of the World." Joshua Cosden is also regarded as a founder of the city, having constructed the tallest building in Tulsa, the Cosden Building. The construction of the Cosden Building and Union Depot were overseen by the Manhattan Construction Company, at the time, based in Tulsa. Francis Rooney is the great grandson and beneficiary of the estate of Laurence H. Rooney, founder of the Manhattan Construction Company.
City planners immediately saw the fire that destroyed homes and businesses across Greenwood as a fortunate event for advancing their objectives, meanwhile showing a complete disregard for the welfare of affected residents. Plans were immediately made to rezone 'The Burned Area' for industrial use.[3]:22–23 The Tulsa Daily World reported that the mayor and city commissioners expressed that, "a large industrial section will be found desirable in causing a wider separation between negroes and whites."[65] The Reconstruction committee organized a forum to discuss their proposal with community leaders and stakeholders. Naming, among others, O.W. Gurley, Rev. H.T.F. Johnson and Barney Cleaver as participants in the forum, it was reported that all members were in agreement with the plan to redevelop the burned district as an industrial section and agreed that the proposed union station project was desirable. '... not a note of dissension was expressed.' The article states that these community leaders would again meet at the First Baptist Church in the following days.[66] The Black Dispatch describes the content of the following meeting at the First Baptist Church. The reconstruction committee had intended to have the black landholders sign over their property to a holding company managed by black representatives on behalf of the city but which was to be turned over to a white appraisal committee which would pay residents for the residential zoned land at the lower industrial zoned value in advance of the rezoning. Professor J.W. Hughes addressed the white reconstruction committee members in opposition to their proposition, coining a slogan which would come to galvanize the community, "I'm going to hold what I have until I get What I've lost."[67]
Construction of the Tulsa Union Depot, a large central rail hub connecting three major railroads, began in Greenwood less than two years after the riot. Prior to the riot, construction had already been underway for a smaller rail hub nearby. However, in the aftermath of the riot, land on which homes and businesses had been destroyed by the fires suddenly became available, allowing for a larger train depot near the heart of the city to be built in Greenwood instead.[3]:22-3[1]:38, 40, 168

1921 Grand Jury investigation

Allegations of corruption

Chief Chuck Jordan described the conduct of the 1921 Tulsa Police as, "... the police department did not do their job then, y'know, they just didn't."[68] Parrish, an African-American citizen of Tulsa, summarized the lawlessness in the state of Oklahoma as a contributing factor in 1922 as, "if...it were not for the profitable alliance of politics and vice or professional crime, the tiny spark which is the beginning of all these outrages would be promptly extinguished."[48]:87 Clark, a prominent Oklahoma historian and law professor completed his doctoral dissertation in law on the subject of lawlessness in Oklahoma specifically on this period of time and how lawlessness led to the rise of the second KKK in order to illustrate the need for effective law enforcement and a functional judiciary.[44]

John A. Gustafson

Chief of Police John A. Gustafson was the subject of a vice investigation. Official proceedings began on June 6, 1921. He was prosecuted on multiple counts: refusing to enforce prohibition, refusing to enforce anti-prostitution laws, operating a stolen automobile laundering racket and allowing known automobile thieves to escape justice for the purpose of extorting the citizens of Tulsa for rewards relating to their return, repurposing vehicles for their own use or sale, operating a fake detective agency for the purpose of billing the city of Tulsa for investigative duties he was already being paid for as chief of police, failing to enforce gun laws, and failure to take any action at all during the riots.[69]
The Attorney General of Oklahoma received a number of letters alleging members of the police force had conspired with members of the justice system to threaten witnesses in corruption trials stemming from the Grand Jury investigations. In the letters various members of the public requested the presence of the state attorney general at the trial.[70][71] An assistant of the attorney general replied to one such letter by stating that their budget was too stretched to respond, and recommended instead that the citizens of Tulsa simply vote for new officers.[72]
Gustafson was found to have a long history of fraud predating his membership of the Tulsa Police Department. His previous partner in his detective agency, Phil Kirk, had been convicted of blackmail.[73] Gustafson's fake detective agency ran up high billings on the police account. Investigators noted that many blackmail letters had been sent to members of the community from the agency. One particularly disturbing case involved the frequent rape of an 11-year-old girl by her father who had since become pregnant. Instead of prosecuting, they sent a "blackhand letter."[74]:2–3

Breaking the silence

There were no convictions for any of the charges related to violence.[63] There were decades of silence about the terror, violence, and losses of this event. The riot was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories: "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place."[75] It was not recognized in the Tulsa Tribune feature of "Fifteen Years Ago Today" or "Twenty-five Years Ago Today".[1]:26 A 2017 report detailing the history of the Tulsa Fire Department from 1897 until the date of publication makes no mention of the 1921 fire.[76][77]
A number of people tried to document the events, gather photographs, and record the names of the dead and injured. Mary E. Jones Parrish, a young black teacher and journalist from Rochester, New York, was hired by the Inter-racial Commission to write an account of the riot. Parrish was a survivor, and wrote about her experiences and collected other accounts, gathered photographs, and compiled "a partial roster of property losses in the African American community". She published these in Events of the Tulsa Disaster.[48] It was the first book to be published about the riot.[1]:28
The first academic account was a master's thesis written in 1946 by Loren L. Gill, a veteran of World War II, but the thesis did not circulate beyond the University of Tulsa.[1]:28–29
In 1971, a small group of survivors gathered for a memorial service at Mount Zion Baptist Church with blacks and whites in attendance.[1]:29
That same year, the Tulsa chamber of commerce decided to commemorate the riot, but when they read the accounts and saw photos gathered by Ed Wheeler, host of a radio history program, detailing the specifics of the riot, they refused to publish them. He then took his information to the two major newspapers in Tulsa, both of which also refused to run his story. His article was finally published in Impact Magazine, a new publication aimed at black audiences, but most of Tulsa's white residents never knew about it.[1]:29–30
In the early 1970s, "[a]long with Henry C. Whitlow, Jr., a history teacher at Booker T. Washington High School, [Mozella Franklin] Jones had not only helped to desegregate the Tulsa Historical Society, but had mounted the first-ever major exhibition on the history of African Americans in Tulsa. Moreover, she had also created at the Tulsa Historical Society the first collection of massacre photographs available to the public."[1]:21–36 While researching and sharing the history of the riot, Jones collaborated with a white woman named Ruth Sigler Avery, who was also trying to publicize accounts of the riot. The women encountered pressure, particularly among whites, to keep silent.[1]:30–31

Tulsa Race Massacre Commission

In 1996, as the riot's 75th anniversary neared, the state legislature authorized an Oklahoma Commission to investigate the Tulsa Race Riot by appointing individuals to study and prepare a report detailing a "historical account" of the riot. Authorization of the study "enjoyed strong support from members of both political parties and all political persuasions".[78] The commission was originally called the "Tulsa Race Riot Commission", but in November 2018 the name was officially changed to "Tulsa Race Massacre Commission.[79]
The commission conducted interviews and heard testimony to thoroughly document the causes and damages. The Commission arranged for archaeological, non-invasive ground surveys of Newblock Park, Oaklawn Cemetery, and Booker T. Washington Cemetery, which were identified as possible locations for mass graves of black victims of the violence. According to oral histories and other sources, such mass graves existed.
The Commission delivered its final report on February 21, 2001.[1] The report recommended actions for substantial restitution to the black residents, listed below in order of priority:
  1. Direct payment of reparations to survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre;
  2. Direct payment of reparations to descendants of the survivors of the Tulsa race massacre;
  3. A scholarship fund available to students affected by the Tulsa race massacre;
  4. Establishment of an economic development enterprise zone in the historic area of the Greenwood district; and
  5. A memorial for the reburial of the remains of the victims of the Tulsa race massacre.[1]:37–102[page range too broad]

Post-commission actions

Search for mass graves

Tulsa Race Massacre Commission arranged for archaeological, non-invasive ground surveys of Newblock Park, Oaklawn Cemetery, and Booker T. Washington Cemetery, which were identified as possible locations for mass graves of black victims of the violence. Oral histories, other sources, and timing suggested that whites would have buried blacks at the first two locations. Blacks were said to have buried black victims at the third location after the riot was over. The people buried at The Washington Cemetery, which is reserved for black people, were thought to perhaps be those who had died of their wounds after the riot had ended since it was the most distant suspected burial location from downtown.
Investigations of the three potential mass grave sites were performed in 1997 and 1998. Though the total areas could not be surveyed, preliminary data suggested there were no mass graves in these locations. In 1999 an eyewitness was found who had seen whites burying blacks at Oaklawn Cemetery. A team investigated the potential area with more equipment. In the end, searches for any mass graves were made using ground radar and other technology, followed by core sampling.[80] The experts' report, presented to the Commission in December 2000, could not substantiate claims of mass graves in Oaklawn Cemetery, Washington Cemetery, or Newblock Park.[80] A promising spot in Washington Cemetery had turned out to be a layer of clay, and another in Newblock Park had turned out to be an old basement.[80] The suggestion that the bodies had been burned in the city incinerator was also discounted as unfeasible, given the incinerator's capacity and logistical considerations.[80]
In preparation for the 100th anniversary of the massacre, state archaeologists, using ground-penetrating radar, are probing Oaklawn Cemetery for "long-rumored" mass graves.[81] Mayor G. T. Bynum calls it "a murder investigation."[82] After input from the public, officials from the Oklahoma Archeological Survey used three subsurface scanning techniques to survey Newblock Park, Oaklawn Cemetery, and an area known as The Canes along the Arkansas River.[83] The Oklahoma Archeological Survey subsequently announced that they were discontinuing search efforts at Newblock Park after not finding any evidence of graves.[84] On December 17, 2019 the team of forensic archaeologists announced they had found anomalies consistent with that of human-dug pits beneath the ground at Oaklawn Cemetery and the ground where the Interstate 244 bridge crosses the Arkansas River. They announced them as likely candidates for mass graves but further radar survey and physical excavation of the sites is needed.[85] Researchers secured permission from the city to perform "limited excavations" to determine the contents of these sites beginning in April 2020, and while they did not expect to dig up any human remains, asserted they would treat any they find with proper respect.[86]

2001

In March 2001, each of the 118 known survivors of the riot still alive at the time, the youngest of whom was 85, was given a gold-plated medal bearing the state seal, as had been approved by bi-partisan state leaders.[87][88]
The Tulsa Reparations Coalition, sponsored by the Center for Racial Justice, Inc., was formed on April 7, 2001 to obtain restitution for the damages suffered by Tulsa's Black community, as recommended by the Oklahoma Commission.[89] Also that year, Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor held a "celebration of conscience" at which she apologized to survivors and gave medals to those who could be located.[87]
On June 1, 2001, Governor Keating signed the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act into law. The act acknowledged that the event occurred, but failed to deliver any substantial reparations to the victims or their descendants. In spite of the Oklahoma Commission's recommendation for reparations in their report on the riot, the Oklahoma state legislature opposed the request for reparations and thus did not include them in the reconciliation act.[87] The act fell far short of the Commission's recommendations, only providing for the following:
  • More than 300 college scholarships for descendants of Greenwood residents;
  • Creation of a memorial to those who died in the riot. A park with statues was dedicated as John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park on October 27, 2010, named in honor of the notable African-American historian from Tulsa;[90] and
  • Economic development in Greenwood.[91]

2003 lawsuit against the City of Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma

Five elderly survivors, represented by a legal team that included Johnnie Cochran and Charles Ogletree, filed suit against the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma (Alexander, et al. v. Oklahoma, et al.) in February 2003, based on the findings of the 2001 report. Ogletree said the state and city should compensate the victims and their families "to honor their admitted obligations as detailed in the commission's report."[92] The federal district and appellate courts dismissed the suit, citing the statute of limitations had been exceeded on the 80-year-old case.[93] The state requires that civil rights cases be filed within two years of the event. The court did not rule at all on the issues. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the appeal.
In April 2007, Ogletree appealed to the U.S. Congress to pass a bill extending the statute of limitations for the case, given the state and city's accountability for the destruction and the long suppression of material about it. The bill was introduced by John Conyers of Michigan and heard by the Judiciary Committee of the House but it did not pass.[94] Conyers re-introduced the bill in 2009 as the John Hope Franklin Tulsa-Greenwood Race Riot Claims Accountability Act of 2009 (H.R. 1843), and in 2012. It has not gotten out of the Judiciary Committee.[87]

2010: John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park


John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, 2010
A park was developed in 2010 in the Greenwood area as a memorial to victims of the riot. In October 2010, the park was named for noted historian John Hope Franklin, who was born and raised in Tulsa.[95] He became known as a historian of the South. The park includes three statues of figures by sculptor Ed Dwight, representing HostilityHumiliation and Hope.[96]

2020

An extensive curriculum on the event was provided to Oklahoma school districts in 2020.[97]
On May 29, 2020, the eve of the 99th anniversary of the event and at the onset of the George Floyd protests, the Human Rights Watch released a report titled "The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument", demanding reparations for survivors and descendants of the violence as the economic impact of the massacre is still visible in the high poverty rates and lower life expectancies in North Tulsa.[98] Several documentary projects were also announced at this time with plans to be released for the 100th anniversary of the event, including Black Wall Street by Dream Hampton, and another by Salima Koroma.[99]

In popular culture

Publication of the Final Report by the Riot Commission and related publicity has stimulated artistic works related to the riot.

Literature

Film and television

  • The Tulsa Lynching of 1921: A Hidden Story (2000), a documentary directed by Michael Wilkerson, was first released on Cinemax in 2000.[102][103]
  • Before They Die, (2008), a documentary by Reggie Turner that is supported by the Tulsa Project, chronicles the last survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot and their quest for justice from the city and state.[104]
  • Hate Crimes in the Heartland (2014), a documentary by Rachel Lyon and Bavand Karim that provides an in-depth examination of the riot.[105]
  • Watchmen (2019), TV series on HBO, based on the characters of the graphic novel of the same name. The series' producer, Damon Lindelof, was inspired to open the pilot episode with depictions of the riots and base the series on racial tensions after reading Coates' article about them.[106] Many aspects of the series' plot, centers on the legacy of the graphic novel and the massacre in an alternate timeline in the present day in Tulsa, where racial conflict remains high.[107] The popularity of Watchmen was considered to be the first exposure to the Tulsa race massacre via the entertainment industry as its history was generally not widely discussed and had not been depicted in that form before.[108]

Music and art

See also

References

  1. Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao apaq ar as at au av Oklahoma Commission (February 28, 2001), "Final Report"Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, archived from the original (PDF) on January 16, 2008, retrieved June 20, 2018
  2. Jump up to:a b Humanities, National Endowment for the (June 18, 1921). "The broad ax. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1895–19??, June 18, 1921, Image 1"ISSN 2163-7202. Retrieved October 23, 2019.
  3. Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i Willows, Maurice (December 31, 1921). "Disaster Relief Report Riot 1921" (PDF)Tulsa Historical Society & Museum. American Red Cross. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 1, 2017. Retrieved February 14, 2020.
  4. Jump up to:a b c d "Negro Deputy Sheriff Blames Black Dope-Head for Inciting His Race Into Rioting Here". The Morning Tulsa Daily World. June 3, 1921.
  5. Jump up to:a b c d e "Statement O. W. Gurley, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1062". 1921. p. 1.
  6. Jump up to:a b c "Statement Luther James, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1062".Oklahoma Digital Prairie. July 18, 2006.
  7. ^ Rooney, Lt. Col. LJF; Daley, Charles (June 3, 1921). "Letter from Lieutenant Colonel L.J.F. Rooney and Charles Daley Officer of the Inspector General's Department to the Adjutant General, June 3, 1921".
  8. Jump up to:a b c d e f g Franklin, Buck Colbert (August 22, 1931). "The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims"National Museum of African American History and Culture. Retrieved December 3, 2018. Full text.
  9. ^ "Tulsa 1921 Race Riot Commission renamed Race Massacre Commission"KJRH News. Tulsa. November 29, 2019. Retrieved May 10, 2019Sen. Kevin Matthews held a news conference Thursday morning, in which he announced the official name change of the 1921 Race Riot Commission to the 1921 Race Massacre Commission.
  10. ^ Day, Meagan (September 21, 2016). "The history of the Tulsa race massacre that destroyed America's wealthiest black neighborhood"Timeline. Retrieved February 27, 2019.
  11. ^ White, Walter F. (August 23, 2001). "Tulsa, 1921"The Nation.
  12. ^ Rao, Sameer (May 31, 2017). "It's Been 96 Years Since White Mobs Destroyed Tulsa's Black Wall Street"Colorlines.
  13. ^ Moorehead, Monica (June 10, 1999). "U.S. ethnic cleansing: The 1921 Tulsa Massacre"Workers World.
  14. ^ "Nearly 100 Years Later, Tulsa Begins Search for Mass Graves From 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre"The Root. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
  15. ^ Ellsworth, Scott (2009). "Tulsa Race Riot"The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Retrieved December 31, 2016.
  16. Jump up to:a b Messer, Chris M.; Bell, Patricia A. (July 31, 2008). "Mass Media and Governmental Framing of Riots". Journal of Black Studies40 (5): 851–870. doi:10.1177/0021934708318607JSTOR 40648610.
  17. ^ Messer, Chris M.; Beamon, Krystal; Bell, Patricia A. (2013). "The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Collective Violence and Racial Frames"The Western Journal of Black Studies37 (1): 50–59.
  18. ^ White, Walter F. 29 June 1921. "The Eruption of Tulsa." The Nation. via Digital Prairie.
  19. ^ Connor, Jay (2020). "The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Will Officially Become a Part of Oklahoma School Curriculum Beginning in the Fall"The Root.
  20. ^ Smith, Ryan (2018). "How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative"Smithsonian Magazine.
  21. Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Hirsch, James S. (2002). Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and its Legacy. Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 978-0-618-10813-8.
  22. Jump up to:a b c Alexander, Charles C (1965). The Ku Klux Klan in the southwestOCLC 637673750.[page needed]
  23. ^ Levy, David W. (2005). "XIII: The Struggle for Racial Justice"The University of Oklahoma: A History. II: 1917–1950. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-5277-6. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  24. ^ Mary Elizabeth Estes, An Historical Survey of Lynchings in Oklahoma and Texas, M.A. thesis, University of Oklahoma, (1942)
  25. ^ Rothstein, Richard (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-1-63149-285-3.
  26. ^ "Tulsa History: Urban Development (1901-1945)"Tulsa Preservation Commission. May 19, 2015.
  27. Jump up to:a b "A Find of a Lifetime" Archived September 29, 2007, at the Wayback Machine. Currie Ballard silent film of African-American towns in Oklahoma, 1920s. Rev. S. S. Jones for the National Baptist Convention. American Heritage magazine, 2006; Retrieved September 18, 2006
  28. ^ "Statement Barney Cleaver, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1062". 1921.
  29. ^ Krehbiel, Randy (April 29, 2011). "Tulsa Race Riot legacy still felt in the city"Tulsa World. Retrieved November 30, 2011.
  30. ^ Franklin, Buck Colbert (2000). Franklin, John Hope; Franklin, John Whittington (eds.). My Life and An Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin. Louisiana State University Press. pp. 195–196.
  31. Jump up to:a b c d "1921 Race Riot:Tribune mystery unsolved". Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa World, May 31, 2002. Retrieved February 29, 2020.
  32. ^ Ellsworth, Scott (1992). Death in a Promised Land. Louisiana State University Press. pp. 47–48. ISBN 978-0-8071-1767-5.
  33. ^ Brophy, Alfred L. (2007). "Tulsa (Oklahoma) Riot of 1921"". In Rucker, Walter C.; Upton, James N. (eds.). Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 654. ISBN 978-0-313-33302-6.
  34. Jump up to:a b Walter F. White, "The Eruption of Tulsa", The Nation, June 29, 1921., Digitasl Prairie
  35. Jump up to:a b "How The Big Fight In Tulsa Started". The Guthrie daily leader. June 1, 1921. p. 1.
  36. ^ Ellsworth, Scott. "Tulsa Race Riot"Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Retrieved March 1, 2015.
  37. ^ Tulsa Daily World, June 1, 1921
  38. ^ Brown, L.A. (March 29, 1918). "Letter from L. A. Brown to Roger Baldwin"This Land Press.
  39. ^ "Correspondence-Cases By State: Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Volume 36; 1917–1918. MS The Roger Baldwin Years, 1912–1950.; American Civil Liberties Union Papers, 1912–1990"Princeton University Library, Gale Primary Resources, ACLU. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. From American Civil Liberties Union Papers, 1912–1990. March 29, 1918. p. 77 (134–135 of folio). Archived from the original on January 4, 2019. Retrieved January 4, 2019.
  40. ^ Chapman, Lee Roy (2011). "The Nightmare of Dreamland"This Land Press. Retrieved September 19, 2011.
  41. ^ "I.W.W. Members Are Held Guilty". Tulsa Daily World. November 10, 1917. p. 2.
  42. ^ "Harlow's Weekly – A Journal of Comment & Current Events for Oklahoma". Harlow Publishing Company. November 14, 1917. p. 4.
  43. ^ Paul, Brad A. (January 1, 1999). Rebels of the New South : the Socialist Party in Dixie, 1892-1920 (Thesis).
  44. Jump up to:a b Clark, Blue (1976). A history of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma (Thesis). pp. 23–25. hdl:11244/4165OCLC 1048011720.
  45. ^ "Modern Ku Klux Klan Comes into Being". Tulsa Daily World. November 10, 1917. p. 1.
  46. ^ Myers, Jeffrey (November 5, 2014). "Examining the legacy of Tate Brady"Tulsa World.
  47. ^ Vickery, Paul S. "Brady, Wyatt Tate (1870–1925)". Oklahoma Historical Society. Retrieved December 21, 2018.
  48. Jump up to:a b c Parrish, Mary E. Jones (1922). "Events of the Tulsa Disaster". University of Tulsa, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
  49. Jump up to:a b Letter Captain Frank Van Voorhis to Lieut. Col. L. J. F. Rooney, 1921 July 30, pp. 1–3, at digitalprairie.com
  50. ^ Jones, F. "96 Years Later The Greenwood Cultural Center 1921 Race Riot Massacre Facts with Video". Retrieved April 9, 2019.
  51. Jump up to:a b c Madigan, Tim. 2001. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 4, 131–32, 144, 159, 164, 249. ISBN 0-312-27283-9
  52. ^ Keyes, Allison (May 27, 2016). "A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921"Smithsonian Magazine.
  53. ^ "McNulty Park"The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. March 6, 2013. Retrieved November 3, 2018.
  54. ^ "Letter Chas F. Barrett, Adjutant General to Lieut. Col. L. J. F. Rooney, 1921 June 1".
  55. ^ "Barrett Commends Tulsa for Co-operation With the State Military Authorities". The Morning Tulsa Daily World. June 4, 1921. p. 2.
  56. ^ "tulsa-race-riot". greenwoodculturalcenter.com. Archived from the original on April 1, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2017.
  57. ^ "Richmond Times-Dispatch". Richmond, VA. June 2, 1921 – via chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
  58. ^ "Sixth and Seventh Annual Report for the State Department of Health of Oklahoma, for the year ending June 30, 1922 and for the year ending June 30, 1923". State Department of Health of Oklahoma. p. 64.
  59. ^ Walter Whites total estimate of about 250 white and African American fatalities is apparently confirmed in Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2013), p. 224 {reference only}
  60. ^ White, Walter F. (August 20, 2001). "Tulsa, 1921 (reprint of article "The Eruption of Tulsa", first published June 15, 1921)"The Nation.
  61. ^ Associated Press, "Tulsa Guard Kills Man"Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), 6 June 1921, article includes photo of burned-out portion of Greenwood, Chronicling America, Library of Congress; accessed 31 December 2016
  62. Jump up to:a b "Tulsa In Remorse to Rebuild Homes; Dead Now Put at 30"New York Times, 3 June 1921; accessed 31 December 2016
  63. Jump up to:a b Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, LSU Press, 1992 pp. 94–96
  64. ^ "No Trace of Girl"The Black Dispatch. June 17, 1921.
  65. ^ "Burned District In Fire Limits, The Morning Tulsa daily world". June 9, 1921. p. 2. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  66. ^ "Leading Negroes Meet with Committee – to sanction Program". Tulsa Daily World. June 19, 1921. p. 2.
  67. ^ "Unbroken Faith Shown In Re-habilitation Program". The Black Dispatch. June 29, 1921. p. 1. Retrieved December 21, 2018.
  68. ^ "Police Chief Donates Rare Picture Of Tulsa's First African-American Officer". May 31, 2016. Archived from the original on August 11, 2016. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  69. ^ "Accusation District Court State of Oklahoma v. John A. Gustafson, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1062".
  70. ^ "Letter C. J. Seeber to S. P. Freeling, Attorney General". July 8, 1921.
  71. ^ "Letter Archie A. Kinion to S. P. Freeling, Attorney General". July 7, 1921.
  72. ^ "Letter Assistant Attorney General to R. J. Churchill". July 27, 1921.
  73. ^ "Local Findings on John A. Gustafson, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1062; Page 1". Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  74. ^ "Witness Statements taken by R. E. Maxey, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1062".
  75. ^ Sulzberger, A. G. (June 19, 2011). "As Survivors Dwindle, Tulsa Confronts Past"The New York Times. Retrieved June 20, 2011.
  76. ^ Goforth, Jill (2017). "History of Tulsa Fire Department" (PDF). Tulsa Fire Department. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 19, 2018.
  77. ^ Goforth, Jill (2017). "History of Tulsa Fire Department" (PDF). Tulsa Fire Department.
  78. ^ "Changes Planned for Resolution Authorizing Study of 1921 Riot" (Press release). Oklahoma House of Representatives. March 13, 1996. Archived from the original on May 24, 1997.
  79. ^ "Group renamed Tulsa Race Massacre Commission"KJRHKJRH-TV. November 29, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2019.
  80. Jump up to:a b c d "Tulsa Race Riot: Experts provide findings to panel". Randy Ktehbiel, Tulsa World, December 6, 2000. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
  81. ^ Brown, DeNeen L. (September 28, 2018). "They was killing black people"Washington Post.
  82. ^ Brown, DeNeen L. (October 8, 2019). "Tulsa searches for graves from 1921 race massacre that left hundreds of black people dead"Washington Post.
  83. ^ Canfield, Kevin (February 2, 2020). "1921 Tulsa Race Massacre graves investigation oversight committee to meet Monday"Tulsa World.
  84. ^ "Tulsa Race Massacre graves committee meets again tonight"Tulsa World. March 2, 2020.
  85. ^ Brown, Deneen L. (December 17, 2019). "In Tulsa, an investigation finds possible evidence of mass graves from 1921 race massacre"Washington Post. Retrieved December 17, 2019.
  86. ^ Brown, DeNeen (February 4, 2020). "Tulsa plans to dig for suspected mass graves from a 1921 race massacre"MSN. Retrieved February 4, 2020.
  87. Jump up to:a b c d Expat Okie, "The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 – justice delayed, but the fight goes on"Daily Kos blog, 30 June 2012; accessed 31 December 2016
  88. ^ "Survivor Medals for Race Riot Victims", News on 6, 26 March 2001; accessed 31 December 2016
  89. ^ "The Tulsa Reparations Coalition". April 23, 2014. Archived from the originalon April 23, 2014. Retrieved February 6, 2017.
  90. ^ "John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park".
  91. ^ Schmidt, Peter (July 13, 2001). "Oklahoma Scholarships Seek to Make Amends for 1921 Riot"The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  92. ^ Brune, Adrian (April 30, 2003), "A Long Wait for Justice"The Village Voice
  93. ^ 04-5042 – Alexander v. State of Oklahoma – 09/08/2004. (D.C. No. 03-CV-133-E). Archived April 25, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  94. ^ Myers, Jim (April 25, 2007). "Race riot bill gets House hearing"Tulsa World.
  95. ^ "Tulsa's John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park Dedicated", News on 6, 27 October 2010.
  96. ^ Dexter Mullins, "Survivors of infamous 1921 Tulsa race riot still hope for justice"Al-Jazeera America (US), July 19, 2014; accessed December 31, 2016
  97. ^ Querry, K. (February 19, 2020). "Oklahoma state leaders to roll out new curriculum on Tulsa Race Massacre"KFOR-TV. Retrieved February 20, 2020.
  98. ^ "Human Rights Watch calls for Tulsa Race Massacre reparations a century after violence"Washington Post. May 29, 2020. Retrieved May 29, 2020.
  99. ^ Smith, Michael (June 5, 2020). "From 'Watchmen' to new film projects and more, the Tulsa Race Massacre will become a growing part of worldwide popular culture ahead of the 2021 centennial"Tulsa World. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  100. ^ "Celebration of National Museum of African American History and Culture among activities at BCC's Friends and Family Day"Purdue University. September 15, 2016. Retrieved February 6, 2016.
  101. ^ Coates, Ta-Nehisi (June 2014). "The Case for Reparations"The Atlantic. Retrieved October 21, 2019.
  102. ^ Bracht, Mel. May 31, 2000. "Tulsa race riot examined in new film; Documentary debuts today on Cinemax." The Oklahoman.
  103. ^ Oxman, Steven. May 29, 2000. "The Tulsa Lynching of 1921: A Hidden Story." Variety.
  104. ^ Before They Die!, movie website
  105. ^ Fisher, Rich (February 4, 2015). "Rachel Lyon Discusses Her Film, "Hate Crimes in the Heartland," Which Will Soon Be Screened in Tulsa". Public Radio Tulsa. Retrieved April 2, 2016.
  106. ^ Cullera, Scott (October 21, 2019). "Why Watchmen's Damon Lindelof Used the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 as a Backdrop"IGN. Retrieved October 21, 2019.
  107. ^ Arkin, Daniel (October 21, 2019). "'Watchmen' recreates the Tulsa massacre of 1921, exposing viewers to an ugly chapter"NBC News. Retrieved December 17,2019.
  108. ^ Lambe, Stacy (June 2, 2020). "Hollywood Is Finally Shining a Light on the Tulsa Race Massacre -- Right When We Need It Most"Entertainment Tonight. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  109. ^ Race Riot Suite at AllMusic
  110. ^ "The Broad: Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth". Retrieved September 9, 2018.

Further reading

  • Brophy, Alfred L. (2002). Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Race Reparations, and Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University PressISBN 0-19-514685-9. "[T]the best account of the 1921 Tulsa riot, which drew wide acclaim from historians and others."—Rao, Gautham (September 2017). "University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War by Alfred L. Brophy (review)". Journal of the Civil War Era7 (3): 481–483. doi:10.1353/cwe.2017.0069S2CID 148763755.
  • Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
  • Rudia H. Halliburton, Tulsa Race War of 1921. San Jose, CA: R and E Publishing, 1975.
  • James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
  • Rob Hower, 1921 Tulsa Race Riot: The American Red Cross-Angels of Mercy. Tulsa, OK: Homestead Press, 1993.
  • Hannibal B. Johnson, Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District. Austin, TX: Eakin Press 1998.
  • Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001.
  • Williams, Lee E. (1972). Anatomy of Four Race Riots: Racial Conflict in Knoxville, Elaine (Arkansas), Tulsa, and Chicago, 1919-1921. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-009-3.
  • Halliburton, R. (July 26, 2016). "The Tulsa Race War of 1921". Journal of Black Studies2 (3): 333–358. doi:10.1177/002193477200200305JSTOR 2783722.
  • Witten, Alan; Brooks, Robert; Fenner, Thomas (June 2001). "The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: A geophysical study to locate a mass grave". The Leading Edge20 (6): 655–660. doi:10.1190/1.1439020.
  • Greenwood, Ronni Michelle (June 2015). "Remembrance, Responsibility, and Reparations: The Use of Emotions in Talk about the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot". Journal of Social Issues71 (2): 338–355. doi:10.1111/josi.12114.
  • Krehbiel, Randy (2019). Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-6583-7.

External links

External video
 A Find of a Lifetime. Silent film of African-American towns in Oklahoma. 1920s. Rev. S. S. Jones for the National Baptist Convention. American Heritage magazine. Retrieved September 16, 2006.

As Trump Loses His Generals, He Clings To The Legacy Of Confederate Failure"

$
0
0

 Braxton Bragg Was A Confederate Traitor  Who Fought To Kill Indians  And Steal Land From Mexico | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

As Trump loses his generals, he clings to the legacy of Confederate failure




Washington (CNN)It's head-scratching, really, that the most prominent Army base in America is named for Braxton Bragg.
He was on the wrong side of history, as a Confederate general and a slave owner.
It's hard to find a redeeming account of Bragg. Historians repeatedly highlight just how poorly he got along with everyone -- except perhaps Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States. Davis seemed to have a soft spot for Bragg, but he was still relieved of his command.
    As it turns out, Bragg wasn't even that good at his job.
    The highlight of his military career was leading Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee in 1863, perhaps the biggest and bloodiest win for the Confederacy on the western front of the Civil War -- but it was a Pyrrhic victory.
    Bragg failed to capitalize on the win and Union General Ulysses S. Grant ultimately overpowered his forces at the Battle of Chattanooga. That's when Davis sacked him.
    When Bragg later returned to the battlefield it was to lead a smaller contingent of forces in the loss of the last port of the Confederacy -- a significant data point on the graph of the South's defeat.
    "The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention," retired four-star Army General David Petraeus wrote this week in The Atlantic.
    Petraeus commanded coalition troops in Iraq during the surge and in Afghanistan.
    Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is home to the elite 82nd Airborne -- the military unit that can be anywhere within 18 hours, parachuting in behind enemy lines if needed. It's also home to Army Special Forces and the training facility for Green Berets.
    One of the entrance signs to facillities in Fort Bragg  Fayettville, North Carolina.
    It's a pretty important place. But when military-connected people talk about Fort Bragg, they don't think too much about the man for whom it's named.
    This week, amid a sweeping national movement for racial equality, Marine leadership banned depictions of the Confederate flag from their installations. Not even on bumper stickers or coffee mugs. The Navy says it will follow suit.
    The possibility of changing Fort Bragg's name was also raised.
    An aide to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy revealed that his boss was open to a bipartisan discussion to rename the base and the nine other US military installations named for Confederate commanders.

    Trump blocks discussions on renaming "Fabled Military Installations"

    But on Wednesday, President Donald Trump quashed the idea, saying they are "part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory and Freedom."
    "The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations... ...Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!!"
    In World War II, that military included approximately 1.25 million African American troops.
    And up to 500,000 Hispanic Americans, according to a House resolution honoring them.
    They were joined by 44,000 Native Americans, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
    Many of those soldiers also left these bases.
    And the names of Confederate soldiers still haunt the soldiers of color who serve.
    "A part of this is the Confederacy and the fact that these individuals not only fought violently to overthrow the United States government, but quite frankly, fought in favor of continuing the institution of slavery, which has had a direct impact on the lives and minds of black Americans," said Bishop Garrison, a black West Point graduate who served two tours in Iraq and currently works as Human Rights First's chief ambassador to the national security community.
    "So it is almost like a microaggression," Garrison added. "It affects you in a certain way when you realize that you keep having to go to Fort Bragg."
    As current and former top brass distance themselves from or criticize Trump, he seems eager to shore up support among rank and file service members who are disproportionately from southern states.
    On Thursday, America's top general apologized for appearing in Trump's photo-op at a church near the White House last week, after the National Guard helped federal law enforcement forcibly remove peaceful protesters from outside the White House, using pepper balls and flash bangs.
    In an extraordinary moment, speaking to future military leaders graduating from the National Defense University, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a "mistake" and said his presence "created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics."
    Defense Secretary Mark Esper broke with Trump last week when he said he disagreed with invoking the Insurrection Act to bring active duty troops to control protests, a move for which the President mobilized troops. Ultimately Trump did not deploy them.
    Former Defense Secretary and four-star Marine General James Mattis slammed President Trump as "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try."
    Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell told CNN's Jake Tapper that Trump has not been an effective president and that he lies "all the time."
    Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, another former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been more reticent than others to criticize the President but wrote that he was "sickened" by Trump's church photo op.
    Marine Corps General and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Marine Corps Gen. John Allen. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers. Army Gen. and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey. Former Defense Secretary William Perry. The list is long.
    In the past, Trump has embraced "his generals" but right now there's no love lost.
    He's confronting a dangerously low approval rating and playing to his base.
    White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that even discussing the renaming of the installations was akin to desecrating the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.
    "To suggest these forts are somehow inherently racist and their names need to be changed is a complete disrespect to the men and women, who the last bit of American land they saw before they went overseas and lost their lives were these forts," she said.
    That prompted a sharp dismissal from a former Army captain turned author, Matt Gallagher, whose books include Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, a memoir of his time serving in the Army in Iraq.
    He tweeted in response:
      "If any of my fallen friend's last thoughts were of the f***king base they deployed from, I'll eat Kevlar."
      Please send story ideas and feedback to homefront@cnn.com

      "If Trump Is A God-Send..."

      Quora: Most Brutal Military Tactic - "I Have Such A Hard Time Understanding How We Can..."

      $
      0
      0
      467 || Napalm Girl Forgives Those Who Burned Her - Shattered Magazine
      I would also add Paul Moore's answer to What was the most brutal military tactic in history? Napalm and White Phosphorous (also called Willie Pete) are particularly nasty.
      I have such a hard time understanding how we can do this shit to each other.

      Search Results

      Featured snippet from the web



      Dow Chemical Company
      Dow Chemical Company manufactured napalm for the U.S. government from 1965 to 1969. Protests against Dow and boycotts of its products occurred across the country.
      To his credit, the ghoulishness of weapons manufacturers has not escaped Pope Francis' notice.
      Pin on Terrible, Dirty Politics!

      Trump Supporter Shoots Protester In Albuquerque Statue Protest

      $
      0
      0
       Albuquerque Shooter Steve Baca | made w/ Imgflip meme maker
      Trump Supporter Steve Baca, Shooter

      Political violence in the United States is almost exclusively perped by people on the right side of the aisle.
      Antifa barely rises to radar.

      "Who Gets The Political Support Of 892 Certifiable U.S. Hate Groups?"

      "There Is Neither Nobility, Nor Kindness Nor Uplift In Trump's America"

      A Critical Mass Of American "Conservatives" Are Stupid, Ignorant, Hateful And Cruel

      https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-critical-mass-of-american.html

      "George Carlin Describes America's Dumbf*ck Quandary"

      Juan de Oñate, The Conquistador Whose Statue Was At The Center Of Yesterday's Kerfuffle In Albuquerque

      Excerpt: Today Oñate is known for the 1599 Acoma Massacre. Following a dispute that led to the death of thirteen Spaniards at the hands of the Ácoma, including Oñate's nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, Oñate ordered a brutal retaliation against Acoma Pueblo. The Pueblo was destroyed.[2] Around 800–1000 Ácoma were killed.[3]
      Of the 500 or so survivors, at a trial at Ohkay Owingeh, Oñate sentenced most to twenty years of forced "personal servitude" and additionally mandated that all men over the age of twenty-five have a foot cut off.[3]



      "The People Who Refuse To Wear Face Masks Are The Same People Who..."

      $
      0
      0
       THE PEOPLE WHO REFUSE  TO WEAR FACE MASKS  ARE THE SAME PEOPLE; WHO REFUSED TO WEAR SEAT BELTS  BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO BE THROWN FREE OF THE CAR | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

      Alan: At bottom these denialists are too stupid or too ignorant to understand statistics and the fact that a wave doesn't crash everywhere at the same time.

      Pax on both houses: Barack Obama: "It's Like These Guys Take Pride ...

      Dimwitted yahoos that they are, these morons point to isolated anecdotal evidence of the guy who "smoked 3 packs a day and lived to be a hundred," or the vanishingly rare person who was actually "thrown free of a car," and then they convert these "exceptions to the rule" into the "demonstrable" basis of a New Rule.

      Pax on both houses: The Exquisite Stupidity Of Trump Supporters

      And it doesn't help that "conservative""Christians" (who are neither) use their chosen beliefs in "the fantastic" and "the miraculous" as reasons to ignore the quotidian provability of Science.

      Let us never forget that self-professed "Good Christians" brought this cataclysm upon us.


       The People Who Refuse To Wear Face Masks Are People Like Mike Pence; Who Claim Smoking Doesn't Cause Cancer | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

      Anti-COVID-19 Lockdown Group Encourages Followers To Burn Masks
      https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/anti-covid-19-lockdown-group-encourages-followers-to-burn-their-face-masks/

       Civilizations Collapse  When The Ruling Class  Aspires After Nothing  But Its Own Advantage | made w/ Imgflip meme maker
      Alan: I have a question for honorable conservatives such as "Never Trumpers."

      Are you aware that you collaborated in laying the Republican Party's deliberate groundwork for the catastrophe of Trump Cult?

      And if you are aware, do you take any responsibility for this calamity?

      I have a good conservative friend - a retired military officer - who routinely tells Democrats what they "must do" to restore America to its status quo ante monstrum.

      Every time my friend does this -- and he's a very smart, caring individual -- I wonder why he never prefaces his comment with a confession that conservatives, at bedrock, actually put "The Collapse of Civilization" in play.

      Could it be that American conservatives are essentially irresponsible people who project their irresponsibility onto "whipping boy" liberals-and-progressives whom they have always accused of being irresponsible?

      Pax on both houses: "What A Failed Trump Administration Looks Like ...

      Video Of Trump Mocking Murder Victim For Crying Out, "I Can't Breathe"

      https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/06/video-of-trump-mocking-victim-for.html

      "The Divinity Of Donald Trump"
      The Daily Show
      "A Video Collage Of Trump's Arrogance: If You Are Even Vestigially Normal, You Will Sicken"

      "The Daily Show" Lets Trump Cultists Reveal Their Own Stupidity And Obsequious Boot-Licking

      "Jaw-Dropping Stupidity: 3 Short Videos That Will Change Your View Of American Politics Forever"

      "The Exquisite Stupidity Of Trump Supporters"

      Christianity: A Compendium Of "What Went Wrong" And Current Worship Of The Wrongness


      "George Carlin Describes America's Dumbf*ck Quandary"

      Core Truths That Dependably Dismantle Attractive-But-Bogus Right-Wing "Arguments"


      “I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything,  but she’s wrong within normal parameters...  Better the devil you know  than the Lord of the Flies on his own 757.”  Conservative Icon, P.J. O'Rourke | made w/ Imgflip meme maker



      Why GOP Strategist Steve Schmidt Quit The Republican Party

      Frank Bruni Thinks Trump's Niece Mary And Disgruntled Ex-Employees Will "Take Him Down"

      $
      0
      0

      "Maybe Donald Trump Should Have Been A Better Uncle"

      Author Headshot
      Opinion Columnist
      Beware the number of enemies you make, and pray to God they don’t have literary agents.
      That’s a lesson President Trump never learned. But he’ll be schooled anew in late July, the scheduled publication date for a book by his niece, Mary Trump. Spoiler alert: She’s not defending the honor of a misunderstood uncle. She’s reportedly plunging a dagger into him, though its lethalness is unclear. It’s not as if she had an Ivanka-grade seat to the circus of his life.
      John Bolton had an excellent, if briefly occupied, perch as the third of Trump’s four national security advisers so far. That’s surely why he makes the president so nervous. Trump and his flunkies are raging about and suing to delay distribution of Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” set for release early next week. (“He’s broken the law,” Trump fumed on Monday, referring to the administration’s claims that Bolton is trafficking in classified information. “I would think that he would have criminal problems.”) But Martha Raddatz of ABC News has done a long interview with Bolton to be aired on Sunday. One way or another, the truth will come out.
      Then again, the truth was never in. While most presidential administrations leak like kitchen faucets — or at worst, garden hoses — Trump’s leaks like Niagara Falls, as many unflattering books and much unsparing journalism have already shown. And while most presidential administrations have a few embittered exiles, Trump’s has a teeming diaspora of disgusted refugees, many of whom tattled as soon as they fled, either on the record or in whispers to reporters.
      But many others have yet to spill the beans, at least not every last lima, pinto and garbanzo, and I think we’re on the cusp of a bean buffet. As Trump grows even meaner and more erratic and as the election nears, the impulse to expose him will intensify. It could be what topples him.
      In addition to the books I mentioned and a rumored tell-all by the Trump fixer Michael Cohen, there’s the recent denunciation of the president in The Atlantic by Gen. James Mattis, his former defense secretary, who had previously taken such pride in holding his tongue.
      It was seconded — sort of — by Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who clearly has more to say and may well say it between now and November. As I noted in a previous column, the two belong to an array of current and former military leaders who, in an extraordinary break with tradition, have taken public issue with a sitting president, venting their disapproval of Trump.
      But there’s no reason to believe that this revolt will be confined to men and women in uniform. Trump has incensed and alarmed officials and staffers in all kinds of institutions and all corners of the government. He has burned through personnel like a pyromaniac.
      And that’s just over the three and a half years of his presidency. His path to it is strewn with betrayed business associates, duped clients, ditched friends and estranged family members. Their reticence, to the extent that they practiced it, has always existed in proportion to his potency. The weaker he seems to become, the chattier they’re likely to be. Revenge is a dish best served on CNN.
      I’m wondering if there’s another Anthony Scaramucci out there, a post-Mooch snitch. I’m wondering about diplomats who might jettison their last scraps of discretion.
      I’m wondering what H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, has to say. I’m wondering what Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state, hasn’t said yet. Neither strikes me as a figure so partisan that he feels compelled to prop up whoever happens to be leading the Republican Party, including a twisted tyrant like Trump. Neither has the Faustian stench of a Bill Barr, a Mike Pompeo, a Nikki Haley.
      But those are just the names we recognize, the associates who are on our radar. Trump’s niece wasn’t. At this point his detractors are so legion that there’s no way for him and his unscrupulous sentries to head all of them off at the pass. They’re like a zombie apocalypse, lurching straight for the White House.
      Yes, I know, Trump has survived the display of piles of his dirty laundry before, readily recasts unethical behavior as boldness and blithely dismisses horror over his antics as the last gasps of a faltering establishment. In the context of his brand, the title of Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” is less affront than affirmation. It sounds like a James Bond movie. (The subtitle, “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” sounds more like a “Frankenstein” remake.)
      But there comes a tipping point when the people who saw you up close and cringe at the memory cannot be shrugged off. And for Uncle Donald, it may fast be arriving.
      Forward this newsletter to friends …
      … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s free and it’s published every Wednesday.

      Hometown Hillsborough's Growing-And-Sharing "Urban Gardens" Program

      $
      0
      0
      Community Garden | Hillsborough Urban Gardens
      "Hillsborough Urban Gardens" 
      Nourishing our community through growing and sharing our own food
      https://www.hillsboroughurbangardens.org/

      Excerpt: Our gardens will be open to the public and provide the space for performances, artists and cultural events that serve our members and the greater community, including our youth, our elders, schools, and partner organizations.



      Dorothy Day: "Dissenting Voice Of The American Century" Chronicles Day's Astonishing Life

      Viewing all 30151 articles
      Browse latest View live