I have never heard so much baloney in my life. Insurrection? It was a protest that got out of control thanks to known or unknown agitators. Loss of life? A Capitol Police Officer dies from a stroke, and an unarmed woman protester (Ashley Babbit) was shot to death by and idiot police officer who's history and incompetency would have gotten him fired from any police department in the country. With the exception of course the Capitol Police. This country and the people had better start getting it's stuff together and fast before we see the Constitution disappear and we find ourselves in Orwell's 1984.
Sounds to me like they are trying to force the residents out. I know the property and it is prime real estate. They must have something up their sleves.
Having grown up on the Southside of Tucson, raised by a mother who worked as a secretary and knitted sweaters and barbie doll clothes for extra money, I can say that there was a time in Tucson's history that bigotry was not what it appears to be today. Of course, I was a kid living out on the Nogales Highway in a House that my grandfather had started building but never finished because he died from a massive heart attack. My mother and grandmother finished it using the insurance money from a policy my grandfather had from working for the railroad. In those days, the nearest store was ten miles away, and I had to catch a school bus to the elementary school, and eventually to Sunnyside High School. Friends were few and far between, and growing up I was a bit of a geek. Which meant I was fair game for everyone. If I had any prejudice, it was against those who were pounding the hell out of me because they could. The only concept I had of racism was what I saw on television during the marches of Dr. Martin Luther King and the fight for desegregation. Tucson was smaller then, and it seemed that everyone respected each other. That may not have been the case, but I had no concept of racism, and realistically couldn't understand it, nor did I care. When I joined the Army at 17 I quickly learned that it didn't matter what color a person's skin was. You looked out for them and they looked out for you. You got drunk together, and you got stoned together, and you fought the enemy together. Race never entered into the equation. Tucson was a rather small University town back then. Now its turned into a mega-metropolis and as such it has all of the problems that go with that title. I now live in a small town in New Mexico, I am getting old and despite that, I still have a great deal of love for the Tucson of old. The memories of my mother and grandparents, and the friends I had as a kid, both black and white. I certainly don't remember having any white privilege, simply because we had to work for what little we had. There were no designer clothes, no games, other than the ones we made up to entertain ourselves. As a result of all of this, I find it difficult to understand the rhetoric of today, or why people are destroying the hard work and lives of not just white people, but black people as well. It seems to me that there is more going on here than meets the eye, and this scares me.
I cannot disagree with the author regarding the statue of Poncho Villa, and since I live in New Mexico now after being raised in Tucson, I am fully aware of the attacks that took place here at Columbus and the resulting aftermath. I might add that since my family has had dealings with Babbling Babbitt, it does not surprise me that after it's all said and done he has faded into the obscurity he so richly deserved. However, (there is always one of those) While I have never thought of myself as a racist or having white privilege's. Yet I suspect that after writing this I will be accused of both. Yes, the Confederate Battle Flag needs to go, but as a historian I have to ask about the wisdom of destroying statues of Confederate Heroes or for that matter statues of our founding fathers, or even Abe Lincoln. I ask this simply because it has been my experience that if we attempt to rewrite history or even forget it, we are most certainly doomed to repeat it.
Recent Comments