© photo by Daniel DeMarle 2018

Words are important!

I was listening to NPR the other day about Southern Civil War monuments being torn down, and a great, great relative of Southern General Nathan Bedford Forest was bemoaning this fact and how they are fighting these removals.  He used the phrase the “War between the States” instead of the Civil War.  If you hear this, do not let people get away with this crap.  There was no “war between the States”.  The Southern States for the purpose of protecting their rights to own slaves seceded from the United States, and started their own country.  It was called the Confederate States of America.  There was a war between the United States and the Confederate States of America, a separate country.  Wikipedia states that “The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease, and 50,000 civilians.”  So when you hear that phrase “War between the States” don’t let it slide, it was a Civil War, started by the Southern States. Everyone who fought on the Southern Side was a traitor to this country.  Let me say it again, they were traitors, and they were traitors fighting for the right to continue to own black bodies.  Statues of Traitors should never have been allowed to be put up in the first place.  They should all be undone.

© words by Dan DeMarle 2018 – photo by Dan DeMarle 2017

Sen. Booker: “I loved a book I read called In Search of My Mother’s Garden, by Alice Walker, where she talks about — it’s a chapter where she’s giving advice to revolutionaries, in this case, black revolutionaries, and she says, “The real revolutionary is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff: the raising a child’s reading level from third-grade to fourth; the filling out food stamp forms for folks, because they have to eat, revolution or not. The real revolutionary is always close enough to the people to be there for them when they’re needed.”

Sen. Booker: Well, I question people a lot about what we say about other people says more about who we are than who they are. And it was that moment when I first started on Martin Luther King Boulevard, with Miss Jones, where she checked me, hard, and she said, “Describe the neighborhood.” And I described it like I did to you — the drug dealing, the projects, the abandoned building. And she just said to me, in a very curt way, “Boy, you need to understand that the world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you, and if you’re one of those people who only sees darkness, despair, that’s all there’s ever gonna be. But if you see hope, opportunity, if you’re stubborn enough to, every time you open your eyes, see love and the face of God, then you can be a change agent here. Then you can make a difference.”

From On Being 7/18