EXTRA! EXTRA! Women's Suffrage Revoked; Slavery Reinstated....

You who follow me know that I have often mumbled, confessed and ranted about the fact that I was sure I was losing my mind, but,hell,   you all know I was mostly kidding.   Today I am not at all sure about that, or about anything.  I may very well have gone mad, but apparently this country, the good old U.S,. of A  has beaten me to it.

In my last blog I remember saying something flippant about the election like...."We don't need another Civil War".  Then today I bleariily logged onto my email and saw the headline of a news story....."31 States File Petitions for Secession".   WHAT THE FUCK?  Talk about infantile behavior and poor losers.  I am speechless.

Well, of course, not quite.  That is an obvious lie.

Why oh why is it that for every inch of progress we manage to eke out as partially civilized beings there are those who fight like demons (0r the demented )  determined to drag us backward into the slime?

I have read that once upon a time some people arrived at the idea that owning and exploiting Slaves was not a very fair or nice thing to do.  Naturally, the people whose comfortable way of life depended on Slavery did not see that to be true.......hell, they had bought and paid for them there Slaves fair and square and damned if they were going to be deprived of their lifestyle and slave property by a bunch of heads- in- the- clouds Socialists out to ruin the Country.  This meant WAR!.  And war it was.

After much bloodshed and devastating destruction,  Slavery was finally legally abolished, but, I suspect, the idea was never really accepted in certain parts of the country as the right and proper thing for civilized people to do.  Not to mention the fact that the ex-Slaves found that the Freedom they had been granted had a number of huge drawbacks and impediments .......their treatment might even  be considered less than humane..but that is another story.  We will get to that later.

Moving onward there came a time that women (and perhaps one or even two enlightened men)  had the notion that,  since women were doing at least half of the work at maintaining a civilized society and could not be treated as or considered slaves since that had sort of been declared illegal, that perhaps they should be given the opportunity to vote since what the government did affected them too.  An outrageous premise, but since an awful lot of women seemed to like the idea and made a helluva lot of noise in favor of it, somehow the crazy notion became law and,. voila, women were allowed to cast ballots and have some say in the government.  Since I am not quite old enough to remember those heady days, I cannot be sure whether efforts to repeal that law were attempted.  I am pretty damned sure efforts were definitely considered.  And, for that matter, to this very day I see horrific attempts to get women back into their proper place, in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant........

Oh, yes, and then there was the time when some crazy ladies (who may have been sick of their husbands coming home drunk and beating up on them and the kids) decided that Liquor was an evil of the Devil and should be outlawed and I'll be damned if I know how they managed it (I am almost positive that most men were not too hot about the idea) but they actually achieved the passage of a law that prohibited Booze....none, nada, zilch. And, of course,  a bunch of guys who saw a fortune being offered to them via providing that illegal substance that everyone really wanted, formed an organized group or several of them and so was born Prohibition, the Speakeasy, contraband hooch, bathtub Gin and The Mob.  Of course, this No Booze thing  was such a ditzy idea that it had no staying power and was soon repealed, all of which shows that prohibiting liquor had nothing at all to do with progress.......just goes to show how dangerous bible-thumping Church Ladies can be if they get together.   However, the era did give birth to bobbed hair, short skirts, the greatest Jazz ever and the Charleston...... all of which I consider hugely progressive.

As I muse further on what I consider progress I come next to that period in the  mid-20th Century when someone admitted to themselves that simply freeing the Slaves had really not accomplished everything that it should have in regard to respecting human dignity regardless of skin color. Marches were organized, speeches were made, and in spite of meddling wretches like Governor Wallace, schools were integrated.  A process of Desegregation was actually begun.  I am sad to say I do not expect to see that struggle completely won in my lifetime, but I feel that some progress has been made and I pray it will continue.

And that  brings us to today when people around the world are cheering our wisdom, courage and good intentions for the world by reelecting President Barack Obama, the first elected leader of a predominately white country who is not 100% white, and I am forced, before breakfast even, to read that poor sports and misguided fools in 31 states have filed petitions for Secession. from the United States of America. 

Sigh.  You know what I think?   Dammit.....let them do it!