LAmom

THE UNITED NATIONS IS OFFICIALLY "NOT SMARTER THAN A FIFTH-GRADER"

At least in 1950 they weren't.

For Veterans Day today, my boys and I looked a little information about the Korean War (they were interested in that because some of their great-uncles served in Korea).  We followed the action of the invasion by North Korea, the Allies coming in to help, and their successful recapture of South Korea.  When we reached the point of the US/UN decision to cross the 38th Parallel, JG declared that that was a terrible idea.

Only after countless more lives were lost did President Truman conclude that they never should have crossed the line.  Too bad they hadn't applied some fifth-grader logic before they did it.

DEPRESSION SONG

I've always loved this old song, and now it seems timely again.

If I ever get a job again,
I will never be a snob again;
I'll live within my means, carry a dollar in my jeans,
If I ever get a job again.

If I ever get a break again,
Brother, what I'll do to steak again!
No turning out the light bidding my appetite good night,
If I ever get a break again.

I'll get two rooms and a kitchenette,
Furnished comfortably;
With two rooms and a kitchenette,
I'll get a sweet somebody to move in with me!

If I ever get a job again,
I know that two hearts will throb again,
She told me with her eyes we'll be rehearsing lullabies,
If I ever get a job again.

If I ever get a job again,
I will never be a snob again!
I'm through with stocks and bonds, I'd rather spend it all on blondes,
If I ever get a job again!

If I ever get my pay again,
I'll save it for a rainy day again,
But let me tell you, bud, I'm gonna save up for a flood,
If I ever get my pay again.

I'll get two suits and an overcoat,
Like a millionaire!
Just two suits and an overcoat,
And then when things get better, I'll buy underwear!

If I ever get a job again,
With my old friends I'll hobnob again,
What great fun it will be saying, "Just have one more on me!"
If I ever get a job again.

DEFINING MOMENTS

I've come to expect politicians to act like politicians.  I know what they say about laws and sausages, and I accept the fact that at times there have to be compromises.  But sometimes a critical moment comes when we really need our representatives to rise above politics and do the right thing, even if it's not politically smart.

I remember how I felt when the Iraq War resolution was being considered.  I remember pacing the floor in our den while I listened to the radio.  I couldn't believe that Congress was seriously considering the president's proposal to start a war unilaterally against a country that had not attacked us nor threatened us.  How could we set such a dangerous and immoral precedent?  I figured that some of the legislators really did want to go to war, but I strongly suspected that there were others who knew it was wrong but were afraid of being painted as "soft on terrorism" by war hawks who were capitalizing on a zeitgeist of fear and the confusion some Americans had about who's who between bad guys overseas.  I saw it as a defining moment, one where you see what a leader is really made of.

I felt helpless thinking that the people who were supposed to represent me could cave in to political pressures at a time when we so desperately needed them to stand for what was right.  Before the vote, I told myself: Anyone who votes 'yes' on this has got to go.  What I meant by that was that they needed to get the boot from Congress; it hadn't occurred to me that some of those people would later be running for the presidency.  My vote for our commander-in-chief will not go to anyone who either sincerely believes in pre-emptive war or was spineless enough to go along with one.  That's why I didn't vote for John Kerry, would not have voted for John Edwards, and will not vote for Hillary Clinton.  It's also the reason why I was glad to be able to vote to re-elect Barbara Boxer to the Senate in 2004.  Despite the fact that we disagree strongly on some things, such as abortion, she had the courage to stand by her convictions and vote against the war.

I've had this blogpost halfway composed in my head for over a week, but I hadn't made the time to sit down and finish it.  Then yesterday I happened to see something at the library that finally got me back to it.  I was glancing at the section of biographies for kids when I saw a name that always stops me in my tracks -- Jeannette Rankin.  Even though she knew that her votes against war would doom her political career, she would not go against her principles.  After her vote against entering World War I she said, "I'm not interested in that ["that" being the question of how her vote would affect her chances at re-election].  All I am interested in is what they will say fifty years from now."  Those votes were her defining moments, and she rose to them.

It's wonderful that she broke the gender barrier in Congress, but that's not the thing that makes her so special to me.  Her willingness to stand alone was what had me suddenly shedding tears right there in the middle of the San Pedro library.  We need more leaders like that.

THE "PROJECTS" IN FRANCE

Via Alas.  Doug Ireland gives some history on the minority neighborhoods in France that are now in flames:

If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers, primarily from North Africa, were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed  many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers (especially Moroccans, particularly favored in the auto industry) were favored by industrial employers as passive and unlikely to strike (in sharp contrast to the highly political Continental French working class and its militant, largely Communist-led unions) and cheaper to hire. In some industries, for this reason, literacy was a disqualification -- because an Arab worker who could read could educate himself about politics and become more susceptible to organization into a union.

(. . .)

France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers, today encircled by flames. Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.

(emphasis mine)

Chilling and much too familiar.

BILL SAMUEL ON ROSA PARKS

How can you honor the memory of Rosa Parks? She would not be interested in receiving a lot of earthly glory.  We can honor her by saying no with quiet dignity when we face injustice and oppression, not seeking to be the great leader but only to be faithful when the time comes to say we simply can not go along with what is wrong.

Read the whole thing.

BADGE OF HONOR

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system's riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

(New York Times)

HAPPY WOMEN'S EQUALITY DAY!

Yes, it's the 85th anniversary of women getting the right to vote.

I plan to head to the library today to see if I can get a little more acquainted with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an anti-abortion, pro-birth-control, pro-civil-rights, feminist mom.

REMEMBERING THE WATTS RIOTS

I don't remember the Watts Riots myself.  I was an infant in the summer of 1965.  But my parents remember it.  We were living on 74th Street and Denker Avenue, near the intersection of Normandie and Florence, 3.3 miles from the site of the initial arrest that led to the riots.  I asked my mother to write about her memories of those events.  So travel back in time with LAgrandma . . .

My first impression of the news that businesses were being attacked in Watts was that it was senseless.  I couldn't figure out how burning business establishments would solve the problem of police brutality and racial injustice.  As a matter of fact, those who were being killed in the process were blacks. Amid the profanities and expressed frustrations of the alleged oppressed, I could sense that a backlash of a stream of hatred toward all blacks could be the result.

As it went on for days on end, and the looting and rioting grew worse, curfews were imposed on many residential areas, including ours.  As my husband and I had only been married for slightly less than two years, and we had a small baby and I was pregnant with another, we decided to head back to my hometown, which was San Bernardino.  Our plans were to stay there until the whole thing passed over.

On our way on the 10 freeway,  we heard a horn honk.  We turned to see who or what it was, and it was a dear friend of mine from the same hometown and her husband and small baby, who were also headed back to San Bernardino.  A few miles later, there was another couple that we knew from San Bernardino, doing likewise!   We stayed in San Bernardino for a couple of days.

When we returned home, we guardedly went back to our normal activities.  Several businesses in our area, although not directly affected by arson or looting, had decided that they'd had enough of being vulnerable to the general public, and had closed their shops.  For blocks and blocks, especially on Vermont Avenue, businesses were burned to the ground.  There were other areas on the east side of town that were far worse.  The police chief was under a lot of attack and was eventually replaced.

Equal opportunity was one of the themes of the protests, and was much more in the forefront in the job market and caused a different climate of opportunity for blacks, which was a positive outcome resulting in affirmative action to right injustices.

Thanks for contributing to my blog, Mom!  And thanks for getting my brother and me out of town!

Unfortunately, history sometimes repeats itself.  In 1992, I was employed at King/Drew Medical Center, which had been built in response to the '65 riots in an attempt to improve the neighborhood (KDMC, of course, is now considered a blight on the city and is in danger of being shut down).  When the '92 riots broke out, I had the same reaction my parents had in their day.  I left the little place where I was living and went to their house in Carson until things simmered down.  I didn't go to work for several days.

YESTERDAY IN HISTORY

Yipes!  I had waited until today to blog about the anniversary of Nixon's resignation, but now I see that he announced it on August 8th, not the 9th!  The resignation became effective the next day.

I remember watching Gerald Ford's speech on television when he took office on August 9th.  I was nine years old.  I even remember one line from the speech: You haven't elected me as your president with your ballots, but I hope that you will confirm me as your president with your prayers.

I heard someone opine once that children's political views are strongly influenced by the earliest political events that they remember.  Kids who cut their teeth on the hostage crisis in Iran tended to see America as being under seige, etc.  My earliest political memories were the 1972 election and then Watergate.  I remember seeing what looked like a sea of desks on TV (this is my child's-eye impression of things).  Guys in suits were sitting at the desks and talking into microphones, explaining themselves.  And the reason for all of the hullabaloo was because the president was a crook.  Maybe that did influence me to view governments as having high levels of dishonesty.

In one way, this has led me to be more tolerant of some things about politicians.  For instance, I've never really cared whether a candidate is a skirt-chaser or uses foul language or consults astrologers because the whole idea of looking at politicians as role models seems ludicrous to me.  A politician is someone I am hiring to do a job.  My only interest is in choosing the person who I think will run the country the way I want to see it run.

On the other hand, when it comes to actual policy matters, I tend to be very suspicious about what our leaders are doing or planning to do.  I think there are only a few sensitive intelligence matters that would really need to be top-secret and classified.  Outside of that, I don't think anything that's done with my tax money needs to be kept secret from me!  That's the best way to ensure that we don't have any more Watergates.

INDEPENDENCE DAY 2005

What I love about Indpendence Day is our attitude that we became independent not when we finally won the war, but when we first declared it.  Like people say: Free your mind, your body will follow.

I think that's the sentiment behind the best acts of civil disobedience.  The message is, "I've freed my mind, my body is following, and the system had better catch up."

The founding of the United States of America was a huge event in human history.  Even though the founders were still limited in their thinking about who qualified as "people", our ground-breaking declaration of the equality of all and the belief in inalienable rights was an example to the rest of the world.  May we ever be so.

Happy Fourth of July, everybody.