Don' wait until the last train out for the epiphany!

Good. If you meet the Buddha on the road...

Have you ever heard of the tenants on when to speak?

The jealous god.

There is only one true god and that god is a jealous god!
The god of judgement and retribution!

I speak of the god of Westboro Baptist church and the god who was the copilot on 9/11. I speak of the god of Srebrenica (1995) and Babi Yar (1941) and Jericho (approximately 3000 BC) and the multitude of god induced killing fields that lay between the dawn of time and this very moment. The god of the old world and the god of the new world. The god of Israel and the god of Palestine and the god of Washington DC and the god of Kabul. The god who intends to burn me in hell on a roasting spittle everyday for time eternal!

You know (trumpets blaring an intro....BUMP BUMP BA BAAAAHHHH)

GOD ALMIGHTY[/quote]

That's what I thought...

PS...All them gods are just about the same. John Prine

It turns out that they only used around 1/2 ton of bullets. That is 1 truck for probably 2 days. I bet they made a detail of Jews unload the bullets from the truck.

And that is exactly why George Wallace and I were opposed to all them uppity niggers sitting at lunch counters and such back in the 60's. If them bad ass Heb's no what's up they will get some dogs and fire hoses and keep their own damn sand niggers down!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_tBg_86pc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1L8y-MX ... re=related

And sad to watch up close as it is happening. Terrible.

Fifty years later after enough people felt that terribleness, hearts changed. People changed. Lunch counters and churches and schools and buses and people are very different. Not all but enough to notice if you want to notice. It gives me hope for the Middle East. They will change when they no longer can endure the terribleness.

I met George Wallace twice. Once when he was the firebrand segregationist; once when he was a crippled old man in a wheelchair accompanied by his black friends. Don't ever think miracles don't happen. They can be frustratingly slow but the course of change of the heart is positive if slow as long as love pushes it forward. Terribleness is never forever.

in the case of wallace, perhaps he came around, that would be nice, but something you left out, the way i understand it is that before he was governor, when he tried running before, lost to someone (who i understand had the support of the KKK) wallace had been considered a moderate (?) when it came to the race thing and actually had the support of the NAACP. but when he lost he decided he didn't want that to happen again so he all a sudden was pro-segregation and stuff. and won.

i haven't watched the clips yet heraclitis, but i will...thanks for posting them.

Huh, it is funny, I thought you were on the other side of this integration thing? Palestinians and Hebrews have to bite the bullet and you are correct, America should be proud of its progress but that doesn't mean we can stop fighting for right!

There are almost always more than two sides if there is more than one but when there are, all of them hurt. It isn't abstract. It's close and personal. For me, real integration begins with six black nine year old kids clinging to a brick wall in fifth grade too scared to play with us.

If you didn't grow up in the middle of it as it happened, integration is a story, a movie, pictures in a book, speeches on TV, songs, but not real faces on a real playground in a real situation when we had to choose. But not sides. We had to choose words to get them off that wall, choose a game that made us all laugh so we would all quit being afraid of each other. It doesn't happen all at once to everyone. It happens a few at a time, a few words at a time, in games we play everyday. It starts at that wall and continues through events that get scarier and more complicated, more comical, more dangerous, and sometimes very threatening. It is a life lived, not a law or a TV mini-series.

Imagine turning your back on aome of your friends and some of your family and saying those words and playing those games. Societies don't integrate. People do. One at a time. Ask yourself why you will do that and not why others won't. The honest answer isn't abstract because to choose to do it is to choose to be hurt for doing it. It is choosing to hurt others that you care about. To fight for the right is to choose the pain for whatever reason you will, but you will hurt and be hurt for that choice. It isn't free.

You seem to think I didn't grow up in the middle of integration. I grew up in Oklahoma City with Judge Luther Bohanon and I was right in the middle of racial mayhem and violence. You have no idea where I have been. I turned the corner at the wrong time and got the shit kicked out of me for being white and I have known kids that got bullets in their heads because they were the wrong color.

http://digital.library.okstate.edu/ency ... BU017.html

Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys was one of my fav albums when the last bit of racial violence occurred in my life. They didn't give a shit that I had long hair...they saw white and they kicked my ass, and I was bloody and beaten in a U S Grant high school hall way singing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFA0rg6rX_c

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What did you learn?

This looks like fun: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbuster ... treet.html

Well I didn't really learn nothing that I didn't already know at that particular moment in time. I picked myself up and I did what I was accustomed to when there were race riots at the old high school. I went out to the parking lot and I watched the red necks pelt the buses full of black kids as they tried to evacuate them from the premises as quickly as possible. I listened to the Principle as he walked around with the bull horn telling us to disperse and leave as the ambulance pulled across the broken glass from the school bus windows that had been pelted by rocks by the red necks as they were pulling out of the parking lot. I heard the kid with the bullet in his brain was black and the bullet had actually skidded off the wall above a locker and hit him in the head (nobody actually aimed at anyone). Later I heard the argument was actually over a dexidrine deal that had gone bad but it turned into a race riot. I myself, did what had become typical on days like this, I parted from school with my buddies and headed out to the Canadian River Shore to smoke some mary juana and drink some beer (if we were lucky, maybe do some LSD).

Of course, I have always pondered on the fact that it was a shame that between 1972 and 1976 the good folks of Oklahoma City had found it necessary to let the kids finally sort out the whole integration thing. The town of Moore Oklahoma just south of the city on the way to Norman became a city as all the whites that could afford to move their children outside of the range of Judge Bohanon's ruling did so. All in all, things have worked out well and I still contact occasionally a number of black friends from that time. You see, I was a drummer in one of the first predominantly all white high schools that introduced a bit of soul into our marching step at the football games. All due to Andre Francisco, a huge black kid in the band that could play the s##t out of the tuba. Bump she Bump ba bump (dip) bump bump, Bump she bump ba bump (turn-and dip bump bump) dabba dabba dabba dabba bump ba bump ba bump (I can still go in the basement and play that cadence on the old snare down there). He was a monster on the bass fiddle as well. I was playing tympani's in the orchestra at a contest when Andre took his normal solo and (at a pivotal moment in the recital), he threw the bow down and began plucking some immediate bass lines like I had never heard before. The band director was dumbfounded but the rest of the orchestra (who knew Andre pretty well) did their level best to support him. Nobody gave a s@@t about color at that particular moment! He was gettin' down!

What did you learn?

It was a long story here because so much of the early intergration takes place in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, etc. We were in Huntsville and it was peaceful relative to what was going on in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery but also personal. I was on the poor side of town living in what had been a sharecropper field before they started building houses for the aborigines (original poor white folks in a town that suddenly got really stinking rich) on what had been sharecropper land, cotton fields, and so on. So it was very poor white country folk staring down way more poor black sharecropper families. It was beautiful and awful all the same.

On the mountain where I was born before we moved into the valley, there was us and the Germans who ten years earlier had been Nazi scientists lobbing V1s and V2s on London and the US Army and American scientists and engineers. Then we moved to the valley. Integration starts earlier because the Germans became irate about the signs over the water fountains and demanded this change and it did. But it took time and wasn't without some pretty weird stuff. Model Cities emptied the ghettos downtown. They tore them down and moved the families there into our neighborhoods as the better off engineers who had moved here from around the country with the space program fled south into all white neighborhoods. Then we learned the poor white southerners weren't quite as afraid or bigoted as the rich white northerners and coasties. When they had a choice, they fled. We didn't have a choice except to go further into the country and some did. My Dad didn't. He wanted to but it came down to money and he had eleven kids across three families, so it wasn't an option. So we became buttermilk: white kids raised in a black neighborhood. Dad is gone now and Mom still lives there with her old lady black friends.

It got hostile after Dr. King was assassinated. Up until then, the kids were getting along relatively well and our school had one of the top black football quarterbacks in the nation, Conredge Holloway. Then the riots broke out in the schools, the cops occupied the schools, and that stopped the business both sides were doing with drugs and that tended toward some truces. I can relate a lot of stories but another time.

What did I learn: there is no justice in nature or society. There is justice in human hearts when they wish to practice it and it is learned one by one, one to one. The same kid who we saved in junior high school from white bullies pissed he was dating a white girl saved my life in a parking lot in high school when black bullies were about to kill me with bricks for telling them to leave a drama club rehearsal after the walked in demanding money.

The music counted for a lot. The music saved our souls. Guys like Arlo and Pete who had a reach into our generation, we owe them big. They showed us we could keep our sense of humor. We could grow up without always being afraid. The musicians, the folkies, they were huge. There are always the cruds who will keep on hating, keep on hurting, keep on trying to keep the emnity going, but after a time we grew tired of them and these other guys were telling us we could get high, get laid, and get happy. Hate or hookahs? Hate or hooters? Hate or ha has? Easy choices, in my opinion.

I'm glad I was there, but like war, I'm glad my children were not. It isn't that we overcame, but we did find common grounds for living together and we keep working on it. My epiphany (yes, I got on the train) would be in Santa Barbara years later in California for the first time when I realized that they had no blacks there and that it made me uncomfortable. Something was missing. Serendipitously that same week, I saw Arlo for the first time on a bill with John Sebastian in SB. It was magic.

I learned to make friends. I learned not to believe everyone was like me or wanted to be. I learned I could live inside the music that was living inside me. I learned not to act black to be cool and to be white was because it is who we are and that's fine. Bluegrass is every bit as valid as blues-rock. People do smell different. They make different sounds because their heads are shaped differently. I learned to like the differences and to miss them when they were gone. I learned I was part of a heritage of slavery and oppression. I learned it wasn't my fault or mine to apologize for or to forget. I learned to look at a black woman or a lesbian and say, "foxy!" not that they are mine to have or not but that they are simply beautiful. I learned it was ok to be me and to look back at someone who wanted me to be guilty for things I was not a part of and say, "get real." I learned to lay it down, to hold up a "candle in the rain", to come out from under the blanket of the past and let the rain wash off the mud, sing, dance, fuck, and raise my babies free of the fears I was raised with.

This for me is peace. For you, I don't know what your peace is. I hope you have it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH2rL4c4Wjs

Did you know this guy is an Okie?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaMf6ydI-YI

I don't know shit from a tree