Running Late Again

I was going to read the link you gave me yesterday, I really was, but, for some reason, it doesn't work. Usually, when you type in a URL, it will come up blue and automatically become a link, but this one didn't. I suppose I could type it in manually, but it's really long, and I'm running late again tonight. To speed things up, I will grant you that Michigan probably has passed some laws over the years with the intent of inconveniencing the abortion people, as well they should. Contrary to your assertion that most people were in favor of legalizing abortion, the voters of Michigan defeated a ballot proposal to that effect by more than a two to one margin only a few months before the Supreme Court mandated that we had to allow it anyway. That's why I said that they shoved it down our throats. Although I personally don't like the idea of abortion, and was one of the people who voted against it, what I really don't like is the way the Supreme Court forced it on the people of Michigan against their will. Nevertheless, like I said, they still can't make a girl have an abortion if she doesn't want one, at least not yet.

It seems to me that freedom of speech also implies the freedom to not listen if I don't want to. I don't know what the Supreme Court would say about that but, as any kid in school could tell you, they would have a had time enforcing a law that requires people to listen and pay attention to something against their will. In Orwell's novel "1984" they had TV sets in every home and public place that couldn't be turned off, but they don't have anything like that in the real world, at least not yet.

The numbers you got from Wiki about the racial make up of Cheboygan seem a little off to me. I would have guessed less Blacks and way more Native Americans. Last I heard, there were no Black families living permanently in Cheboygan. When I was driving school busses, there were a few Black kids who had been adopted by White parents, but that was over 10 years ago and there may be more of them by now. Come to think of it, some of those kids have grown up by now and had kids of their own, so there might be a few Black or mixed race families around. We have those Jamaicans that are hired by local businesses under some government program, but they are seasonal workers who return to Jamaica after their employment runs out. Now and then you might see a Black tourist or two in the summer, but they are just passing through on their way to somewhere else.

Wiki probably got their numbers from the U.S Census, where people are asked to self identify their race, which might account for some of the confusion, especially with the Native Americans. I'm sure I told you before about how, back in the 80s, a court ruling gave certain special hunting and fishing privileges to Native American Indians. This caused a whole lot of people of French ancestry to be magically transformed into Indians. Of course, most of them were only part Indian, but government policy dictates that, if you're part anything and part White, the White part doesn't count. The furor over this issue has long since died down, so maybe many of those Indians have transformed themselves back into Frenchmen again by now. I understand that there was a time in history when Frenchmen weren't considered White, but that was a long time ago and nobody remembers it anymore. I wouldn't know about it myself if I hadn't stumbled across it in a book that I was reading.

When I was a card carrying Libertarian, there were some party members who believed that the census shouldn't make an accounting of race at all. They suggested that we all self identify our race as "human" in a symbolic act of protest. I considered it, but decided that they would just send somebody around to follow up on it, which would waste more of our tax money and my time, so I didn't do it. Besides, I think that all us White people should stand up and be counted. All the others do it and, if we don't, we might be marginalized even more than we are being now.