what went wrong 1

 I think people supported him because he said the things they wanted to hear after years of perceived denigration and disrespect by politicians and opposition progressives.

I came across this on fb  yesterday.  Well I've seen this before. this sentiment which I think is broadspread across this land and in all those maps that show the US as a great red sea dotted with blue islands, mostly the big cities, ah here is Chicago, here is Houston, the college towns, and some that look like places where a lot of black or hispanic people live, that there is some elite that is lording it over all those good hard-working Mericans. 

It always struck me as false where is all this denigration coming from?  I don't hear it.  What are they all up in arms about?  Don't they have it pretty good?  Weren't we just coming out of a financial crisis?  Wasn't employment going up?  Didn't we just give them affordable health care?  And now, this?  What the hell is going on?

If I calm down and think about it, I do kind of hear that denigration in the way the more loose cannons of my ilk toss around the term racism.  I think we can all agree that anybody who wants to bring back slavery is racist, also likely anybody who wants to bring back Jim Crow, although maybe not on the latter.  Well surely anybody who thinks that blacks ought to have to go to crappy schools, or be barred from good jobs, or not be able to live where they please, is a racist.  But what about when the black kids come to his kid's school, when he had to compete with black people for his job, when his new neighbors are black?  Maybe not so much.  If a guy wants his kids to go to a school where everybody looks like them, have some job security in feeding his family, wants to not have to worry about the property values on his house?  Is he still a racist?  I don't think he thinks so, and when he hears those of my ilk who toss the charge around like nickels he feels like he is being called a racist like the ones who want to bring slavery back, and that is certainly not true, he is being insulted. 


And here I am going to go back in time to 1953, the inauguration of Ike who everybody liked,  I guess I did too.  My dad was a republican.  My mother was a democrat but like all good boys I wanted to be like my dad.  Anyway I knew it was a big deal because they gave us the day off school to watch the inauguration, and we were watching it on our very own tv, and later that year we would buy our first automobile.  Life was very good in Gage Park.  What went wrong?

To be continued.