getting ahead of the book

I believe originally it was the nobility that went for Huss while the peasants remained Catholic, but when the empire crushed them they had to become Catholic while the peasants carried on some Hussite teachings.  I believe they remained in the country.  The Hapsburgs tolerated little pockets of protestantism as long as they didn't raise no ruckus. 

I think the free thinkers were around the turn of the century.  The Czechs have always seemed to me to be a skeptical people.  I remember how my mother would give salesman what I thought of as the Bohunk fish eye.  She was the Bohunk, my father was a German and some other stuff.  I always liked to think of myself as German because of my last name, and except that little unpleasantness during the world wars they seemed like smart people.  But in College I took a couple years of German and boy were they schmaltzy.  I decided to call myself Czech at that point.

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the Eastland disaster.  It was a summer excursion to some lake resort in Michigan I believe.  The ship was being boarded in the river, just a block west of where I live.  It was taking on more people than it should have and it was top heavy.  The people ran to the railing to wave and the ship tipped so they ran the other way and that just made things worse and then the ship tipped over.  844 people drowned just feet from dry land. 

A little more information than I needed about the army ranking system.  Mainly I was wondering about the difference between enlisted and commissioned men, like the way they have officer's clubs and enlisted men's clubs, which I think goes back well maybe to the days of knights when you had the nobility and the rabble.  And I am still wondering why you didn't go to officer's training school.  Weren't you planning a career in the army?

I don't know about the busing plans in Chicago.  Is that in the book?  I'm still at the point where they are having meeting after meeting and being stonewalled and there are all these alphabet organizations, and it's kind of slow.  I guess this is the history those guys lived so it seems important to them.  Well they are so philosophical like if we think this then we must think that, and I can see where some of the hotheads are beginning to think, well let's do something.

But then doing something is not necessarily helpful.  They had those school boycotts which were very successful but once they were over things were the same as they were before.  Well I'm sitting here thinking maybe they should have done this or they should have done that, but then when I think of the enormity of what they were trying to do I think how could anything have worked?

Maybe I am getting ahead of the book but I think what they were aiming at was a country were black and white were completely intermixed in housing and schooling and everybody had an equal opportunity to succeed, and what they got was well, not much.  There have been gradual things, brought on more by cultural changes then by any legislation where for instance mixed marriage is no big deal anymore, and that racist language is not tolerated. 

Well it's a big subject.