let's do it by the book

I remember Wisconsin and Colorado having 18 year old drinking ages, Colorado I think it was only 3.2 beer, but a hardy teenager can get a pretty good buzz out of that.  I think the feds put the kibosh on the 18 year old drinking age by withholding highway funds for those who had it.  And of course for awhile 18 year old women in Illinois could drink while men had to wait until 21.

There had  been some laws in Chicago against blacks moving into certain neighborhoods, but I think they were all gone or ignored by the 50s.  It was chiefly what you call social custom, social custom being reinforced by white people refusing to sell their houses to black people, and hordes of white rioters descending on your house if you managed to find a white person to sell it to you, that kept the neighborhoods segregated. 

If I happen to not want to sell my house to anybody who is not a Cubs fan, that makes me kind of a charming eccentric, nobody would get up in arms about that.  If I decided I didn't want to sell my house to a black person, then I am a bigot, and a lot of people are going to look down on me, but it's no big deal, they can buy one from my neighbor.

But what if no white people will sell me a house, and no white guy will give me a job, and the white people have all the nice houses and good jobs?  Isn't that a problem.  Should I (and I seem to have become a Black person), just shrug my shoulders and say, well that's custom, whaddaya gonna do? 

Here is where the gummint steps in, the blacks and the liberals flex their political muscle because the gummint doesn't do it unless most people want it, and they pass the laws to enforce voting and employment and housing rights, and I think anymore most people think that was a good thing.

On the one hand I (and I am white again) should be able to sell my house to whoever I want to, if I don't want to sell it to some Goddamn Sox fan, isn't that my business?  It would be if I was the only one, but if everybody did the same thing then it would be a problem.  Like if I was the only one in the city who burned my leaves it wouldn't be a problem,  but if we let everybody do it there would be too much smoke pollution and the gummint would have to step in and put a stop to it.

What about now?  Now that we have laws against discrimination against blacks, haven't we done enough?  Well there are two things, one is that there is still a lot of prejudice against black people.  The other is that, since they have suffered so much from slavery and all those years of discrimination, they suffer a lot of poverty, shouldn't something be done about that? 

I don't know offhand what happened to busing.  I think it was mainly the courts that mandated it, and it seems like there was quite a bit of it for awhile, and then it just faded away.  I think the local governments didn't provide the money and the courts had a hard time enforcing it.

I think we should both get the book too.  I was thinking one of us would get it and read it and send it to the other guy, but then how much would the first guy remember about what was in it?  This will be an interesting episode for Beaglesonia because now we will both be reading from the same text instead of things we sort of remember.