TRUMPIST, FASCIST, RACIST AND NAZIs

One hundred sixty years ago or so, some Americans enslaved other human beings simply because of the color of their skin.  Treated no better than animals these human beings toiled for long hours to create wealth for their white masters.  And Southern Americans chose to leave the union to protect the act of enslavement.  And became traitors to the Union when the South chose WAR to preserve the institution of slavery.

These southern secessionist killed Americans in their war against the Union to conserve a way of life with a primary activity of enslaving other Human Beings.  That is the Heritage the monuments and statutes represent that the voices of the past want to preserve.  The only relic of the Confederacy that has any value to current day Americans is the white flag of confederate surrender.

I wonder what the current day (I can no longer refer to these people as southern maintainers of a day gone wrong, because Donald Trump has broadened the assimilation of this behavior to all 50 states…) enablers of mistreatment of other races is caused by?  Is the behavior hereditary  or learned?  Is there a treatment for people who simply hate other people who they are not like?  Is it something in the genes, the chromosomes… no, I think it’s learned.

 

And Trump can never be normalized.  I don’t know why the media normalizes Trump with daily press briefings…?

I hear the Siberian Husky Blue howling in the back yard… he sleeps on the floor in my laundry room.  The door of the laundry room opens into my fenced back yard.  I have a 200 square foot covered deck with a connected deck to the covered concrete stoop my laundry room opens to.  He is shedding and the carpeted floor in the laundry room is covered with Siberian fluff… so I’ve closed and locked the door long enough to vacuum the fluff.  Since Dingo died of complications of a brain tumor treatment, Blue is now alone for periods of time in the back yard.  He howls to let me know he is lonely.  Sometimes Blue will come into the house and sleep on the kitchen floor, but mostly the laundry room is as far as he will venture into the house.  He used to access all of the house but as he has aged, he is 14, the kitchen is the limit and sometimes even the kitchen is off limits.  I don’t force him and the laundry room seems to fit his current life style.  I need to take Blue to the vet for a good bath and comb out.  He has had some skin issues over the past 6 to 8 months and I’ve had him on medication.  I’ve also switched his food source to a non-grain food and he is as of today looking great.  He apparently has a sensitivity to some grain foods…

 

I retired in April 2016.  I’m now 67.  I have an Australian Shepherd who is 15.  She has difficulty laying down, rising after laying down and she walks a little slow these days.  She sleeps a lot.  She’s been a companion since she was 8 weeks old.  Lakoda has only known the house she now lives in.

After retiring, I thought I might do some traveling.  Rent an RV type vehicle, take the dogs and head out… at one point I thought I would retrace the route of John Steinbeck in his book Travels with Charley… but I had 3 dogs, not 1.  Later I thought about visiting some places I visited in my youth.  New Orleans.  Panama City.  The Gulf Coast.  Venice Louisiana. And Dolphin Island, off the coast of Mobile Alabama… so, I waited a few months before I made concrete choices… and in August, 2016, Dingo had a seizure…and every thing changed.

Lakoda stretches on the floor beside me.  Maybe more a twitch. “…most Trump supporters filter negative reporting about Trump as ‘fake news’ and simply discount anything negative said about him,” the Trump supporter on the TV says in defense of Trump’s crazy comments in Texas yesterday.

I focus back to the meme I’m creating…

Hurricane Harvey has moved north east and is now headed for my house.  I clip a radar image of the storm as it moves east across Tennessee.

I googled something yesterday, don’t recall exactly what and opened wikipedia to read the article.  Wikipedia is accepting photographs of monuments and I begin to think about what a monument is.  Photograph an historic site…

… so as I begin doing some preliminary research on a monument to photograph, there are several in the Chattanooga area… I find these sites that I post below:

For Confederates, the quickest connection across the Appalachian Mountains, which roughly split the eastern and western theaters of the war, was a railroad line from Richmond, Va., to Chattanooga, Tenn. From Chattanooga other lines fanned west and south toward the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, the Mountain City’s strategic significance was far greater than its population of just 2,500 people might lead one to believe.

4 of the medal of honor winners are buried at the Chattanooga National Cemetery as well as Andrews himself….

The Andrews’ Raiders Monument, dedicated by the State of Ohio in 1890, honors Union spy James J. Andrews of Ohio, and 24 of his men who snuck deep into Confederate territory on a mission to cut rail and communication lines.  On April 12, 1862, the men boarded “The General,” a wood-burning locomotive, at Marietta, Georgia, while the passengers and conductor enjoyed breakfast.  The raiders took off in the engine, heading north, cutting telegraph lines and tearing up the rail tracks along their way.  The train’s conductor and others gave chase, commandeering two other trains as they encountered broken tracks.  When the raiders reached Ringgold, Georgia, 80 miles northwest of Marietta, they jumped from the train, scattering in the forest.  Andrews was captured and eventually hanged in Atlanta.  He and eight others from the mission are buried in Section H of the Chattanooga National Cemetery.  Four of Andrews’ Raiders buried here received the Medal of Honor, although Andrews, as a civilian, was ineligible. The monument to these daring raiders is also located in Section H of the cemetery and consists of a granite pedestal topped with a bronze replica of “The General.”

In February 1960, black activists kicked off a wave of protests against segregation across the South, beginning with sit-ins at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The sit-ins spread to Nashville and then to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they were organized not by experienced or professional activists, but by the teenage students of Howard High School.

Beginning on Feb. 19, Class President Paul Walker, Lehman Pierce and as many as 200 other black students organized peaceful sit-ins at four businesses along one block in downtown Chattanooga.