Thanksgiving 2013 In A Suburb 20 Min. From Detroit

Two young women who have been friends since age two, and the eldest sister of one of the women
got their families together for the holiday.
Everyone there had health care.
Five of the adults are safely retired.
Five children, 14 and under attended..
Three of the children were covered under a mom or a dad.
One of the children was definitely covered under a mom's insurance.
One other was probably covered under a dad's.
Two adults were working, and wouldn't talk about whether they were covered at work; but two
others (one with no children) were definitely covered at work. We spoke only briefly about
health care.gov except to say a computer cannot cover you anyway. Go to an insurance company.
Of the adults, eight women and four men came to dinner.
All the women were single except our hostess;  though two women were there with significant others.
Three of the single women were divorced.
The men were all married or paired.
One divorced couple was there with an adult son and his girlfriend and three of his young children with her. Though he was only forty-five, he had done time, had a newly discovered twenty-eight
year old son, and a twenty-five year old daughter in Florida.
We had to assume that for the two adults who wouldn't say, they did have health insurance because the children, it seems, were all covered.
Two of the working adults were social workers. One seemed to be an accountant, speaking about the
twenty-two levels of financing to save the Detroit Medical Center, ten years ago.
One was principal of a charter school.
One was an advertising professional.
One was in graduate school.
Other professions didn't come to light.
Dinner was all homemade save the jellied cranberry sauce and one of the cakes. The hostess had spread the cooking out over a two day period.
We ate a flavorful, tender turkey, stuffing with gravy, green beans with corn bread, (Oh, the
Honey-Baked ham was the brand named ham.) the cranberry sauce, a tender, fluffy mac and cheese.
Desserts were two sweet potato pies, a pound cake, and an Italian cream cake from Knudsen's Bakery
on W. McNichols in Detroit. No one can do that cake better. The store has been there more than forty
years.
We also talked Detroit politics. The buppies, young (Black Urban  Professionals)
believe we have a new mayor. No one else believed it.
The buppies were thirtyish.
All in attendance were African American. But two were related to mixed race families. One had
a daughter who was married to a white gentile. The other had a daughter who married a Jewish person.
We talked for a while about how last Sunday's Patriots/Broncos game nearly gave me a heart attack.
I don't always scream at TVs, but that day I was beside myself that I had stayed up late to see the
Pats go down 24/0 at half-time. I wanted to spit nails at high velocities.
Even though New England won in the end, I have barely forgiven them for what we put them through.
A couple of us lamented that Lovie Smith isn't coaching, and we expressed high hopes for the Lions.
We talked a little about institutionalized racism, but not much. Buppies seem to believe each racially
motivated incident is sui generis.
None of the rest of us could understand why they think that true until we decided none of them know
the history of the "struggle".
The youngest member of the dinner party got picked up by his divorced mom before he was ready to
leave. He was an only child, so having four adoring fans between about nine and thirteen was a dream so great he couldn't have imagined it.
Buppies seem to believe in charter schools, and are dubious about union professionals- equating the
individual problem persons in some cases with unions themselves.
I guess we weren't all deep thinkers, but we covered so many topics.
We didn't get into criminal justice or rap music.
Next time ... maybe at a book club meeting.

Republicans Destroyed The Health Care Website?

If Republicans hadn't been constantly so giddy day after day about their impending government
shut down last month, we would not have seen so many people so panicked they were going to lose
a chance for health care that they all flocked hurriedly to healthcare.gov at once. Everyone who
wanted health care was worried the government would be shut down long enough to keep them from
having a chance to sign up in time to get insured before January,
The site was designed to let people in through thousands of turnstiles.  Instead, people trampled and
overran each other, toppling the turnstiles en masse.

President Kennedy- Early And Taking Requests

Why do pundits keep saying President Kennedy was late to the table of the civil rights movement?
I thought that was George Washington?
Didn't Washington fight the Revolutionary War based on principals of freedom and pursuit of
happiness for all Americans and on no taxation without representation?
Didn't he think labor theft was taxation?
Whose happiness could a slave pursue in the country where he or she was born?
Was Jefferson late? Did either he or Washington attempt to work out the birthright of their slaves
as citizens who lived and worked hard in this country every day?
Was the NAACP late during and after emancipation and so many regular lynchings?
Were not hundreds of years of those failures not dumped into President Kennedy's lap, triggered
by the murders of Emmett Till and countless SNCC and CORE sit-in youngsters after WWII?
President Kennedy did send needed troops down south when governors there attracted mobs
as they blocked entrances to schools directed to integrate.
He did ask Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. how the two of them could best interact to peacefully foster civil rights for all Americans.
He did drag the Mississippi River for young college student victims- repeatedly, agonizingly.
He did call Myrlie Evers when Medgar was martyred.
He did welcome Dr. King into the White House.
He did welcome the historic March On Washington.
He had begun talks on legislation to protect all our rights when that awful bullet took his life.
Unlike the then Vice President Richard Nixon, Senator Kennedy promised during the 1960
Nixon-Kennedy debates, to work on civil rights in our country.
When elected, he did just that.
President Kennedy was attempting to re-encode civil rights, and the rhetoric regarding the equality of all men into the U. S. constitution when he was prematurely cut down in his prime.
The United States hi-jacked -over and over again- the very wood citizens ever attempted to use to build an enfranchisement table out of the right to vote.
Were the civil rights leaders who weren't on the Edmund Pettus bridge when
Congressman John Lewis marched across it and into a screaming crowd backed up by
gun-toting, billy-clubbed badges late to the table?
None of our leaders gave us each and every right we deserved to exercise at the moment we asked
for them.  However-
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy helped build the table he came to early.
He invited all the rest of us to try to feel a tiny bit safer if we wanted to have a seat there beside him.
All hail, to Camelot, and to one of our most forthright civil rights leaders, President John F. Kennedy

Why Are We Shopping On Thanksgiving?

What is wrong with these nutty American market practices?
They are giving us all super sales at the exact time we should be on our way to grandma's house?
Say we get to grandma's. We have to be careful to leave  for a few hours to be time for sales?
How about the store gives me an honest price, any day.
Thanksgiving is the one day of the year kids can be sure they are free to play all day with family.
Children are guaranteed a four day week end and good home cooked meals every day for families
not grocery challenged.
America has all but killed childhood already. Now when do the children get to interact with extended
family. When they meet relatives it can give them a sense they themselves are extended, especially when they recognize everyone knows them or knows of them.  Instead of those moments settling in,
someone gets up to go buy a camera because they can get it for less than it is worth?
Why are we so obsessed with not paying a fair price?  This is a costly obsession.  Even if you are
someone who makes only 7$ an hour, when you spend two hours getting in and out of a crowded store, you have used up 14$ of your time.
If you are unemployed, talk with your family members about their jobs. When the week-end is over,
go to dollar store.
Salespeople have had their days interrupted so I can buy cheap towels?
Stores don't even pay overtime or holiday pay any longer. Are we to waste our own time and theirs?
There are exceptions.
If your family is intolerable, go home Friday. Or do go to a movie if your kids actually like Auntie
Grace's three hours of magic tricks. Movie workers are accustomed to splitting holiday shifts.
Whatever you do, please don't go to "the sale" at precisely the moment a white snake slithers out of
the woods at midnight, so that you can be banned from "the sale" the second someone hears the clock
strikes "eye of newt".
Hocus pocus - pay a fair price. Later. On your holiday, eat something.

What We Lost When We Lost President Kennedy

We lost traffic patterns.
We lost a cool head, in the leadership on which way to go, and how to get there.
We ourselves were in the thick of it all. So we lost our President in the commotion.
...We lost the 'assured clear distance ahead'.

Republicans With A Black President

Republicans will use anything they can to attack a Democratic President.
Some of them are racists;  but more to the point, they know they can represent all the racists willing to vote. What else do they have?
How many votes will Republicans get in any race if racists stay home?
Republicans don't have numbers any longer. All they have are procedures.
They have to use what they can to make use of outlandish procedures in order to represent
underrepresented minority points of view.
That means they have to have all the racists they can muster ( and some people willing to sometimes vote with racists) if they are going to continue to represent anyone at all.
A great many Republicans know that Barack Obama is the legitimate leader of the free world.
But how many of them can admit that?
They have to placate the millions who believe we are still a country of 150 million.
I'm sure many Americans want to believe we are still a relatively small populace. However...
We are twice that now. We really are not in Kansas anymore; and even if we were, we don't live on
the prairie any longer.
Why did Atlas shrug? (by Ayn Rand)
He wasn't up to the task of knowing, or of figuring it out past the point where one group simply
exploits all the others. That was then.
This is now.

Thank You Martin Bashir

The diaries kept by proud slave owners and torturers are the truest slave narratives to be found.  Slaves didn't often repeat the real horrors they suffered. In my family, the stories were only barely
whispered if someone who had suffered mentioned a circumstance. No one was allowed to bring
up or question any indignities forced on a family member during or immediately after slavery.
I appreciated Mr. Bashir's honesty and frankness because he wears the mantle of an observer who
has no investment in either exaggerating, or providing cover, for the nightmare American slavery was in the U.S.
Many in any in 19th century America, however, fought a war for the rights to continue these practices. Many in 21st century America seem eager to do the same again. They've even asked the
government for drones.
People still praise the antebellum south represented in the diary Mr. Bashir presented in his
broadcast of November 15, 2013. The diary was that of an owner-animal.
There are those in this country who want very much to return us all to barbarisms the states, not our
country, wish us to endure. Justice John Roberts is one of those people.
Many Americans would that any state in this country could legally treat citizens of the United States
of  America any way a state should choose to treat them.
And we have yet to name the barbaric ones, unless it's to call them "owners"
Slavers kidnapped people from their homes and families and stuffed them into crushing ships' holds.
Slaves were forced to work, while having all wages stolen from them, and all family continuously
subject to "owners".
The time has passed long ago for us to call these inhuman vicious some other thing than "owner"
or "master".
No group on this planet could have failed to amass fortunes using the tactics these people used.
And those tactics required only a tiny modicum of intelligent thought.