Tuesday, June 23, 2015

"Mine eyes have seen the glory..."









"Old times are not forgotten...."



This whole argument thing over the battle flag of the Confederacy is something else, don’cha think?  I mean, the darn war was ended in 1865 and the south lost ’n as ever’body knows, the winner gets to make the rules…
Of course, it’d probably help if all the schools in this fair country of ours ‘ud teach history the way it actually happened, warts ’n all…but, we had us a President back a few years ago, one of them progressive liberals, by the name of Woodrow Wilson ’n he decided that he didn’t like the way our history wuz taught so he, with the power of the Presidency (sound familiar) did something about it…he had it re-written…not a lot, y’understand…just a little bit…just enuff to clean up our hist’ry books by taking out some of the more heinous things that happened…ah well, for the common good, y’know….
I didn’t find out about all this while I wuz in school…like durn near ever’one else, I tho’t history wuz pretty darn boring, all about names ’n dates ’n places ‘such…I didn’t know that a whole lot of warts had been removed courtesy of progressive liberalism…
Anyway, this flap over the Confederate flag is sumthin’ of a tempest in a teapot,  most of us regular Americans being far too busy trying to keep up with the payments ’n such…
I hear people on television talking about ‘institutional racism’ ’n stuff…it ain’t true, of course, being against the law and the Department of Justice eager to prosecute anyone they can that might be guilty of it….
People talk about racism ’n bigotry ’n tolerance ’n intolerance ’til a body just wants to plug up his ears ’n run away somewhere where it’s summertime ’n the fish are jumping...
Tolerance is a funny thing, being sometimes good ’n sometimes bad ’n figgering out the difference c’n give a body pause…
Now, I’ll testify that it’s a whole lot better t’be loved than t’be just tolerated…but, sometimes, ‘specially in a marriage, being tolerated is asking a lot of your partner, ’n other times, just being tolerated is enough, ‘specially if you happen t’be in the wrong, ’n as I approach that magical age of…well, old, I realize that I spent a lot of my life just being wrong about so many darn things….
Intolerance, on the other hand, is just plain bad…well, that’s how it’s portrayed today…today, when our United States are at loggerheads with each other, or at least seem t’be...
Now, when a progressive liberal behaves intolerantly, they’re apt to rename it ’n call it zero tolerance becuz intolerance is just plain bad…so when a six year old brings a toy cap pistol to school for show ’n tell, the teacher calls the cops who come and arrest the six year old, putting him in handcuffs and transporting him in a patrol car to jail where he’s photographed sitting on a wooden bench while various ’n sundry cops in battle gear pretend to interrogate him on suspicion of terrorism...
The actual fact of the matter is that while sometimes tolerance is good ’n intolerance is bad, other times ever’thing just gets all turned around….what in my somewhat wayward youth, we often referred to as ‘bass-ackward’….
As a young person, it’s really difficult to know the difference…sometimes, it’s difficult to know the difference when you’re old but usually by the time you get old, you just don’t give a big rats behind (or patootie) if I use the language of a favored niece….you notice how I cleaned it up for those folk who don’t hold with what they consider to be prurient language…just another form of discrimination that kids have to learn how to deal with…(back in the day when I wuz a reasonably tolerant father, before I became a curmudgeon, I told my children that when they felt they were grown up enough to swear, they should come to me ’n I’d teach them all the swear words that I knew ’n what they meant ’n how best to use ‘em~none of them ever did that having learned how to swear in the time-honored manner of ever’body else)...
Discrimination is the same kind’a thing…sometimes, it’s good t’be discriminating; other times, t’ain’t!
Now, you take bias…you c’n have a bias for something or ag’in it; it all depends on which side of the creek you happen to find yourself...
Now, for some reason, I almost always find m’self on the ‘wrong’ side of the durn creek….Ain’t at all sure how that happens but I feel like I been stuck there since I was a boy running the streets of Beattyville…

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