I graduated from high school in 1962. At that time, if I wanted to go out and get a full-time job, the ads in the newspapers listed jobs for men and women in separate sections. A woman might get a job which usually went to a man, but the law allowed an employer to pay her a lesser wage.
The law also allowed someone who wanted to sell a home to advertise the property as being ‘restricted,’ which meant blacks and Jews shouldn’t bother to look at the house because they wouldn’t have an opportunity to buy it, even if they paid cash.
If you drove down the newly opened New Jersey Turnpike, it ended when you crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The very first drive-in on Route 40 in Delaware had a sign which read: ‘colored in back.’ This wasn’t Alabama or Mississippi; this was in Delaware, okay?
And by the way, if you were driving to Florida and you were a black couple or God forbid a couple of mixed race, forget getting a motel room unless you got off the main roads and found some crummy, little place to sleep in a black town, or what they referred to in South Carolina as a ‘scrinchy’ town. Sleeping on a pull-out couch on some black family’s porch also worked.
A woman couldn’t terminate a pregnancy legally in any of the 50 states. Gay couples couldn’t get married anywhere in the United States and there were still lots of states which made it a criminal offense if a man and woman of different races wanted to get married and worse yet, have some kids.
And by the way, if you were gay or transgender or anything other than a straight woman or a straight man, you better keep your mouth shut on the job or you probably wouldn’t have a job and you wouldn’t get hired by anyone else.
My children were born in the 1970’s and came of age in the 1990’s. The first political thing they remember was whether Bill Clinton inhaled when he smoked a doobie in law school. They have actually no idea how things have changed in this country from one generation to the next.
And the reason they have no idea is because a Southern President named Lyndon Johnson rammed a civil rights bill down the throats of some of his legislative buddies from some Confederate states, and once the floodgates opened a crack, then eventually they opened just about all the way.
Yea, yea, I know all about the ruling on Roe v. Wade. I also know all about that bizarre IVF decision in Alabama where the Chief Justice of the State Court quoted biblical sources in his opinion, as if when you live in Alabama, the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply.
There were two things that the men who met in Philadelphia and wrote the Constitution in 1787 couldn’t predict and therefore couldn’t write a legal document defining exactly how things in the United States of America would work for all time
They couldn’t predict the Industrial Revolution which totally transformed every economic and social relationship over the course of the next hundred years. And they also couldn’t predict that a lot of people living in the United States of America were just too dumb to figure things out.
Why did we have a Civil War? The standard answer, whether Nikki Haley knows it or not, is we fought that conflict over slavery. The truth is that we fought a four-year war which resulted in more than 600,000 military casualties because there were too many people living in too many states who were too dumb to realize that blacks were human beings and deserved to be treated just like whites.
Now the good news is that a lot of those dumb bunnies are still around, but they only get to take themselves seriously when the GOP runs a Presidential candidate who wants those dummies to use their votes and get the guy into the White House for four or eight years. I’m thinking of guys like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
I predict that after Joe kicks Trump’s ass for the second time later this year, the GOP will go back to ignoring the dumbbells for a few election cycles until another God-fearing, racist POS raises his or her head.
Think it won’t happen again? My cat Leonard is smarter than anyone who has voted or will vote for Trump. Too bad Leonard can’t vote.
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