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New Day Cafe - Saturday: Remembering That Day. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-12
Good morning, dearest Newdists. I hope you all are Covid free (yeah, that sucker’s on the rise again...) and healthy.
Today, I have a serious diary, and I’m going to write it in general terms.
Today is the 6th year in remembrance of what happened in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12, 2017. One person died at that event, and numerous others experienced life-altering injuries. It changed the city. It changed TJ’s University. It changed the community at large. The Robert E. Lee statue finally came down. A judge has allowed a Charlottesville museum’s initiative to melt down the statue. Not only that, now Richmond’s Monument Avenue looks different than it did before.
Personally, I will never forget that day — the screams, the rage, the expressed hatred, followed by a heavy sadness at the injuries people suffered, the people that died, and the loss of a young life and a mother’s broken heart.
We changed that day as a city. I think we also changed that day as a country, when we saw clearly that a monstrous mindset that is apparent to many Americans, and generally experienced by Black Americans, came out of it’s bag and made itself know to all Americans. And we saw, also, that they felt comfortable coming out because they had a friend in the White House. The rally members came to C’ville to express their allegiance to an old dead flag, an old lost war, and old dead generals, and to the old grotesque culture that was more valuable to them, than the Republic they now lived in.
Newdists, I grew up in the west. When I first came to C’ville, a friend asked me to accompany her to the Washington Debating Society meeting happening on Grounds. It was a long time ago. I don’t really remember what was being debated. What I do remember is that as we left, I noticed a group of young men standing in a corner, each wrapped in a Confederate flag, beer bottle in hand, and some were leaning on each other and weeping.
Yes, they were drunk and weeping, at the loss of the Old South at the hands of the Union Army. That was intensely shocking to me, as a child of immigrants raised in the mountain west. That was eye an opening lesson on how invested some people were (and still are…) in rescuing a specific and particular way of viewing their History, which they defend because it was their family’s history. Of course, their History was also an erasure of other residents’ family History. As is evidenced by where the Robert E. Lee statute was established.
That said, the next decades also fed into a vociferous cultural war and famous people inveighing against educational approaches to history. For such people, h istory and H istory was not only a battleground, but it was, as a subject — on trial. And now I invite you to look at the Republican response to the 1619 Project, as well as the Republican response to what books and what History can be taught in American schools. This has been a decades long war on the cultural and popular construction of what is acceptable as History. And we are still not done. Every time the progressives and the center-left have tried to broaden the History curriculum and scope in primary education, the rightwing has reacted with anger and removal of books. They want(ed) American culture and the Founders to be viewed in a limited light. This was true in 1987; this is true today as well. The difference being that today the very school libraries where all kinds of books could be read, are now being turned into Discipline Centers.
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And now — Onwards!
Your Cafe owl.
x Woops...🦉🤣
Stack, our rescue barn owl is too tired to doze 😩
Watch this barn owl nest on my livestream
🎥👉
https://t.co/SbZV1ZUifP#owls #wildlife #robertefuller pic.twitter.com/CT8iPENxzI — Robert E Fuller (@RobertEFuller) August 6, 2023
Sweet beavers!
x Maple and Filbert are known to beavery affectionate pic.twitter.com/6vA8uFve1x — Oregon Zoo (@OregonZoo) August 10, 2023
x An incredible experience with two playful Humpback Whales this week. They spent more than an hour circling us, spy-hopping, spraying and even rubbing our boat. (NOTE: Our motors were OFF the entire time and they approached us.) Curiousity goes both ways!!#ExploreNL #NatureRocks pic.twitter.com/acI6ghfiFy — Jared Clarke (@birdtherock) August 6, 2023
King Otis, having a bearish summer!
x Otis Etiquette: A true gentleman always eats salmon single paw-edly. Stay tuned for more Otis Etiquette lessons. pic.twitter.com/OAck7ijzOj — explore.org (@exploreorg) August 8, 2023
Newdists, please grab a cup of coffee, a plate of food, and join us in the thread.
New Day Cafe is an Open Thread.
What do you want to talk about today?
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/12/2186697/-New-Day-Cafe-Saturday-Remembering-That-Day
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