The Past as Prologue
Hobbs's Friday Flashpoints!
Nobody asked me but...
36 years later, I still remember precisely where I was when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded; I was in eighth grade and sitting in the FAMU High School library with my friends Chris Henry (RIP), Jason Ward, Gregory Anderson, Eddie White, and Robert Palmore as we were preparing for the upcoming middle school quiz bowl tournament. Mr. Eddie Parks, an assistant librarian, rushed hurriedly by us and turned on the lone cable tv that was affixed on the wall and told us that the Shuttle had exploded shortly after take-off. Within minutes, the library was crammed with students, teachers, and administrators all seeking to understand what had just transpired.
The rest of that day was spent watching the almost 'round the clock news coverage of a tragic event that seemed cruel beyond description. Through the years, I have met friends who grew up down on Florida's Space Coast who watched it happen in real time as they stood on their school grounds outside to cheer on the first "Teacher in Space," civilian Christa MacAullife; may God continue to grant eternal rest to her soul as well as the souls of Astronauts Ellison S. Onizuka, Greg Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and the legendary Dr. Ron McNair, the first HBCU graduate (North Carolina A&T) to perish in a NASA accident.
***Earlier this month, the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee voted to ban the book Maus, a graphic account of the Holocaust that won author Art Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
What irks me to no end is that I am willing to wager that 99.999% of the parents in that District have NEVER even read Maus. As I posted on my Facebook page yesterday, I hold my native Deep South in contempt because we “are led by cretins that want to ban books and articles about the Black experience in pre-Civil War and Jim Crow America (1619 Project) or the Holocaust (Maus), books and articles that most of them have never even heard of—let alone read! The South's allegiance to ignorance leaves no wonder as to why vast segments of Dixie remain dead azz last in education, health care, and wages—markers that will only get worse so long as the modern day Know Nothings and their blissfully ignorant followers remain at the helm!
As a self-styled neo-transcendentalist who has always admired the civil disobedience best espoused by leading original Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, the best resistance to these blatant attempts to erase history is to read MORE books and preach the truth among your family, friends, and on social media!
***One of the reasons so many creepy Southern cretins wish to ban books about slavery, Jim Crow, and even the Holocaust is because they are angry that monuments to their precious (and racist) Confederate leaders have been moved from public parks—or courthouse and statehouse steps—in recent years.
Be clear: as a historian by formal education, and as a lover of Civil War history and the Reconstruction Era since childhood, I have a deep knowledge of the key Union and Confederate players that allows me to teach my students at Rise Anyabwele Academy, as well as my readers here at the Hobbservation Point or via social media, objective facts about that era. My knowledge was culled primarily through READING, going to historical museums across America, and watching historical documentaries!
Accordingly, I didn't (and don't) need to see a statue honoring Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest at the local courthouse or state Capitol Complex to know who they were, and what deeds and misdeeds they fomented! Their statues, erected as a symbol of Southern allegiance to segregation and usurpation of Black civil rights, were and remain an insult to Black citizens who have had to transact business in these publicly financed facilities where those who wished our people to remain enslaved—or dead—stood or stand tall; such statues all should be torn down and removed to museums where they can serve as a teaching tool about man's inhumanity to man.
But I would never wish to see books about those Confederates banned because once their deplorable depravity is no longer told in pedantic detail, the likelihood that equally or more depraved acts could occur in the future is enhanced...
***Speaking of Confederates: Many of you may recall that the majority of Union and Confederate General officers during the Civil War attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, but it is important to know that a good number of Confederate officers attended the Virginia Military Institute, a school whose most popular professor of both philosophy and artillery during the run-up to the war was none other than West Point grad (and Robert E. Lee's ace) Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.
Last year, VMI tapped retired Army Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins to become the first Black Superintendent of the school; it is important to note that VMI did not admit its first Black students until 1968—14 years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision had mandated desegregation of public schools and facilities, and four months after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated! VMI did not admit women until 1997—25 years ago when I was a second year law student! Today, only six percent of its 1,650 cadets are Black, and only 14 percent of the student body are women.
Thus, after the Commnwealth of Virginia undertook a study that revealed racism and sexism among the school's ranks, the General Assembly allocated $6.1 million dollars to foster greater "diversity, equity, and inclusion" on campus.
Well, right on cue, quite a few VMI alumni didn't like that too much, and their social media boards have become a rhetorical battle ground as Superinendent Wins, a decorated general officer, has been called out by the creepy cretins for "being woke" and causing harm to their beloved bastion of white military virility (which, truly, is more like white male fragility based upon the losses that the Confederacy took AND the losses that their descendants are taking in courts across the country in this far more diverse version of America in which we live).
As the Washington Post reports this morning, after Supt. Wins took to Facebook to call out one prominent VMI alum for being clueless about the purpose of the funding allotment: "In the hundreds of comments that followed Wins’s Facebook post, one person called diversity, equity and inclusion 'racist,' and another bemoaned 'the ascendancy of cultural Marxism' and 'virtue signalers beating down every last vestige of the Confederacy.'
Sigh…
Honestly, the older I become, the less patience I have for idiotic people. I know, I know, it's not nice to call folks idiots, but it pains me to see the “Know Nothings” poppin' off all bold and wrong on social and traditional media comment threads about any number of topics. Most of this ilk couldn't define the sociological meaning of racism, or the socio-political meaning of Marxism if their very lives depended upon it. And yet, here they are, day after day, loud and idiotic—to my sheer disgust.
I'm not sure why Brother Supt. Wins felt the need to take it to the social media streets, and I remind this brilliant Brother of a favorite Mark Twain quip: “never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience!" Nevertheless, my sincere prayers are with him as he tries to reform a school whose graduates were at the very heart of defending slavery and propagating Jim Crow.
***Speaking of idiots: By now I am sure that you know that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) is Covid positive and, two days after the pronouncement, was seen dining at an outdoors restaurant—with no mask—laughing it up with folks in close proximity.
Yes, I consider anyone who is Covid positive but still refusing to mask up in public to be an idiot—and selfish! Such idiodicy is but one more reason that this disease will continue in perpetuity for many more months, if not years, to come!
Thank you for subscribing to the Hobbservation Point—have a great weekend!
Preach! ❤️
I laugh at how naive and hopeful I was back in ‘90s when the World Wide Web came onto the scene. Now it’s a hellscape run by idiots.
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