Jan 20 2009
A Time of Reflection
Sometimes you just get stuck in how things are and don’t give too much thought to them. As I’ve watched the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States today, it suddenly hit me how far this country has come in my lifetime.
I grew up during the segregation era, but was not much affected by it as there were no African Americans living in my area. When I moved to Texas in my teens, I was astonished and appalled that there was a separate school for them. In the town where I went to school, there were several Elementary Schools, a Junior High and a High School for the white students, but only one school for the African Americans of all ages.
One of my fellow students magnanimously explained to me that “they” couldn’t go to our school because the majority of them worked the cotton fields pulling bowls until the season was over and they would fall behind our schedule, so they were better off in their own school. How far we have come since those days.
As I watched the two members of the Freedom Fighters speak about the Civil Rights Movement I realized that I have never lived in an area where there were such terrible social injustices as in Mississippi and Alabama, but of course heard of them on the news.
It came as a wake up call to relive the great “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King jr. I knew when I heard it the first time, that someday Americans of all races would begin to come together and put aside their racism, but I realized that the world I grew up in forever changed today.
Something that I had never thought of was brought up in the pre-inaugural reports. The White House and much of Washington, D.C. were built by slaves.
Put that together with the fact that most of the people responsible for allowing our country to slip into the mess it’s in right now are descendants of slave owners. Wouldn’t it be incongruous (no matter how wonderful) if an African American could clean up the mess left by them? That should bring some unity to our country . . . or it may create a bigger divide. Such is human nature.
