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I love this. Is it a common saying that I'm hearing for the first time, or is it original with this writer, Caroline Randall Williams?
A Loving Chastisement for America
What if I invited you to look at time differently? What if I said there is the same amount of time between the bellies of Middle Passage boats and German death camps as there is between German death camps and whatever Cold War-Jim Crow hybrid is percolating here in this country today? Seventy-nine years from when the last slave boat docked in Alabama to when Hitler declared war on Poland. Seventy nine years from when the United States joined World War II to this moment we’re in right now. Objects in history’s mirror are closer than they appear. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/o...ca-racism.html
A lot passes by in the length of a lifetime. I remember when the last Civil War vets were passing away. People my age now when I was born were born in America's centennial year, Colorado became a state, here was Custer's last stand, and in the hotly contested presidential election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes gained the presidency after a compromise ended reconstruction in the south (Compromise of 1877).
Met my neighbor’s dad in the early 1950s who was a cowboy on a cattle ranch near Fort Worth, Texas in the 1880s.
My maternal grandfather was born in 1872.
Yeah, those days are a little closer than we think.
Indeed, my grandfathers was born when Alexander III was Czar. I know one person whose grandfather was a slave, another whose grandfather fought for the CSA.
I remember growing up in the segregated south. When our home was built, it bordered a segregated club - no Jews, no Catholics and no African Americans. I remember they put up a six foot chain link fence on the promptly line and put barbed wire on top. My brothers learned to climb it, I never did. But not to worry...my brother and I have a running joke that whomever is the last to be alive gets to write the family history.
I had a job working with elderly folks back in the 1970s and met the sheriff of Tombstone AZ who delighted in pulling up his shirt to show his bullet hole scars. Also a Manhattan Project worker with a medal for something and a letter from FDR for work on the atomic bomb. Being shot a few times or working with plutonium didn't seem to slow them down.
One person I keep in mind is Ruby Bridges. Conservatives like to talk about how far in the past all the bad old days of racial discrimination were. Well, Ruby Bridges, who was the first child to desegregate the schools in her town, and who had to be escorted into school by U.S. marshals because of opposition from the local government, just turned 66. Younger than me. Only one teacher in the whole school would teach her.
So yes, we are still affected by what happened in our lifetimes.
I always get a jolt when I look at how few years have passed since different events happened in American history.
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One other story, which is really wild, is that Harrison Ruffin Tyler, the grandson of John Tyler--yes, our tenth president--is still alive. Tyler was born in 1790, had children by his second wife at an advanced age in 1853, and his son had a similar experience, fathering Harrison when he was 75.
The quoted NYTimes article in the OP's post is just political opinion crap, what an extremely hate filled and ugly racist piece, ironically written in the guise of fighting racism.
Glad that no wasting time reading it. It doesn't belong here.
However the brevity of history is a good topic.
I have a good example as well - the last RECORDED civil war widow died in 2008. Yes many veterans married young ladies in there golden years, maybe of these ladies to get the old soldiers pensions (which was stopped however in the late 30s). Maudie Hopkins died in 2008, 93 years old, widow to Williams Cantrell who fought for Virginia and was taken prisoner by the Union in 1863.
The Daughters of the Confederacy estimate there may be at least two other widows of civil war veterans STILL LIVING that choose to remain anonymous.
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