Rambling. Eminently skippable.
Yesterday was not such a great time. Felt poorly all day, then went to Convocation, which... well.
It's like poking an infected wound to get the pus out, which is what you should do. But it's still painful.
Our speaker was the prosecuting attourney in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case, reopened in 1997.
My mother was ten years old when the church was bombed, living in a tiny town in Georgia. My father remembers being bussed across town, when he was in high school in Mobile.
It's impossible to grow up where I did without ghosts. Scenting burning crosses of decades past and looking at the faces of my friends, black and white, and wondering how anyone -- *any* human being -- could possibly hate for so petty a reason.
People who talk to me tend to ask "Oh, where were you born?"
Right here. I am a Southerner born and bred; between my parents' families, I'm probably related to every officer in the Dixie Confederate Army. A distant cousin of mine is Robert E. Lee. I am a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for how I'm Episcopalian, but we're not Catholic so we're generally lumped Protestant. Anyway.)
I have no Southern accent. Based solely on my speech patterns, I've been told, somebody might place me as being from the New England area. I sound like a Yankee.
And I love the South. I love my state. I love my city. I speak of the Civil War as being either "the late unpleasantness" or "the War of Northern Aggression," (I always feel vaguely guilty about even thinking of it in my head as being the War of Northern Aggression, because it *sounds* like I think the Confederates were right. Like, more specifically, I think slaveowners were right. Which, you know, thinking of people as property! SCARYBADWRONG.) and I have made Faces about how, technically, the Southern states had the right to secede under the Declaration of Independence. My great-grandmother used to tell me stories her mother told her of Reconstruction, and that her grandmother told her of the War.
Had I been alive in the mid-1800s, I would have been aiding the Underground Railroad. I would never, *ever* have countenanced slavery. It's... complicated, I guess. Life tends to be.
It is because of that love that I am shamed to the core when I think of Governor George "Bull" Wallace, of acts of terrorism such as the assault of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth when he attempted to enroll his two children in Phillips High School in Birmingham, of the Klu Klux Klan claiming Christianity and moral superiority. (Which, by the by, is bull. The KKK are *scum of the earth* and they poison the very name of Christ. Possibly I am a tad biased, by virtue of being a decent right-thinking human who has been tarred with the same brush, being a white in the Deep South, and thus utterly loathing them for how people perceive my area.)
And *then* I went to talk to a friend of mine about DID, BPD, abuse and rape and the consequences thereof. Some good news, some bad, all of it interesting. Moreso when happening to *other people*.
I have not had a great day.
And then, when I am sad and angry and embarrased for my people, I see this thread, and then I have to get up out of my chair and do a happy dance around my room.
P.S. Slade meta posted here, the inaugural post of my new journal. Yes, I am an obsessive dork.
It's like poking an infected wound to get the pus out, which is what you should do. But it's still painful.
Our speaker was the prosecuting attourney in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case, reopened in 1997.
My mother was ten years old when the church was bombed, living in a tiny town in Georgia. My father remembers being bussed across town, when he was in high school in Mobile.
It's impossible to grow up where I did without ghosts. Scenting burning crosses of decades past and looking at the faces of my friends, black and white, and wondering how anyone -- *any* human being -- could possibly hate for so petty a reason.
People who talk to me tend to ask "Oh, where were you born?"
Right here. I am a Southerner born and bred; between my parents' families, I'm probably related to every officer in the Dixie Confederate Army. A distant cousin of mine is Robert E. Lee. I am a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for how I'm Episcopalian, but we're not Catholic so we're generally lumped Protestant. Anyway.)
I have no Southern accent. Based solely on my speech patterns, I've been told, somebody might place me as being from the New England area. I sound like a Yankee.
And I love the South. I love my state. I love my city. I speak of the Civil War as being either "the late unpleasantness" or "the War of Northern Aggression," (I always feel vaguely guilty about even thinking of it in my head as being the War of Northern Aggression, because it *sounds* like I think the Confederates were right. Like, more specifically, I think slaveowners were right. Which, you know, thinking of people as property! SCARYBADWRONG.) and I have made Faces about how, technically, the Southern states had the right to secede under the Declaration of Independence. My great-grandmother used to tell me stories her mother told her of Reconstruction, and that her grandmother told her of the War.
Had I been alive in the mid-1800s, I would have been aiding the Underground Railroad. I would never, *ever* have countenanced slavery. It's... complicated, I guess. Life tends to be.
It is because of that love that I am shamed to the core when I think of Governor George "Bull" Wallace, of acts of terrorism such as the assault of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth when he attempted to enroll his two children in Phillips High School in Birmingham, of the Klu Klux Klan claiming Christianity and moral superiority. (Which, by the by, is bull. The KKK are *scum of the earth* and they poison the very name of Christ. Possibly I am a tad biased, by virtue of being a decent right-thinking human who has been tarred with the same brush, being a white in the Deep South, and thus utterly loathing them for how people perceive my area.)
And *then* I went to talk to a friend of mine about DID, BPD, abuse and rape and the consequences thereof. Some good news, some bad, all of it interesting. Moreso when happening to *other people*.
I have not had a great day.
And then, when I am sad and angry and embarrased for my people, I see this thread, and then I have to get up out of my chair and do a happy dance around my room.
P.S. Slade meta posted here, the inaugural post of my new journal. Yes, I am an obsessive dork.