Trail Mix

By Jace, a Trail Mix Contributor

A set of pieces that are very near and dear to me. Both poetic and heroic and finely crafted by a master. Enjoy the music and enjoy the day!

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By GrannyMumantoog, a Trail Mix Contributor

I’ve been a fan/follower of Betty Reid Soskin and her blog for quite a while. She’s an amazing writer and, at 95, she is the oldest full-time park ranger in the U.S. She’s led quite a life! She was in the music biz, was/is a political activist, civil rights champion and was part of the planning & development of Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park, where she now serves as a ranger/historical interpreter.

She is also into genealogy and her family history is amazing. She’s been blogging “CBreaux Speaks” since 2003. It’s very no-frills site but it makes for some terrific reading. On the left side there are links to some of her other pages and family sites. There are a couple of dead links, but the ones that work are worth a look. Also on the left side is the blog archives, it’s a long list, she writes a lot.

If you like oral histories and genealogy this is a fascinating read:
“Rosie the Riveter World War II American Homefront Oral History
Project: An Oral History with Betty Reid Soskin conducted by Nadine
Wilmot, 2002, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 2007.” It’s a pdf transcript of a series of audio recordings that were made by UC Berkeley in 2002

She often writes about political subjects and, needless to say, was not a fan of Trump. I’ve been waiting to see what she thought about the way the election turned out and she finally wrote her feelings about it yesterday (11/16/2016). She didn’t disappoint and I wanted to share what she had to say. Scroll down to the second posting on the blog page to read it there if you have time, but I’ve copied it here too for simplicity (bold text emphases are mine):

How on earth does one respond to the state of the Union?

As are we all, I’ve been in a state of shock for a week, and grateful for whatever was built into the human anatomy that allows us to retreat into ourselves for whatever time it takes to recover.  That, I suppose, is what we call “shock.”  How else can this state of numbness be described?

I’m guessing that I’d secretly kept a corner of my mind in enough doubt to retain the capacity to see the possibility that my country might well slip into a period of regression.  The hints have always been lurking in there somewhere.  We all must have known this, but chose to ignore it.

The fact that the electorate had been persistently dumbed down over past decades by a failing system of public education colored by the introduction of reality television being pumped into every home at the sacrifice of the nation’s values and eating away at our cultural base until little is left with which to fight off cynicism and hate of “other-ness” and the empathy needed to support community.

Over coming months we may learn the painful lesson that Democracy cannot be sustained without an educated electorate.

My fear that the cause of the rise of hate — gradually going dormant in our society but now being given one last chance at dominance — may have been the growing apathy and disconnections within the democratic process. The 39% turnout in the last general election did not bode well for our ability to sustain our system of  governance, and the 50% participation in 2016 simply may not have been  enough to turn us back to the painfully slow progress being made over recent years

I suppose I’m less concerned with how the incoming administration will effect our fate as a nation as I am of the ascendance of hatred and bigotry into an electorate that has been inching its way toward forming that “… more perfect Union” over recent decades, and now will be slowed in that progress as we try to figure out where the Ship of State hit this reef!

I am fairly convinced that we may be seeing the final frantic defense in the attempt to reinvigorate white supremacy in a fast-changing world.  These may be the last gasps as the nation begins to realize and accept that our strengths are in our diversity, and that the inexorable creep toward that realization and acceptance might well be our final chance at eventual salvation.

Universal mobility and an irresistible system of communication has made of us one world; a world that might well begin to achieve a relatively peaceful existence, but only if we can come to terms with the urgent needs to save Planet Earth.

Just how we will manage to do that when the Evangelicals are now holding the reins of power — good folks who sincerely erroneously believe that the “… scientific warnings of global warming, rising sea levels, climate change, are a hoax created by China”,  — and that this global concern is irrelevant since they are hoping to hasten the Rapture when Jesus will return to the world to carry them up to Heaven!  How do we deal with the deniers when everything in which they believe has convinced them that scientific evidence is simply humankind’s wasted effort in the face of what they know is profoundly real and biblically verified by myth?

How could I have ever guessed that there would come a day when I would view Christianity as a detriment to any hope of sustaining life as we know it?

How can this be?

And how can one dare to utter such blasphemy yet feel the ring of truth in the utterance.

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I recommend reading Ms Soskin’s blog anytime you’re bored. You can pretty much just click on any year in the archive on the left and you’ll find something interesting to read about.

More Posts by GrannyMumantoog

Michael Moore recently said he believes that Trump will not last through his first term in office.

American University professor Allan Lichtman, an individual with whom I have great respect (and predicted a Trump win), has also stated that Congress will remove Trump before his first term is over.  Lichtman, author of the “13 keys” system of Presidential predictions, has correctly predicted every winning President since 1984. 

Here’s a link to an interview with Lichtman: http://www.aol.com/article/2016/11/11/a-professor-who-called-trumps-presidency-now-says-it-wont-last/21604240/

Since Congress will be unable to control the Donald, and since the constitution does not indicate that an impeachable offense must take place while a President is in office, and given the fact that Trump is facing numerous court actions in regards to his business(es) – do you think Trump will last through his first term, or will the Democrats be running against President Pence in 2020?

Having chosen Wall Street lap dog Chuck Schumer as their Senate Leader Democrats can only hope that Donald Trump was running a con job on Main Street, only pretending to care about working people and small business. Otherwise, if he actually delivers on that promise the Democratic Party is so totally screwed.

The danger for Democrats is that, thanks to his personal wealth and unorthodox path to the presidency, Trump owes nothing to nobody, as Shirley Chisholm said of herself, “Unbought & Unbossed.”

The same cannot be said about Democrats, who have sold their party’s soul to wealthy interests, no better exemplified than the rise of Schumer, the senator who has made an industry of funneling Wall Street cash to his party in exchange for all kinds of favors that leave Main Street to fend for itself.

And what a sad ending for Obama’s presidency, traveling abroad explaining, defending, justifying and even apologizing for his failure of continuity.

Jim Webb, George Washington University speech (Nov. 15, 2016):

Hopefully the results of this election will provide us an opportunity to reject a new form of elitism that has pervaded our societal mechanisms. This is not quite like anything that has faced us before in our history. It has many antecedents but the greatest barrier, even to discussing it, has come from how these elites were formed, largely beginning in the Vietnam era, and how their very structure has minimized the ability of the average American even to articulate clearly and to discuss vigorously, the reality that we all can see.

Part of it was the Vietnam war itself, the only war with mass casualties – 58,000 American dead and another 300,000 wounded – where our society’s elites felt morally comfortable in avoiding the draft and excusing themselves from serving. As I wrote of a Harvard educated character in my novel Fields of Fire, “Mark went to Canada. Goodrich went to Vietnam. Everybody else went to grad school.” This created, among our most well-educated and economically advantaged, a premise of entitlement that poured over into issues of economic fairness, and obligations to less-advantaged fellow citizens. Writer and lawyer Ben Stein wrote many years ago of his years at Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton, “that we were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural rulers of the universe. … The law did not apply to us.”

Part of it was the impact of the Immigration Act of 1965, which has dramatically changed the racial and ethnic makeup of the country while keeping in place a set of diversity policies in education and employment that were designed – under the Thirteenth Amendment – to “remove the badges of slavery” for African Americans. This policy designed for African Americans, which I have supported, was gradually expanded to include anyone who did not happen to be white, despite vast cultural and economic differences among whites themselves. More than 60 percent of immigrants from China and India have college degrees, while less than 20 percent of whites from areas such as Appalachia do. But to be white is, in the law and in so much of our misinformed debate, to be specially advantaged – privileged, as the slogan goes, while being a so-called minority is to be somehow disadvantaged.

Frankly, if you were a white family living in Clay County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in America, whose poverty rate is above 40 percent and whose population is 94 percent white, wouldn’t this concept kind of tick you off? Wouldn’t you see it as reverse discrimination? And wouldn’t you hope that someone in a position of political influence might also see this, and agree with you?

And part of it, finally, is that diversity programs, coupled with the international focus of our major educational institutions, have created a superstructure, partially global, that on the surface seems to be inclusive but in reality is the reverse of inclusive. Every racial and ethnic group has wildly successful people at the very top, and desperately poor people at the bottom. Using vague labels about race and ethnicity might satisfy the quotas of government programs, but they have very little to do with reality, whether it’s blacks in West Baltimore who have been ignored and left behind, or whites in the hollows of West Virginia. Behind the veneer of diversity masks an interlocking elite that has melded business, media and politics in a way we could never before imagine. Many of these people also hold a false belief that they understand a society with which they have very little contact. And nothing has so clearly shown how wrong they are, than the recent election of Donald Trump.

— Former U.S. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA)

Webb on Fox News (11/15/2016)