Money
That time again...Yes, there are people who legitimately need and deserve handouts. And that's very unfortunate. Because, in order to be a good activist, you really need to be a taxpayer. Pay promptly and honestly. Here, by way of pain relief, is a nice free verse poem.
Music
Many thanks to curiousasacathy.com for sharing this link. It's a mix of song tunes and dance tunes, which may be good news to those who don't get up and dance often enough while surfing the'Net.
Time Travel
How well do you remember the 1960s? This photo montage of 1960s street scenes does a lot to bring back memories...as things really were.
The low gas prices...and the low wages that made people whine and wail about being stuck in those dreary little towns. (Well, congratulations, now they are stuck in big cities, paying ten times as much for gas. Raise wages, raise prices.)
The bustling downtown streets...cigarette ads everywhere...cigarette smoke, too. Sensitivity to the toxic fungi and chemicals in cigarette smoke was disabling, back then, and got very little respect, which is why nonsmokers paid back the contempt so liberally. (Yes, of course the Weepy Weed was "allergic to" cigarette smoke back then, need you ask? Except that, after going gluten-free, I wasn't any more.) I don't know that business owners gave a flip about employees' health even in the 1980s. I think what really, definitively, made smoking anything universally recognized as the antisocial act it is, was the effect ashes have on computers.
The hats, skirts, and gloves on the older people...and the battle that raged over when and whether young people put them on, or didn't, and which ones, and where we wore them, which explains why we started wearing jeans everywhere. (Wearing hats and gloves on a city street was an obvious hygienic necessity up into the twentieth century, but by the 1960s, even by the 1940s, it had started to seem less important because almost all downtown buildings had running water.)
The vintage cars...and the choking clouds that trailed behind them, before filters. Some of those cars got less than ten miles to the gallon.
The cute little stores and diners...and the question whether, in some towns, they were still unofficially segregated. (So, if you looked White or at least not positively Black, you wanted to stick to the White side of towns that had one. It was not always easy to identify those sides, or those towns, on a road trip.)
"Say not thou, 'What is the reason that the former days were better than these?' for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this."
Still, if you were there then, you probably remember a good story now about where you were going, on streets that looked like these, and with whom.
Women's History
Lots of good women's stories have been discovered and told--many of them by Vicki Noble--but not all of them have. Meet Laskarina Bouboulina, one nineteenth-century widow who did more than just dye all her clothes black and sit around looking mournful. Nancy Ward might have liked her.
No comments:
Post a Comment