Archive for the ‘History’ Category
This is What an Obama Victory Looks Like
Attention world!
Used to be Missouri was a bell weather state. Whatever went here, went everywhere. Well, not anymore, as it turns out. Even early in the morning, we still have no word on where Missouri stands on the map. Red? Blue? Does it matter?
Obama is our next president!
In order to secure this historic election, I stood in line for nearly two hours to cast my ballot. Here in St. Louis county, long lines were everywhere. In one black neighborhood in north St. Louis, people waiting in line for up to six hours to vote. In Florissant, also in north St. Louis county, people waited for three to five hours. That’s devotion. Makes my two hours seem small.
Anyway, this is what democracy looks like:
A lone line at the polls in St. Louis county during election 2008
R.I.P. George Carlin
I’ve just learned the sad news that George Carlin passed away. He was 71.
Carlin had a chat with my husband backstage at a concert once. George was performing at our college’s performing arts theater. George was waiting around for his showtime and my husband was doing some security, a boring job that amounted to keeping people from coming in a certain door. My husband had his homework in hand, a book of short stories.
George, who couldn’t have been nicer, signed a record for our mutual friend, talked to my husband about literature, and reccommended a book that my husband loved, the short stories of Breece D’J Pancake. This was, apparently, one of George Carlin’s favorite authors.
Everyone else might remember George Carlin from the seven words you can’t say on TV or from his movie roles in Dogma, Jersey Girl or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Still others will remember Carlin as a counterculture icon with an ascerbic tongue, a witty pen, and a knack for knowing what’s funny.
Words can’t describe how much the pioneering comic will be missed among fans of movie, comedy, or the counterculture.
This Day in History: Robert F. Kennedy Delivers Heart-Wrenching Speech on Martin Luther King
In truly one of the saddest and most touching speeches ever given by a politician, Robert F. Kennedy, former presidential candidate and brother of John F. Kennedy, delivered a speech at a rally in Indianapolis on this day in history, April 4th, 1968, forty years ago today. His speech is considered one of the great speeches ever delivered by a politician.
RFK was in Indianapolis to give a stump speech as part of his presidential campaign. As a politician, Kennedy had changed over the years. He was no longer the same man he’d been only a few short years before. Once the hawkish Attorney General during his brother’s presidency, Kennedy had changed in a short period of time after his brother’s tragic assassination. He’d changed his position on nearly everything: the war in Vietnam, poverty, and the awful racial tension that was about to explode in the country. In fact Kennedy’s police escorts refused to accompany him to his speech in Indianapolis fearing racial violence.
The crowd in Indianapolis had not yet heard that Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated and killed in Memphis, and Kennedy took it upon himself to tell the crowd. In a short speech, he not only told the mostly black crowd the awful news, but calmed them. He reminded everyone that his own brother had been similarly assassinated and he knew the pain of their loss. He also quoted Aeschylus with this powerful quote about despair:
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
–Aeschylus
That night, in hundreds of cities across America, riots broke out over the news of King’s death. In Indianapolis, however, the streets were quiet as the country, and also the world, mourned King’s death.
RFK would later die the same year, also assassinated.
You can see Robert F. Kennedy’s powerful speech in Indianapolis below:
