#i had only really read about british railroads up until now and those are much stronger and well-used

[quatregats]

Hmmm I have been looking into the Boston & Maine Railroad for Reasons™ and reading about this is breaking my heart, like passenger rail service basically stopped being viable in the 1920s because of automobiles and most of the rail network is gone at this point, which makes me want to bite things, but also I’m looking at maps of what the lines used to be and yes I do get that this was the only form of transport but I would kill a man to get extensive rail service between Boston, Montreal, Halifax, and most of Vermont/New Hampshire/Western Mass the way that it was when these lines were in service. Like idk we talk a lot about how we want to make sure that rural areas are also served by public transit and that we want rail lines to more areas of the country and stuff and I’ve heard criticism about the disturbance/difficulty of creating those lines but the lines are literally there!!! There is infrastructure in place that you can build new lines over and it’ll serve the whole entire Northeast and it makes me so angry that we don’t get to have that because Cars™

[s1cparvism4gna]

I Like You A Lot

WARNINGS: cursing & angst

Pairings: Chloe Frazer x Nadine Ross, Sam Drake x OC

Tags: @desertvvitch, @courtenbae, @ammaliatrici

A/N: I will fix the read now later today

Chapter 18

Sam’s POV

I sighed as the wind pushed back my hair, air drying myself and my clothes a bit. Also it was hot as hell. So this nice breeze was doing me a great service. I wiped the shmutz off the tinted glass of a pair of aviators I happened to find in the back seat. “These are nice, heh?” I said, examining the quality and putting them on my face before turning to Sunny with a rather charming smile (if I do say so myself). She didn’t even move. She stayed with her chin resting in her hand as she leaned on the side of the car; Staring at the Indian wilderness as it passed by, wind pushing at her curls. I huffed and shook my head, noticing Chloe glancing at us from the rear view mirror. She frowned a bit and then returned her eyes to the rocky path before us.

“Look! Railroad tracks!” Nadine pointed out. Sunny’s head shot right up as she moved to the middle seat to lean forward for a better look. Right ahead in the distance was a bunch of abandoned cars on the tracks.

“We’ll stop here, then.” Chloe said, pulling on the hand brake and the car skidded in the mud for a second. All of us hopped out of the 4x4, our boots landing on the ground heavily. We all groaned. I was sure all of our bodies were aching— I, myself, was tired and sweaty. My hands were dirty and bruised (much like the rest of me) with a few cuts that had yet to be looked at. And I mean the way my knees felt after that simple jump… but it was better than being left to drown in a flooded chamber, I’ll tell you that. Luckily, my cigarettes had dried so immediately I pulled one and lit it. I needed one. With the way Sunny was acting and how this job was going, I needed a bit of nicotine in my system to help me along.

“Asav will definitely have lookouts throughout the area.” Nadine told us.

“Best be careful then, huh?” Sunny commented, adjusting her jeans.

“Right, right, right… And then we lose the tusk.” I added sarcastically. Sunny made a face. One I knew all too well. One she tended to make when she was done with whatever “pessimistic” outlook I tended to have on things.

“Jesus Christ, Sam—” Sunny groaned, rolling her eyes in annoyance.

“Ay— I’m just bein’ realistic here!” I retorted. Nadine chimed in as well, also rather fed up with me.

“You’re welcome to stay behind if you’d like.” She said. I made a sarcastic expression, mocking her.

Chloe calmly hushed us up, shaking her head, tired of the ongoing arguments and petty comebacks between us all.

“All right, all right… Less talking, more walking.” She said before hopping off the cliff. Sunny looked at me in disbelief and forced out a rather derisive laugh.

“Sounds good to me.” She said, following Chloe off the cliff. I groaned stressfully; letting smoke fill my lungs and exit my nostrils as I watched her walk away, dropping down to the next level. I picked up my pride and began to follow them as well.

“So all that time with Asav and you couldn’t get any intel on the buyers?” Nadine asked me.

“He’s uh…. he’s a cagey one, Asav is. Never talked shop in front of me really.” I answered, adjusting my newfound sunglasses in the sunlight.

“Gee, I wonder why not…” I heard Sunny comment sardonically ahead of us.

“Sunny, you’re being very puerile right now.” I said to her.

“Ooo, look at the ex con using his big boy words.” She replied with a rapid fire tongue. I rolled my eyes and took another drag. I decided I’d be the grown up here and ignore it… Sort of.

“Hey, he believed me long enough to think I was an expert in all this Hoy-sah-la crap.” I said rather pigheadedly.

“It’s Hoysa-lah. Not Hoy- sah-la.” Sunny corrected me.

“All right, Hermione.” I shrugged, trying my best not to let her get to me. But, boy, she was really working on my nerves.

“Thanks for keeping him busy for us.” Chloe said suddenly, taking me out of my thoughts and smiling at me as she looked at me with those stunning blue eyes. It was clear to see why I slept with her to begin with. There was a calm about her that tended to ease even the most chaotic of souls. I wanted to be calmed too. I wanted to be near that energy for just a moment. But in retrospect, it wasn’t worth it. Not to have Sunny this upset with me. I’d take it back if I could… I ran my fingers through my hair nervously and nodded, feigning a confidence that wasn’t really there to begin with.

“Yeah, I mean, I knew everything would work out…. I just wanted to buy you guys some time…. in case you were coming to get me.” I said, looking over the edge of the next cliff. She placed a gentle roughed up hand on my arm and squeezed it.

“Of course we were!” She grinned. Her energy brought a faint smile to my face and I forced a laugh, leaning towards her.

“Seriously, though. Thanks. I thought I was a goner.” I whispered to her.

“I wouldn’t let that happen. Sunny wouldn’t let that happen.” She said, nodding in her direction. I sighed. Even being upset with me, she once again saved my ass. “And your brother would never let me hear the end of it.” She added. I burst into laughter as I followed her across the cliff. Sunny and Nadine both looked back at me. Neither was very happy with me. They seemed to be talking amongst themselves. I could only imagine what about.

We walked along the green grass, looking out at the tracks that hovered above a misty and grassy wetland. It was rather nice if I was being honest. India had spectacular views and I was glad I got to see it all. That Sunny got to see it all. She deserved to see the world more than anybody. I finished my cigarette and tossed the filter over the edge as we came upon a waterfalled cave. Looking in, there was a mudslide inside. “Let’s find out where this goes.” Chloe said before jumping in and sliding away. I stepped aside and gestured to the cave.

“Ladies first.” I sighed. Nadine glared at me, bumping her muscular shoulder into me as she passed, knocking me off balance.

“Very mature.” I grumbled as she slid down after Chloe. Sunny just walked by and slid down without even really looking at me. I took a deep breath and slid down after her.

“I found the train tracks! Sort of….” I heard Chloe say as I approached the bottom. Sitting at the door of the hill were a bunch of broken slabs of wood. The cave probably was once part of a train route from what I gathered. As we came out onto the sunlit cliff, we could see more tracks in the distance.

“It’s weird to see everythin’ sorta go back to normal… After bein’ around Hoysala ruins all day. More modern structures are showin’ up now.” Sunny said as she looked around. I took the opportunity to attempt a conversation again.

“Well it’s either British or Portuguese. So not quite modern. Probably around 18— aaand you don’t care…” I said, biting my lip. Sunny grunted as she dropped to the ground to follow Chloe. I threw my head back in discouragement. Nadine shrugged as she looked at me and began to go behind them. Then she stopped in her tracks and turned to look at me, her bright brown eyes narrowed.

“You did a stupid thing, Drake. She’s hurt.” She told me. I blinked at her a couple times. It seemed like she was maybe trying to…..help me. I wrinkled my bushy brows as I continued to listen to her. “I don’t know why but… she loves you. And she won’t say it. Not to your face. But I know she does care a great deal about you. Just give her some time.” She said. I was surprised. When did she start to care about how Sunny was feeling? Regardless, I took the advice and pushed on. Just as I jumped down, I watched Sunny be the first to cross a wooden beam. Immediately, that familiar niggling feeling kicked in.

“Sunny, what the hell?! Is that thing even stable?!” I yelled. She just kept going until she got to the other side.

“It’s fine. Hurry up and cross it before it’s not. Your luck, it’ll break in half.” She retorted, climbing a wall and crawling into a tight space. As she disappeared, I couldn’t help but to be surprised. Heights weren’t her thing. Now all of a sudden it’s “Balls to the Wall”, “No Guts, No Glory”? Maybe the job had cured her of her acrophobia. Or maybe I pissed her off that much…

I followed the girls across the beam and through the crawl space (And no. It didn’t break). Above us, the sound of a chopper could be heard. The winds from its propellers pushing the treetops about, shaking loose leaves to the ground. As long as we stayed in the shadows and tree lines, I knew we’d be fine. “Asav thinks we’re all dead. Let’s keep it that way.” Nadine said, before heading up more rocks. It was interesting seeing her on the other side of enemy lines. And even better, without a gun to my head. Or a knife to my throat. Maybe if I asked the right questions, I could find a glimpse of a person inside that walking dead shell.

“So, Nadine—” I began but she growled and folded her strong arms across her chest.

“We are not on a first name basis.” She said. I chuckled.

“Okay, fine… I heard you worked for Asav, too?” I asked, carefully.

“What about it?” She grunted, narrowing her eyes and cocking a thin brow.

“I mean… How did you deal with the torture?” I asked.

“Wha… Did he torture you??”

“Oh yeah...” I groaned in all seriousness. He didn’t torture me physically but he might as well have. “Wouldn’t stop talkin’ about himself or his cause. Like, I get it, man. You don’t gotta sell me on it— I’m just lookin’ to make some scratch, y’know?” I chuckled lightly. Chloe shook her head and groaned.

“I can’t stand when people prattle on incessantly.” She said, climbing the next short cliff ahead.

“God, me either.” I agreed. Then Sunny walked by making some odd noise of disgust.

“Wow, you have so much in common.” She said, staley before climbing the cliff behind Chloe. I took a deep breath to calm myself. At this point, she was really just irking me. I’m not exactly what you would call a patient man. But I was enjoying the job, to be honest. And I damn sure wasn’t gonna let her ruin it.

We followed Chloe up the inside of a waterfall’s cave and out through thick vines. “If I had known, I would’ve packed my machete.” She said simply, herself and Nadine pushing the vines apart. The way Sunny’s face lit up when she said that, almost made me forget I was in hot water for a moment. Her big brown eyes, widening and practically shimmering as her freckled cheeks fattened up when she gave that dazzling smile. I could feel my ears burning up and I turned away to light myself a cigarette. Chloe gave her a doting smile as she passed between the vines.

“You have a machete?” She asked, softly.

“Tell you what. We make it out of this alive? I’ll mail it to you.” Chloe grunted as she struggled to keep the vines apart. She nodded to Nadine to go next but just to be an ass, I slid in at the last second.

“Thank you, good gentlewomen.” I grumbled as I weaved my slender limbs through to the other side. Sunny just crossed her arms and scoffed at me. I huffed, dropping my shoulders and gesturing to the vines. “They’re gonna need someone to hold open the other end!” I said, trying to cover myself. But truthfully, I wasn’t a total ass. “Come grab the other side.” I told her as I let my cigarette hang loosely between my lips. I grabbed a vine towards the middle and began to pull.

She stared at me a moment and groaned lightly as she came to grab the other vine. She grunted as she began to pull as well, her muscles taut and flexing as she did as much as she could. Just then Nadine had come out, then Chloe. Soon as they were fine, the path was pretty clear. Even for Sunny, who had already run and jumped across the rushing ravine and was starting to climb up the seeable handholds. I rushed across after her just to make sure she’d be okay. She made it up and over the cliff with no problems. I was impressed. It was like for the first time, I was seeing Treasure Hunter Sunny Spurrs. She didn’t need me. She was excellent all on her own. Which in a way made me feel stupid for thinking my selfish thoughts before. I climbed over the cliff and Sunny reached out a hand to help me up. Just then, I could hear rocks crumbling below us. I looked down to see Chloe falling into the ravine and sliding down off a cliff. All I could hear was her screaming. The both of us (and I’m sure Nadine) gasped, calling out her name.

“Shit!” I exclaimed. But Nadine raised her hand to us a moment and listened closely. I guess she could hear something we couldn’t.

“She’s okay!” She yelled to us. “I’m gonna follow her! You two stay close! We’ll meet up!” She said before jumping into the ravine and down the mudslide, after Chloe. I could hear Sunny groan and swear loud as hell like she couldn’t stand to be with me or something. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. We didn’t have time for this.

“Alright, ENOUGH!” I barked, tossing my cigarette off the edge, forcing out the excess smoke from my lungs through my nostrils in an ire manner. I stood up and turned to look at her with a screwed up expression. Sunny looked at me like I had lost my mind. And maybe I had… I wasn’t so sure. “You’re gonna have to talk to me sometime...” I told her. Begged her, really. She shook her head, chuckling at me. She placed her hands on her hips and bit her lip, standing her ground.

“You really wanna do this now?” Sunny asked me, raising her voice as she approached me slowly. I nodded. I was amped up and tired of the third degree.

“When the hell else are we gonna be able to do it, Sunny?! Yeah! Yeah, I wanna do this now. Right now!” I said in an authoritative voice, puffing my chest out a little. A snarl curled at her lips as she boldly looked me in the eyes.

“Alright then, let’s fuckin’ get to it!!” She shrilled, angrily. Last time she yelled at me like this, I had left for Libertalia without her and we both thought Nathan had gotten hurt. She was just as scary as I remembered. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked this fight so soon. But it had to happen. We needed it out of the way so we could work without distractions. Most of all…. I just wanted my girl back. For real this time. Sunny looked up at me, her eyes never leaving mine, nostrils flaring like an angry bull and her lips pursed; possibly biting her tongue from starting off with the hard hitting questions right away. But this is Sunny we’re talking about. She couldn’t help it. It just wasn’t in her nature to be subtle or tactical in any way. She had to attack it head on.

“Chloe? Really, bro? No offense to Chloe at all, but how desperate are you?!” She exclaimed. I had to laugh. Never in my life had I been before called….

“Desperate?! No, sweetheart. I ain’t desperate—” I chuckled, raising my voice in irritation, both of us beginning to lose our temper.

“So then what the hell, Sam?!” She shouted, furrowing her brow at me. That wasn’t fair. She’d been holding onto this anger about me and Chloe for so long. Yet she hadn’t brought a word about herself to the table.

“What about you?! Huh?!” I shouted, opening my arms to her, welcoming any excuses she could give me. I might be a hardass but I do have my feelings, too. “You don’t get to yell at me about sleepin’ with other people, Sunny!”

“And why the fuck not?!” She yelled. Since we were putting it all out there, I didn’t think it’d hurt if I begged the question.

“How long you been sleepin’ with him?” I asked in a tone so calm, it even scared myself. I stared her in her eyes, waiting for an answer I thought already knew. Her expression never faltered though.

“Who?” She asked, playing dumb. But she knew exactly who I was talking about.

“Erik.” I said, firmly. After I brought it up, my heart began to speed. To be honest, I was a little scared to know. But I could see she really thought I was oblivious to it all.

“Sam—” she began.

“Do I look stupid to you?! Eh, do I?!” I interrupted. “D-Did ya think I didn’t notice? That I didn’t see it? All those little looks he gave you? And still gives you! The way he hugs and kisses all over you? ‘My little Sunflower’?!” I bombarded her with information and evidence that didn’t take me long to pick up during my week of being in San Francisco. She and everyone around her was an open book. The look on Erik’s face when he looked at her like she was the last source of water on earth. Like he was absolutely infatuated— no. In love with this woman. I knew it well. It was the face I made at her quite often.

“Sam, I told you he’s my best frie—” she started but I didn’t want excuses.

“Just answer the goddamn question!” I snapped. She was talking around in circles and I didn’t have time for it. We didn’t have time for it.

“Since long before I met you.” She growled, staring me deep into my eyes. I stared her down and she looked right back. I wasn’t intimidating her for anything. Why I thought I could for a moment, I didn’t know. Nobody scared Sunny Spurrs. Something about knowing officially that she slept with Erik… It hurt more than I thought. And suddenly, I began to understand how she must’ve been feeling. On the other hand though, I couldn’t help but wonder… I winced before bringing up my next question. This one I hoped wasn’t true.

“So you’ve been leading him on? Have you been leading me on?” I asked. I couldn’t be lead on. I didn’t have time for it. I was a grown man with grown man shit to do, treasures to discover. Putting energy into something that wasn’t going anywhere was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Sam, you fucked several girls in several countries. And you fucked Chloe! You don’t get to be pissed over the one guy I fucked, out of your seven! Did it really take so many girls to realize I was waitin’ on you?!” She exploded, throwing her arms about. Her brows knitted together and her lips curled into a snarl. I was shocked…. but she was right. As I looked into her now watering eyes, I lit myself another cigarette and shook my head. She continued on. “All summer…. I did nothin’ but think about you and your sorry ass!” Tears began spilling past her cheeks as she spoke. Here we go: I’d done it.

“Yes. I did fuck Erik. I fucked him as soon as we got back from Libertalia. One time! It was routine. He was safe, he was my friend. And I love him so much but… I’m not in love with him. After the one time we slept together, I called it off. I couldn’t do it anymore…. I just kept thinkin’ about you. So what’s your excuse asshole?!” Her lips trembled and she crossed her arms over her chest protectively, running her hands down her arms to calm her raging nerves.

I really didn’t know what to say… I began wrestling with my feelings, tapping the ashes off of my cigarette. If I kept her around, that was bye bye freedom. If I didn’t tell her how I felt, I’d lose her forever… Once I weighed these options, I knew then what I had to do. “You have no idea… how hard I tried to forget you.” was what came out. For some reason, when I argued with Sunny, things tended to come out far different than intended. In all actuality, she was the intimidating one. She made a face at my sudden comment. And I knew how it sounded already, so I took the time to get ahead of it.

“I tried... so very hard to get over you. I didn’t want that attachment— I didn’t need it. Not when I’d just gotten my life back! Not when there was still so much to do... Selfish thinking: I thought you’d only slow me down.” She looked hurt. But I had a point to all of this. I just had to get it together. “As cheesy as it sounds…… ugh…. my heart had other plans for me. I always thought the guys in the movies were overdoin’ the whole ‘missing you’ thing but…. Every time I turned around, you were there. In a beer, in a song, in some crappy silver diner menu… some stupid bracelet...” I began, chuckling nervously as I gestured to the jewelry on her arm. She didn’t laugh but a twitch came about the corner of her full lips. She looked down at her wrist and touched the bracelet a moment as if she’d forgotten it had been there all along. I didn’t know if anything I was saying was getting through to her, but I continued anyway, just bearing my feelings to her.

“Some girl tried talking to me once… All I could see in her eyes were yours. It annoyed me to shit, so I fucked her. Hoping that just maybe… I’d stop thinkin’ about you. And it worked… Not for long though. It wasn’t until I called someone else your name that I—”

“Wow, Sam. Is that supposed to make me feel better? That you called some other girl my name—” she said, starting to storm off but I grabbed her by the arm and ran in front of her to keep her from going anywhere.

“Sunny, let me finish!” I snapped. I didn’t mean to be so aggressive about it. In all honesty, it was the nerves. I couldn’t fuck this part up. I couldn’t afford to. I couldn’t afford to lose her on behalf of my stupidity. This was the important part and I needed to say it. I felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. Her expression was as still as stone but she stayed quiet and let me continue as I struggled to make sense of things.

“Chloe was like a wake up call for me. And I realized…. when it didn’t feel right… that I only wanted you. I didn’t care how— I just wanted you. And then back there, I thought you were gone…. I’d never been so worried to lose someone…. Y’know, it’s been a while since I’ve dated anyone and I was scared.” I said.

“Scared of what?” She asked.

“To feel…” I answered rather quickly. I hated to do it but if there was ever a time that I needed to be vulnerable, it was now. “I was scared to care… I didn’t wanna face the inevitable that I would hurt you somehow… Or that I wouldn’t be able to care for you like you’d want… I might’ve gotten what you wanted a little confused. But I think I get it now...” Her expression softened a little and I approached her, linking my large pinky with her small first finger, gently swinging out hands between us. I chewed on my lip and looked off a moment before staring into her hypnotizing brown eyes. It was time that I owned up to my mistakes…

“I shouldn’t have expected you to wait for me… I guess I just thought that maybe when I was done with my foolishness that you’d still be there. Which was stupid of me— gorgeous as you are.” I babbled. I stared at her beautiful face and began to let the apologies pour. I’d lay it as thick as I need to. I just wanted my girl back. “I screwed up, Sun. I know that. And I know… I haven’t exactly been the best character in your life… But every second I spend with you means more to me than you even know and I can’t lose th—” Before I could even finish, Sunny placed her hands on either side of my face and brought me down to kiss her warm lips. I could feel a faint smile on her as she kissed me. I seemed to melt into her as my hands circled her waist, pulling her closer and deepening the kiss. I rested my forehead against hers, parting our lips to give us a moment to breath.

“I wanted you from the moment I laid eyes on you. Whether I liked it or not. Although, you kinda didn’t give me a choice so...” I laughed and a small giggle sprung from her lips. One that sounded like music to my ears. It made me smile. A bout of seriousness came around as I spoke. “I need you, Sunny. And I was wrong. You don’t slow me down or hold me back. You’re in this with me. And you can hold your own. I won’t doubt you again, sweetheart.” I told her. I could see her eyes dart over every feature of my face as her thumbs stroked at my cheekbones.

“I forgive you…. and I’m sorry—”

“No, no, baby— don’t be sorry. I understand why… I really do.” I cooed, caressing her cheek and staring into her eyes. “Hey… let’s table this for later, eh? Catch up with the girls, go make some money? Maybe stop an arms deal or somethin’?” I asked, running my hands down her arms. She gave the airiest giggle. Boy, it was much better to be on her good side than bad. The whole silent treatment/ cold shoulder shit? Brutal.

“Sounds like a plan.” She said as I threw an arm around her. Suddenly, she shoved me and leaned back away.

“What?” I asked in confusion. She tuned up her face and covered her nose with her hand.

“Ross was right. You smell like ass.” She croaked our. I burst into laughter.

“Oh fuck off, loser!” I grinned, flipping her off. She just interlocked her fingers with mine and kissed my cheek.

“Let’s go do work.” She said with a smirk. And with that, we were off to finish the job.

Read More on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26555698

[kuroopaisen]

@kacchand (i couldn't tag your main but i wanted to make sure you saw this fdlkjfdlkj) 

hello dear! i’m sorry it took me so long to respond to this dflskjfdlkfdj i decided to answer your ask in a text post so i can link my thoughts to yours more easily! also, i know i'm going to Ramble, so i wanted to be able to keep it under a cut sdlkfjd

Hi rowan!! I've just finished the final chapter of aot and I just wanted to ask your opinion on it!

(SPOILERS THAT DEPICT MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE STORY'S MEANING AHEAD. READ ONLY IF YOU'VE FINISHED THE CHAPTER)

(FR )

(THERE'S STILL TIME TO BACK OUT)

(DO IT NOW. SPOILER ALERT)

I'd also like to ask a follow up question about it, because it seems that I've come to a different concl. from many of my friends and I'm feeling dumb abt how i feel w it.

first of all (and i say this as sincerely as possible, and if i'm coming off as condesending please let me know hh), please don't feel dumb because you've come to a different conclusion :(

we all read media at different levels (i’ve been told it’s ‘not that deep’ before fdljkfsdlkj) and identify different aspects in it, so the fact that you've had a different experience to some of your friends is absolutely not a reflection on your intelligence. and if anyone's making you feel that way, drop their @. i just want to talk :) furthermore, you’re not wrong for responding to something emotionally, especially if it really... makes you uncomfortable, you know? 

i'm from the PH & I've put off determining whether i'm comfy w the manga til the last chap,,,, but is it wrong that I can't shake the feeling that it's a justification of japanese expansionism and genocide? ik this manga has always been in the grey area, and that's what I love abt it! It often shows that no choice they make is absolutely good or bad, and does such a good job at showing you how each complex character came to that understanding (role of environment, etc...) but this last chapter felt too positive abt the rumbling? Like it was justified because paradis was able to advance and there wasn't much choice? idk.

that's totally valid! some of the best think pieces on the show i read mentioned that the concern with the narrative is less "is isayama a nazi sympathiser?" (he most likely isn't), but if he's a imperial japan apologist. and...

well, let's just say that my father is british, and when i was trying to say that colonisation was bad, using british india as an example, he said "well, we gave them railroads." it's... it's uncomfortable and gross and i think it encapsulates how countries with imperial pasts tend to talk about them; even if they don't officially endorse it, there's often a lot of talk about how "well colonialism was good for this country, actually--"

and if the manga felt like it was justifying japanese expansionism, then chances are it had elements that very much did point towards that. i've had a lot of trouble grappling with reiner, annie and bertolt, because they've existed in this grey area of 'victim of oppression' and 'war criminal'; and their existence raises the question of "do people who commit war crimes simply do what needs to be done?" and by victimising them it... it plays into the whole nuremberg defense of "i was just following orders". it's making you feel bad for the people committing said war crimes (and similarly with eren, and all the awful things he's done). but i'll get more into this point later dsfkjfd

i haven't read the last chapter yet (and don't worry about spoilers! i've been approaching aot from a very... specific perspective anyway, so i actually don't mind spoilers -- i read a bunch of analyses of the series before i'd even watched it hh), but... i think if it came off as too positive about, you know... an awful thing that happened, then it absolutely makes sense that you'd feel uncomfortable?

the modernisation narrative in general is one that always skeeves me out. it's one japanese imperialists use to justify the invasion of korea (and even those infamous tweets from the one account purported to be isayama talk about how the population of korea boomed under japanese imperial occupation, which... stop.)

it's also commonly invoked in cases of development. certain members of society (usually the poor), just 'had' to die for the good of the future. who gives a damn if they consent to that? they have to.

similarly, the 'we had no choice' narrative. that's... a concerning one that crops up time and again with history apologists, the argument that "oh if x country hadn't done y, then someone else would've!" or that acts of aggression were done as pre-emptive self-defence, which is so... ugh. i just. i just hate it.

It also feels really weird w the ymir and the whole loving fritz thing. i wish we got to see more of her thought process and what conclusion she came to that led her to destroying the power of the titans.

i... hate this so much. i get that abuse is complicated and victims often have multifaceted feelings towards their abusers, but... most people would focus on that in their story? the story would be about that? but instead, it's just... a thing in the history of the world and that's... icky.

also having the genesis of the titans come from a slave girl in love with her captor... there's many levels of ick to it and i highly doubt it was handled with the appropriate level of grace and sensitivity.

honestly, this might be one of the things that pissed me off the most because of how... contradictory her backstory was with That One Chapter (you know, instead of ymir crying because she wants to be free or because she’s been trapped she........ wants to see mikasa kiss eren’s decapitated head? i guess? what the fuck?) 

idk...I just think that context is sometimes everything. and i understand that media can portray incorrect things,,,, and that isayama likely didn't intend for it to become a global sensation, but i guess i'm just uncomfortable w the right wing nazis getting a comfort book ahaha.

i totally get that! even if attack on titan is meant to be anti-fascists, the fact of the matter is... a lot of fascists love it. and relate to it. which is... alarming. especially given just how popular aot is worldwide.

it’s hard because before the ending, attack on titan did feel like it was more grey; i remember saying that i wouldn’t know how to feel about it until the ending because the story was either saying “the military is corrupt and war is hell”, or it was saying “the military is corrupt and war is hell, but it is necessary.” 

still sorting out my thoughts, but yeah. I think i'm having a hard time understanding what they really accomplished with the rumbling and how they gave eren a sudden lelouch role and a lot of how they made it out to be a happy thing? perhaps I'm too biased to see it fully but to me it gives a "woah. eren was a hero. he saved us from destruction. those people needed to die for us to achieve this temporary peace and new start". i suppose the rumbling gave them a levelled playing ground?

OH MY GOOOOOD okay. i haven't finished code geass. but i really don't like lelouch. i mean... i think i just don't like characters that sacrifice other people for a purported 'greater good' (i could write an Essay about how much i hate erwin smith looking at him is enough to send me into an unhinged rage), but where i'm up to in the anime, i don't like the direction they're going with eren? i mean, i've never liked eren, but... that whole "martyr for the eldians" is just. ew. especially when you see several eldian characters disagree and resist him. 

why does this one guy get to make choices for everyone else? because he’s sPeCiAL? fuck off 

sorry for not being coherent. maybe i'm basing this too much on feelings ahaha. trust aot to finish it's scandalous run with a scandalous end.

no omg you're being perfectly coherent :( also, if anyone's making you feel bad or stupid for how you experience media, they’re... definitely not as smart as they think they are fdslskjfdlk. 

i'm of that mind that, while media consumption is in part an intellectual exercise, it is inherently very emotional; narrative media tries to make us feel as much as it makes us think. that’s what stories are for, you know? intellectual analysis is well and good but what’s the point of a story if it doesn’t make you feel anything?

that's to say, i don't believe there's such thing as basing your opinion too much on feelings :') especially since it's your personal experience with a piece of media; you don't owe anyone 'objectivity' (which is always a farce when it comes to this sort of thing) or 'logical analysis', because nobody's got any right to criticise you for engaging with media the 'wrong way'.

tl;dr I feel like the mood was too celebratory abt the rumbling, and didn't entail enough on the tragedy so much that it felt like a justification for genocide and expansionism. how do you feel abt it's ending and the message it leaves? is isayama responsible to give a morally correct answer to the cycle of hatred? you're not obligated to answer! and sorry for the rambling.

hhh yeah i guess that’s the thing at the end of the day... is isayama responsible for giving a “morally correct” answer? no, but the way the ending plays out is very telling. 

like armin thanking eren? mikasa’s e n t i r e character boiling down to being in love with a mass murderer no matter how poorly he’s treated her? and one could argue that kind of ending is supposed to be unsettling, supposed to hint that the cycle will just continue, but...

framing is everything. and it’s framed like a Good, Emotional Thing, Aren’t We So Grateful Eren Did All Those Awful Things 

YI think I would've been fine if we got to see more of Eren's or Yif you have a different perspective on how eren is being portrayed please do share! I just felt really yucky watching armin say "thanks for murdering all those people for us" with love,,, I suppose he was trying to make eren feel better. ach maybe I'm just overreacting. idk. im dumb ahaha . i'll send this in anyway cuz I'd love to hear your take!

HHHHHHH i just hate eren and i never got him. i felt bad for him in the beginning, but he's always been too... violent for me. there was a very short period of time in season 2 where i felt bad for him, but otherwise it’s just been... ugh. the main three have always been the weakest part of the series imo, so it’s really not surprising they’re part of the reason the ending was so. bad. 

and... well, that one infamous quote pretty much sums up my issue with armin. he's supposed to be the 'intelligent' one, but he's hopelessly devoted to a homicidal maniac with whom he has a very artificial, unbelievable bond with.

at the end of the day, the "thank you for becoming our monster" thing just makes it seem like attack on titan's core message is "war is horrible, but it is necessary." it feels like it's justifying massacre. and while fiction is fiction, and sometimes it's as simple as that, i think something as politically loaded as attack on titan needs to be looked at with a critical lens when discussing what it’s trying to say or what it means. 

do i think it makes someone a Bad Person for liking aot or being attached to it in some way? no, because that’s dumb, and what media someone likes =/= their Moral Goodness TM. ofc trends are a thing and certain pieces of media appeal to certain types of people, but it’s a false equivalency that misses the point. 

but by that same breath, nobody is wrong or stupid or has Less Valid Opinions just because what they took away from it makes them uncomfortable. 

i’m sorry this is So Long i have so many thoughts about this dskljfslkj 

but at the end of the day, 

levi sexy

[monochromemedic]

What are all the Fallout companions like?

depends on the game my friend there’s been a couple of fallout games, the ones i know the best are new vegas and 4 although i didn’t hang out with much of the vegas companions as I should have. I mean i’ll give you info on the ones i Know but it might be long an inaccurate gonna be kinda long

Fallout new vegas:Rex: DOG. 2. *peggle 2 gif* Cyber dog that was owned by the leader of a group called the Kings. They are just a bunch of elvis impersonators. You give him a new brain cause he’s sick. He’s like a dog but cooler.Boone: Super Duper Depressed angry seething emotionaless sniper whos so damn upset because his wife, the only thing that brought him joy after he left a part of the army was sold to slavers, ya know, as a slave and he killed her and his unborn child to save her from being a slave and lives with the guilt. He is mad. all the time. or seething. quitely.E-De: floating little robot. can’t speak but makes noises. He has backstory but it doesn’t really matter. He is a little ball.Lily: Nightkin grandma. Nightkin are like super mutants which are like big mutated humans that like to make flesh bags of things and kill because of a virus they got. But nightkin are like them but crazy cause they use stealth boys which is a thing that makes you invisible and it fucks up their head. She is nice and a grandma and thinks you are her grandson. Has a voice in her head telling her to kill but is still super grandma even though she looks like a wrestling star.Cass: she is sad because she is a trader but her trading van got burned with everything in it. she drinks alot. it’s about it.Raul: Ghoul which are people effected by radiation so much they basically turn into a zombie that is immortal as long as you don’t get fucking shot. Mexican I believe? at least spanish in some sorts. He’s a mechanic. He is nice.Arcade Gannon: Gay doctor that is sassy and actually reads books. Has a tragic past of belonging to a group of people called the Enclave who were shitty people. Doesn’t like to bring it up. Fallout 4: Dogmeat: a dog. That’s it he’s just a normal ass dog but a good one. Codworth: Robot butler you had before you got frozen. He is british. You can put a hat on him. He is polite and posh.Curie: imagine one of those but she was a scientist and you let her out and she wants to do science so bad she wants to become human somehow you fucking acomplish that. That’s her. She is polite and french. She doesn’t know shit and is kinda oblivous and just wants to do science.Danse: Part of the Brotherhood of Steel a group that has been in many games and in this game their dicks that wanna take technology and kinda... are racists. Danse is a good two shoes in the sense that he follows those orders to a t. You learn out later he’s a Synth, a synthetic human like a human made in a lab by tech. Everyone is afraid of synths cause the people who made them do bad things. Danse didn’t know he was one because ... complicated stuff too long to put here. He wants to end it but you can save him and tell him there’s more to life and you care about him. Danse is very robotic in tone, big beef cake and after that he tries to be less of a ignorant slut. Most of that racist shit was him trying to fit in to the only family he knew and trauma from his childhood friend turning into a mutant.Hancock: a ghoul who is a mayor of a small town where stabbing people is ok. He does alot of drugs. people wanna fuck him alot. did a drug so bad he turned into a ghoul some how. Literally named himself hancock after you know... the old dude and took his clothes cause he related.Maccready: use to live in a little cave full of children only. (long story) later grew up moved out and met the love of his live and had a kid only for the kid to get sick and his wife to die so he fucking moved to the commonwealth to find a cure for his kid. Can’t swear cause he promised his son, is a mercenary that worked with an asshole group but left cause they were dicks. He likes money. People say he s a rat alot because he is scrawny and kinda rat like. You can kiss him. voiced by Matt Mercer. Child in a man’s body at times.Deacon: works for the railroad a secret organization that liberates synths. helps them move on, get new identities and live a normal life. Secretive himself, lies a shit ton, literally spies on you in game until you meet him. has disguises but all of them has his stupid signature sunglasses. Funny guy, till you learn that he use to be a bigot as a kid and killed a person and he hated that and left the group of other bigots and wanted to start a new life with his wife and have a kid until they learned she was a synth and the group that was bigots hated synths and so they killed her and he killed them in retalliation and now he can’t look himself in the mirror or can’t get close to them for fear. Changes his face so much his face right now probably isn’t even close to what his old face was.  Todd won’t let me kiss him.Preston: member of the minutemen, a group of people in old patriotic gear wanting to help people. Was one of the last ones. Super duper nice but kinda monotone. Tells me to help people so often. probably the :) emoji but if made real. just wants to do good.Cait: got sold as a kid and made her way to becoming a fighter in a combat zone you learn shes hooked on chems aka drugs and you can help her not be an addict. she is irish and swears and wants to punch everything. Rude lady. Her backstory is super dark. she goes back after she gets the money to go home to her parents that sold her and just shoots them. like damn.Strong: super mutant. wants to smash. like kill.. alot. that’s bout it.x6-88: a synth from that evil place the institute that can work with you. he’s kinda a prick. monotone and just wants whats best for the institute. doesnt’ care about anything else.Piper: reporter in a big town she wants to alert people about synths. gets into trouble. she has a sister.  Nosy.Nick Valentine: old noir style detective except he is a synth that is an older prototype modal that makes him look super robotic. just wants to help. you can call him a dick and techinically it’s true. idk much about the dlc companions  uh two are robots and ones and old guy and the other is gage whos a raider i kinda killed him so

[levihauser]

十月の三週間

25 October, 2019

Sorry I have taken so long to write another blog entry! I have been a little busy with stuff here in Japan, so this entry should be filled with interesting events from the past three weeks.

On the fifth, my host niece and nephew, Yuria and Shuudai, came over for lunch. We had pasta (with thousands of tiny fish eggs mixed in-yum!) and crabs. My host mom said that the crabs were small, but they were larger than any I had ever seen. I was told to scrape the meat out of the legs and eat that, as well as the eggs for that. After having had eggs for breakfast, it was a pretty egg-cellent day. There. I hadn’t made a pun yet on this blog, but now you get to put up with one of the most cliché bad puns of all time. I went to our neighbor’s (Mrs. Takamatsu, I think I mentioned her in the most recent post) house to stay the night. I just learned a few days ago that her husband runs one of the 5 most profitable businesses in the prefecture.

The next day, I read in the morning and finished the last book that I had brought with me from the US. We had curry rice for breakfast, then I went with Mrs. Takamatsu to a temple for a Buddhist festival. It was quite a big temple, and very new. The festival was also interesting-everyone just sat in a central room and watched a recording of the same festival happening in a central temple in Tokyo, occasionally chanting, bowing, or clapping along to it. We left early to pick up her husband at the train station. He had just come back from Chicago (a few days later, actually, Mrs. Takamatsu left for Chicago. They have a daughter there, so they visit there a lot). I had my first Japanese-style pizza for lunch. It was very thin-crusted and crunchy, almost like a big cracker. I returned home, then my host parents and I went out for dinner at a nearby specialty restaurant called Nishide. I think they know the people there, and the like eating there, but it is expensive so they don’t do it too often.

The entire next week was midterms for the students at my school (their school year starts in April), so the school days ended at around 11 AM. I couldn’t take the tests, not understanding the language, so I was sent to the library to read and study Japanese.

On the tenth, I had a Rotary meeting. I have started taking Japanese lessons every Thursday at the Matto Cultural Hall near my school, so I have to go straight to the Rotary meeting without going home to change out of my school uniform. This one was in Kanazawa at a special restaurant. We had good food after a short meeting, and played host to a Rotary club that had come to visit all the way from Lake Biwa.

On National P.E. and Sports Day here in Japan (the same day as Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day in the US), I had no school, so my host mom and dad suggested that I take the train to Kanazawa. I have never ridden the train before, even in the US (unless you count subways and old-fashioned railroads where you pay a lot of money to sit in leather seats and get your ticket punched with an actual ticket puncher), so I was a little worried. I had no problem buying the tickets-the ticket machines have an option to use English-but I accidentally got in the wrong line (I am still not sure what it was for and I haven’t seen one like it since then) and wasted about 40 minutes there without moving before I asked someone and they pointed me in the right direction. I successfully got to Kanazawa Station. One of my classmates was on the same train by coincidence, so I followed them to find my way to the exit. I actually went out the one that my tiny tourist map didn’t cover at first, so I had to go around to the other side. It was raining and windy, so I had some difficulty reading the map and holding my umbrella at the same time. I eventually made my way to Oyama Jinja, a famous shrine just outside of Kanazawa Castle and near Kenrokuen Garden (which is a famous Japanese garden, for those of you who haven’t heard of it). I admired the shrine for a bit and bought a few good luck charms that were for sale there, then returned to the station and went home, since I had to be home before 5 PM. The round trip only cost ¥400.

On the 18th, my school festival began. My school’s festival is a small one, or so I’ve heard, but the Japanese certainly know how to throw one (no offense to anybody back at home, but PHS should take some advice from Matto High School. Those 2-hour pep rallies and shouting contests just don’t cut it). The first day was not at the school, but at the nearby Matto Cultural Hall, since they have an auditorium and the school doesn’t. There were several student presentations and performances, including brass band (I mentioned this earlier. It has won regional awards and is very impressive. They play music that sounds just like the original recordings. They did a specially arranged version of the alma mater as well as the Jurassic Park theme and a few other songs), choir (it is made up of only 7 members, but has beautiful harmonies and keeps in tune perfectly, while creating a huge amount of sound without microphones. They did a song from Sister Act and a few others), taiko (I performed in this one! We borrowed some drums from the Asano Taiko Company, the largest taiko company in the world. The owner and CEO is a member of my host Rotary Club and my school is the only one in the prefecture with a taiko club), and dance (it was very well rehearsed. There were only five members, but I think they created their own routine and it was fun to watch), as well as a short, corny play put on by the teachers in which one of the gym teachers, Mr. Higashi, had to go on a funny adventure to rescue Miss Matto High School 2019 from her kidnappers (either a gang or a group of devils, it was hard to tell without understanding the language) headed by the other gym teacher, Ms. Sawada (everyone loves Ms. Sawada and they were a little disappointed to see her defeated in the end). We returned to the school after the performances finished, then finished preparing and decorating for the next day (I say finished because we had been preparing for this after school for weeks, making paper chains, posters, placemats, paper flowers, etc.), before being dismissed. The next day was a Saturday, but the festivities continued. It was in the school, and was pretty much the “buy stuff” day. We had tickets that cost from ¥50-400 that payed for things ranging from waffles to games of bingo to weird, confined-space bowling to tea ceremony. It took up seven hours, in which I explored, ate lots of food, and went to various events including what they called a 4DX movie, which was essentially an English horror film translated into Japanese and played through tiny speakers while a few students made weird sound effects and threw things (e.g. whacking rulers on desks, throwing foam at backs, and spritzing water from spray cans) to make it “more realistic.” With all of the stuff going on and the voices, I really didn’t pay attention to the movie and instead collected as many of the little foam pieces as I could.

On the twentieth I had my favorite Japanese food for breakfast-hooray, inarizushi! I went to Kanazawa alone by train again and spent about 5 hours wandering about and seeing new things, but forgetting to eat lunch and getting kind of hungry. I returned home at around 4, and was almost immediately told that I was shortly going to a concert with a Rotarian, Ms. Ikemoto (I think she is going to be my third host mom too, but I am not sure). We went to an old, elaborate temple and watched an out-of-place-seeming amateur old folk and country music concert with a couple of English songs and one entirely about curry rice. The musicians were very talented. We went to an udon shop for dinner afterwards and stayed very late because Ms. Ikemoto didn’t want to leave until the match of the Rugby World Cup between Japan and South Africa had finished.

I had the 22nd off of school because of the enthronement of the new emperor of Japan. My host Rotary club counselor, Ms. Nagase, took me to Kanazawa (by train, because the roads were too crowded due to the holiday). She spent 3 years in England a while back, so she speaks fairly good English, which is good for smoothing out misunderstandings. She is a bit of an anglophile and is constantly asking me how to say things in British English. We briefly stopped in at the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art, but it was crowded as usual and we had to leave soon. There was a Moomin exhibition which I would love to have gone to, but the Japanese love Moomin and the entire floor it was on was packed (Moomin is 20th Century art, so how does that fit into the museum?). Next we went to the D.T. Suzuki Museum, which is a small, modern museum celebrating the famous Kanazawa-born philosopher that is its namesake. There were not many people and it was very peaceful. It was even free admission because of the Enthronement Day (upon seeing the sign, Ms. Nagase got very excited and took several pictures-apparently it is very rare at this museum). We went to a fancy sashimi restaurant near the train station for lunch-it was great food, and we got our own special compartment with sliding doors! After lunch, we went to a concert hall right next to Kanazawa Station for a piano concert. The Kanazawa orchestra has a weird mascot named Gargantua that is sort of like a caricature of a conductor. The orchestra was conducted by Keita Matsui, and the three piano concertos were Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, performed by Yukari Yamada, Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, performed by Rikono Takeda, and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat Major, performed by Marie Kiyone. The performance was all very high-quality, and it was open-seating so we got second-row seats in the perfect spot to watch the pianists’ hands. At the end, all three pianists returned and played a piano trio all on the same piano, which must have been difficult. They were all wearing dresses that I would think would hinder playing (forgive me if I went a little overboard in description there, I am very interested in anything related to piano playing). Ms. Nagase and I returned to Hakusan City by train, then went to her house. Half of it is a 30-year-old addition to the other half, which is 200 years old and barely touched. She has a beautiful yard (a rarity in Japan) and back garden. She showed me around briefly, then we went to walk her dog. After we returned, her husband got home from work. Both of them are very friendly and kind. Ms. Oribe, another Rotarian, had been invited for dinner and arrived shortly, then we walked to a nearby restaurant and had tempura.

There was also no school the next day, to make up for the Saturday that we had come to school for the festival. I studied Japanese for a little while, then on a snap decision decided I wanted to go to Fukui, a city in the neighboring prefecture. I obtained permission, then left. It was only ¥1,100 for each way, and the train ride was an hour and ten minutes on the small trains that stop at every station. I arrived and got some maps at the tourist information center, then set out exploring the city. I walked past some animatronic dinosaurs (that seems to be Fukui’s big tourist attraction, as the prefecture is a paleontological hotspot) and the ruins of the castle (which is now the prefectural government office-what a great workplace! You get to drive across a moat every day). I eventually reached a beautiful mountain in the middle of the city that had been turned into a forested park. It was the closest I have gotten to nature since I have come to Japan. I stopped at a shrine and explored a little more before descending. I continued wandering some more in search of restaurants and candy stores, but the food map I had was either outdated or misleading, and I couldn’t find any of the shops I searched for. At about 4 PM, I settled for some rice balls and ice cream from a convenience store for lunch instead, then returned home. The sun sets so early here, it is difficult to stay much longer and still have a good time.

Yesterday was my school’s P.E. festival. I was told to study Japanese in the school library instead of participating, but all of the other students went to a big park and participated in races and other mandatory events for gym class. I had my Japanese lesson and watched a tea ceremony with a lady who was visiting from Germany who happened to be at the Cultural Hall at the same time before going to the Rotary meeting. This week, a delegation from Hakusan’s sister city, Columbia, Missouri was visiting, so they came to the Rotary meeting and presented in the first half before leaving for some other obligation.

Today has been a fairly normal day so far. I had an average school day followed by an average afternoon, as far as I am allowed to use the word average, being an exchange student to Japan. I have been studying my Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) quite a bit lately and seem to be making some headway. I am looking forward to being literate! I feel like it’s about time, now that I have officially passed the two month mark. Thank you all for your patience in waiting for this long-delayed entry.

Oyama Jinja Shrine:

Kanazawa Station:

I would add more pictures, but it keeps telling me there is an upload error, so I will try again later.

[bountyofbeads]

The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

New York Times Magazine has a project called the '1619 Project' in commemoration of the first slaves brought to Jamestown, Virginia. The project provides a different perspective, from prominent African-Americans and others, than what most of us have been taught or told. Included are essays, photojournalism and poetry.

I will post several pieces from the series as I am a subscriber to my timeline. If possible please take time to READ 📖 and SHARE their stories.

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

Our Democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.  Black  Americans have fought to make them true.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones | August 14, 2019 | New York Times Magazine | Posted August 16, 2019 |

My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”

Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”

With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation’s highest courts declared that no black person could be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fight against their former “masters.” But Lincoln worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?” he had said four years earlier. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”

That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly created position called the commissioner of emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.

“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”

You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men. It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had signed up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,” the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would consult on his proposition. “Take your full time,” Lincoln said. “No hurry at all.”

Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Americans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. ... Here we were born, and here we will die.”

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one of the nation’s first human rights organizations — to fight discrimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices. Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the first black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school. Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefly, attended schools together.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, making the United States one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year, black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s first such law and one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It codified black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in the United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains automatic citizenship. The 14th Amendment also, for the first time, constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly all other marginalized groups have used the 14th Amendment in their fights for equality (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of democracy and citizenship — the right to vote — to all men regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not.

But it would not last.

Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the Army in World War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he could use the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just 4½ hours after his military discharge. At 26, Woodard would never see again.

There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people almost entirely from mainstream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old they were. In the North, white politicians implemented policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites-only public pools and held white and “colored” days at the country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black people service, placing “Whites Only” signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in barring black people from marrying white people, while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white children.

This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence. This intensified during the two world wars because white people understood that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.

This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.

Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became black Americans’ second sustained effort to make democracy real. As the editorial board of the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “We wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement. But it is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for black civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the centennial of slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.

For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this country white. Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees.

The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.” For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

They say our people were born on the water.

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.

Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled “slave,” and slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing their native religions.

But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.

Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans speaking various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved people — shorn of all individuality — to exert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today’s avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans, particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessential American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.

Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

At 43, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship. Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.

What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?

When I was a child — I must have been in fifth or sixth grade — a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to write the assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment would just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random African country and claimed it as my own.

I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

[stone-man-warrior]

March 27, 2021: 2:44 pm:

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The terror spies at Symantec/norton/Centerylink/Google terrorists consortium saw that I had taken some photos and getting ready to post them, so, when that happens, when they see that I am active online and am about to make a post, the terrorist bastards send one of these pop-up windows to scare me, they know that I know that they were watching my email, and my phone use, so, they also know that when they send the pop-up window, that will scare me, it will, and does affect what I write about, the notion of a spy who is there watching, and makes an effort to frighten me by sending the pop-up is a frightening event.

It’s the same as a vulture waiting for me to die.

The same as a shark waiting for me to take a swim.

It’s exactly the same as a murderer who is there to make sure I don’t say details about the way the murderer is killing me or say anything about the heap of dead and dying high school students I saw at the high school that day when the Grants Pass Rural Metro Fire Department came after I called them for help ... the fire department solved the problem by burning the heap of dead and dying high school students that day.

That pop-up window is exactly like the Grants Pass Rural Metro Fire Department waiting to set me on fire when someone calls them to help me.

That is the level of help you can expect when the SAG/Canadian terror army takes over your town too. It’s only a matter of time until they come to your town, where ever you may be, the terror army will be there soon, to offer that level of service to your town, like they did to my town, and all of the towns in Oregon.

This is what I was getting ready to show when the terror bastard spies interrupted me:

I want to show the close up of the effect of the poisons, and point out that each of those big lesions is composed of two small puncture wounds that grew in size and depth to join together as one larger lesion. This photo below shows where about seven pairs of small puncture wounds grew together to form larger ones. This rash started out as pairs of small red dots after I was attacked by a terror soldier in my home. A terror soldier who is associated with the people who sent that pop-up window from Symantec through the Centurylink ISP network.

Here is example of one of the pairs of puncture wounds. This one is moving slower than the others did, and is just above my right ankle near the back of my leg. I suspect those will eventually grow to form one bigger sore as the others did.

I have been saying that the sores look like an entrance and an exit wound of a rapidly stabbing needle of a syringe, however, now I feel as though the attacking terror soldier had two different kinds of poison that was injected in tandem, with two syringes side by side repeatedly thrust into my leg. That explanation of two separate poisons makes more sense to me and fits the habits and of what I already know about the terror army, they do things from two extremes, and my symptoms are extreme cold at my toes, and extreme burning of the skin areas of the lower calf/shin.

I share this to help others, so they might help me. There is no place to get medical services here in Oregon unless you are a Canadian terror soldier or a Screen Actor Guild member, then, you can get the best health care there is.

The attack in my home occurred in the first or second week of February to the best of my recollection. The attack may have been the result of asking the Joe Biden White House for help to stop the terrorism, as I sent a note there asking for help on about February 12, 2021. The note is available to read in the entries of that time on this account.

Those photos were taken today, at about 2:30 pm, 3-27-2021.

There is little if any healing going on, and absolutely no interest of any kind from any helpful people. I am still not able to walk enough that I am willing to go check my mailbox, about a 1,600 foot walk, round trip from front door to maibox and back again ... it’s too far, I won‘t make it back, and has been a long time since I was able to get my mail. The last few attempts I made to get my mail from the mailbox included that there were terror neighbors all over the place, actually lined up down the street, waiting for me to be in the roadway where the mailbox is at for a chance to run me over.

================================

3:27 pm:

Also, that Joe Bonammassa email promotion always sends a email with a pertinent title within a few moments of each of the times I have shared photos of my injuries, seriously, you need look no further than the sender of that email promotion to learn more about why US Citizens cannot get medical treatment, while SAG, and Canadians in USA can get medical treatment. Joe’s people are able to change the time stamp of the emails they send, so the posted time stamp is about two hours off, maybe Joe is in a different time zone, hiding.

Joe lives on Mullhulland Drive (Valley Circle Blvd above Tarzana) at a place he calls nerdville studios, I used to go there in my youth before Joe took possession, there is even a police report I made of a murder that happened on the front porch there from about 1978.

I don‘t like that Joe Bonammassa makes fun of my injuries.

An observation and warning to others about the Joe Bonammassa terror High Command promotional emailer from Amp Guru at Vatican Choir:

In event that you sign up to receive the Joe Bonammassa Promotional emailer from On-High, be advised that I don’t think it’s possible to Unsubscribe from the Joe Bonammassa Promotional emailer. The reason is that the Bonammassa email promotions are “bottomless pit” variety of email ... the email has no end to it, When you open the Joe Bonammassa Promotional email from Vatican Choir and try to scroll to the bottom so you possibly “unsubscribe” with the button that usually allows someone to unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, where other important information about the sender is also supposed to be located, at the foot of the email.

The thing has no footer.

The emailers from Joe go on and on and on and on forever loading more and more content into the email as you are trying to scroll to the bottom to find the “Unsubscribe” button.

It’s not there, if it is there, it can never be pushed. It’s a bottomless pit, keeps loading forever with more schwagg, more tee-shirts, more coffee mugs, lapel pins, coasters, doyleys, jackets, hats, back stage at Red Rocks vacation packages, and two-week cruise ship rides that are really one-way tickets designed especially for US national security personnel.

But you can never “Unsubscribe” from Joe Bonammassa Promotional music industry terror emailer from On-High at Amp Guru of the Vatican Choir,

=================================================

Terror airplane low and slow flyover is noted above my house at 3:50 pm.

I also want to make sure I say that the terror bastards are still turning off my number pad on my computer, when I need to use a numeral, and the number pad has been shut off remotely, the cursor goes flying somewhere else on the page, I have to reset the page view to where I was typing, and manually turn the number pad back on, happens dozens of time per day, and has been happening for as long as I can remember, more than ten years the terror bastards have been turning off the number pad. The same person that makes the letter M not work is responsible for that, so, it’s someone who is in a position such as administrator at Centurylink ISP where Remote Access can be done on the computers of Centurylink ISP users.

They are interrupting and preventing reports of terrorism and mass murder, interrupting life saving information from reaching helpful people.

==========================

4:12 pm:

I haven‘t been doing my usual Twitter terror language decoding that I usually do while trying to get help, I am too focused on the pain in my leg for that, am not able to really do the level of thinking required for decoding of terror language on Twitter.

I have some that I will share real quick:

“Uighers” are said to be Muslims treated poorly, held as prisoners in China.

It’s notable that all of the news about the Uighers all seems to come from Christian oriented news sources. I don‘t see any reports about the Uighers coming from Muslim news sources.

That said, consider that the word “Uigher” is actually terror code for the word “Wire”.

That’s all I am going to say about it.

Uigher = Wire

Go back to look at all of the news stories about the Uigher’s, and see if there is any kind of way that “Wire” could be the source of actual subject, that would include British style communication “Wires”, it would include spring loaded wire snares for killing people, and include electrical high tension wires, to name a few of the ways the word “Uigher” could be a terror term that translates to “Wire”.

=========

4:25 pm:

Please send medical services to Josephine county Oregon.

Please send US Military to stop the terror take over in Oregon.

=========

5:07 pm:

Another terror airforce airplane flyover my house low and slow at 5:07 pm. This one is bigger, louder than the usual terror flyover. The airplanes drop loads of nitrous oxide over attack zones to prime the area ahead of a ground attack, and have been “priming” the area around my house for twenty years. I suspect they are using other, more poisonous gasses lately. The forest animal population around here was wiped out long ago because of so much gas released.

(big explosion just now from the north west of here, estimated at Jess Way Railroad crossing area.)

The terror bastards send the young terror soldiers into the mountains regularly to collect small animals and bring them to places where the animals have been killed off by the gas release. That has been happening a long time also.

Grants Pass Municipal Airport about seven miles south of here, used to have a US national Guard base built in to it. All of the US Guard service personnel were killed, then, the Guard sent more to replenish the base with men and equipment in around 2004, then, that group was also killed.

The bottom line on that base at the Grants Pass Municipal Airport is that technically there is a US national Guard base that you can see on a map, and maybe you could phone that Guard base and speak with someone who claims to be a Guard Officer, however, all of that is just for show, as there is no real active guard base there anymore, and hasn’t been there since about year 2000. The terror army took over the Grants Pass Municipal Airport long ago, the terror army has been flying out of there since before 1996, that is as far back as my knowledge goes about that airport and the airplanes that are used for priming attack areas with nitrous oxide aerial drops prior to a ground assault with terror soldiers armed with more gas, and swords, while dressed in street clothes and driving regular automobiles same as any citizen would be driving.

Please send help.

=============

5:26 pm:

The airplane again, different one, just a little south of here...

5:27 pm: airplane made another pass.

===========================

5:42 pm:

I am pretty sure the bastards saw the photos of my leg, then decided what particular poison gas they have that would make my symptoms worse, then loaded an airplane or two with that and flew over my house to drop the specially mixed poison over my house today. Suddenly my leg turned bright pink, the skin is burning, and I am having coughing fits in ways I have not had before.

Please send help.

Is USA and it’s people disposable?

Why are my reports of terror takeover ignored?

Twenty years of ignorance, not one single interested person has asked me to say more.

Why?

================

6:20 pm:

For those who may be interested in doing terror language decoding work to get information used by the SAG leadership for advancing terror events, I have this to offer besides all of the other information I already explained and demonstrated elsewhere on this account and also most of that is contained in two of my suspended Twitter accounts, nsa could gain access to the contents of those accounts to learn more about the decode work I was doing back then.

For now, this: Read each Twitter news story as if its a taxi cab. You get into the cab, the driver does not speak English, and you don‘t speak the language that the driver is speaking, and, you cannot figure out what language the driver is using. So, you read the news article, while also sort of knowing that it’s not really English. You do that enough times, get into different cabs, read the story as it’s written, and pretty soon, when you compare what is said on the taxi cab ride to what you absolutely know is real in real life, you will begin to see that you have been taken for a ride in the cab. The driver takes you everywhere there is to go, other than the place you need to be, so, that is an important part of the Twitter decode. You need to treat all of the Twitter stories as if you already know the driver is not going to take you to the place where you need to be, so, that narrows things down considerably, not much, but it does offer some guidance in knowing for sure that the face value of the each Twitter story is nowhere near what is really being said in the coded language spoken by the Twitter taxi cab driver of news stories. You know before you get into the cab that it’s going to take you for a ride somewhere far from where you need to be.

What I do, is I consider the face value, then turn it completely around the other way backwards. If the news story says something about a new small asteroid was discovered in space orbiting just passed Pluto. then, I consider that the real story is close to my neighborhood, is big, can be seen without special viewing apparatus, is always there, always has been there, and that I need to be aware of what it’s going to be doing. That works as a start, to figure out why did the taxi driver take me to space to see a new asteroid? The answer is he did that so you won‘t be thinking about that other thing, the thing that is real close to home,

From there, you need to go read more news stories, to take more taxi rides, so you can find out more about what it is that the Twitter Taxi driver does not want you to be thinking about. Granted, most of the time I don‘t find the answers, but there are many times when I did find exactly what was being said. You have to take a lot of Twitter Taxi rides to space in order to see that there is a big yellow airplane parked on your front lawn, and Twitter put it there. They don’t want you to see or ask questions about the big yellow airplane, so they baffle you with bullshit.

Basically, whatever the face value is, the real story is something that is polar opposite of that in some way.

The other methods I already explained in many places in this account and the ones in the suspended Twitter accounts will help from there. There is “word magic” and there is the “Russian Mother of all Hoaxes” were established bullshit is adhered to, it’s handy to have a set of lies that are so old and accepted that the lies can be told with a straight face among many, in such a way that the lie reaches the terror operatives as a marching order, in main stream media, prime time, film at eleven, and in newsprint at the news stand.

The Russian Mother of all Hoaxes is everywhere, you can see it very clearly in commercial advertising at holiday seasons for example.

The terror comm is intuitive, is presented with alternate use of English language, and is told in aggregate within multiple news stories on Twitter in effort to guide the terror soldiers who need to read the marching orders, by repeating the same basic information within many different shell language host stories.

I did not go to the terror decode school at the local church on Russell road like my neighbor terror cell members did, I had to learn the hard way to save my own life. My way of reading may be different than the way the terror soldiers do their reading of daily Twitter marching orders.

===

7:10 pm:

With all of that in mind, and knowing that the face value is bullshit, ask some questions:

Why is the Twitter taxi driver taking everyone to the Suez Canal to see a big ass boat stuck in the canal?

Ok, we know it’s bullshit to start with, We know, or should have known, that USA was hijacked, all of the government are shills, there are other SAG members someplace else calling the shots, and there are the top leaders who are in the Music industry at Vatican Choir HQ on the Island of Kauai at a place called Kauai Ranch. We know that much but no one is interested in saving USA from being dismantled by those people.

With that in mind, we also know that much of the US Military equipment is in the hands of the Canadian terror army soldiers who are disguised as US Troops. They are positioned all over the world, and have the US equipment to use as they are instructed to use it by Vatican Choir.

now, we need to think about “Time Warp Terror” the story about the Ever Given is old, that story happened in around 2008. Twitter terror command is running the story again as a current event.

Set that Time Warp part aside for awhile, and look at what we are shown. The boat is stuck, we can see that. There are hundreds of other boats waiting on each side of the canal.

That is where the terror warfare is at.

A well equipped Canadian force tbat is really an extension of British Power composed of Canadians who hijacked US Military, are poised there on each side of the Suez Canal. The Canadians disguised as US forces are said to have gone to the region “to help” as Army Core of Engineers.

There are hundreds of boats on each side of the canal, those boats represent the largest global movers of freight on earth, all of the biggest shipping contractors are there, with no where to go, waiting, floating there.

USA has the Iran Terror Rental Service that I talk about from time to time. I think media calls it “Iran Contra”.

That puts some logistics in place to think about what could be happening, I say that when the story was fresh in 2008, that is when most of the global freight companies were hijacked in the night by US equipment manned by Canadians who work for Britain, and are commanded by Screen Actor Guild and it’s sub unions as leadership.

nitrous oxide mixed with Medazolam released in vast quantity to overwhelm the boat captains and crews of the ships that were waiting for the Ever Given to get out of the way. It did not get out of the way, because it was supposed to get stuck as part of the plan. While everyone is watching the antics of what is happening in the canal, the real story is what was happening on each side of the canal where most of the major global freight companies had at least one boat in the water there.

Basically, US equipment manned by Canadians, who were already secretly stationed at Iranian ports, attacked and took over those ships that were waiting there. It was done super quiet, and in the night time on the high seas where the shipping boats waited patiently.

The captains and crews of those shipping boats are small numbers of people. The success of such a take over only requires that as many of those boats as is possible, simply experience what could be said was a “Crew and Management Change”, a few dozen people on each of the larger boats, and less than that on the smaller shipping boats that were hijacked.

There is no news reports that feature the ships that are waiting, all of the focus is on the Ever Given.

now apply the “Time Warp” terror.

Maybe the terror bastards are repeating the same thing at the Panama Canal, and only need the shell host language of the Ever Given at the Suez for saying the marching orders online in main stream media.

That is what I think already happened twelve years ago when the story of the big ass boat in the Suez Canal was a current event.

====================================

7:52 pm:

In order to stop terrorism everywhere on earth, the very first thing that has to be done, is to remove Twitter from the internet completely.

Any attempt to thwart terrorism will fail as long as Twitter remains actively spewing out the terror marching orders.

The reason includes that the US and other nations governments, militarizes, national security offices, and public safety offices are all infiltrated by the SAG/Britain/Canadian/Vatican representation that if Twitter remains active while global security forces who are in opposition to a British/SAG power structure ruling the world are doing counter terror work to fight against that, those offices I mentioned that are infiltrated will continue to spew leaked information that will end up contained coded in a Twitter news story, and the Twitter taxi driver will simply bring terror soldiers to the places they need to be for protecting the Britain/SAG power structure, while also taking everyone else for a ride to see asteroids orbiting Pluto.

Twitter needs to come down in order to keep leaked national security information associated with counter measures, off of the internet mainstream news,

===========

8:12 pm:

Also, look at the time frame that the Ever Given has been stuck there, then look at all of the other news stories told by the Twitter taxi driver during that same time period.

How many “Schul Schutes” have taken place since the time the boat was stuck?

Is the other news in quality and quantity as per usual with regard to it’s subject matter, or has the month of March been more bad news than usual? Include that Joe Biden did a news conference in that time frame, and for some reason, the notion that Joe Biden did a news conference was a news story of interest all on it;s own. I found that the excitement generated by the existence of a planned Biden news conference was a bigger news item than was the conference itself.

What I am pointing out is that there seems to have been a lot of effort on the part of all of the news media networks to make ample distraction stories during the time that the Ever Given has been stuck in the canal. The relevance of so many “Schul Schute’s” and other exciting news is partly that each news item, of those that could be said were “extra bonus distraction stories” is such that each one of the extra curricular stories presents a shell of specific terror language. and there are many “extra bonus distraction“ stories, so, there is sort of a shell language base of terms and directions that can be used for the multitude of outcomes of shipping companies that were hijacked by virtue of a faked Suez Canal Clog.

Say the terror army only took over one shipping company boat, by flooding the boat with a cloud of nitrous oxide/medazolam gas mixture, and were able to board a boat, take the captain and crew into captivity, interrogate to gain company information,  then send special terror soldier/actors to the HQ of that company to quietly and completely replace everyone who works at the management level and boat captains. The terror army would have enough information to continue to run the company as it is normally run, with exception of special cargo in the post hijack shipping docket, be it human cargo, munition cargo, poison gas cargo .., cargo that suits the needs of global domination efforts. Personally, I feel that such a takeover would present an opportunity to secretly move many thousands of people.

That would suit global domination efforts.

Consider:

There is no place on earth called Russia. The existence of Russia is part of the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes. With a lie supported by news media, and much of the worlds European global leaders, a perpetuated lie of the magnitude of existence or Russia and everything we were told about the Russia military and possession of nuclear warhead missiles, and including that Russia is a Communist ruled place, all of that when accepted as truth sets global power in a false light, one that serves the British/SAG/Canadian offensive quest for global domination.

Everyone on earth is terrified of a boogie man bad guy who has big guns, is as powerful as is USA or China. That bad guy is Russia, a place the never existed.

When you take Russia out of the global power equation, that changed everything about what we thought we knew about global power.

no Russia means USA is pretty much equal with China as far as military strength is concerned.

However, the real truth includes the reason that there needed to be a Russian Boogie man in the first place, that the US Military was already taken over by the British/SAG/Canadian terror army. The existence of Russia was amplified at the time the British plan to take over the world was initiated for the taking of USA phase when they news media pulled down “The Iron Curtain” and the “Cold War“ was said to be over, all of that breathed new life into the lie that is Russia.

now the reason that the freight company take over could include that the reason for it was partially to move vast quantities of people quietly, unnoticed in unexpected ways, but at expected, normal and customary locations.

Hong Kong.

Shipping boats parked at Hong Kong ports, could pick up large quantities of Hong Kong resident terror soldiers trained under Britain rule the same way that Canadians were trained for taking over USA.

The boats loaded with Hong Kong terror soldiers who are loyal to Britain, would then be “shipped” to Chines ports, take over the port cities, quietly kill & replace the Chinese population and blend in while working on land to take more shipping companies in effort to move ever closer to Beijing, and once in Beijing in great numbers, could take the capitol city the same way that Washington DC was taken in USA but much faster, because in USA the attack was over a long period of time, done by individual vote of each individual impostor of a murdered US Citizen.

In China at Beijing, the Hong Kong terror army would not need to wait for election day over many years.

Since there is no Russia, there will be no Russian interference.

Since there is no US Military, all is hijacked by Canadians, any US boats in the area will support the British Hong Kong take over of Beijing.

It’s really not that complicated of a plan. The magic that makes all of that takeover work so successfully is the quality of the lies told many decades ahead of time, lies that are so big, that everyone believes that the lie is truth.

When truth includes that Russia is a lie, that there is no Russia and never was, trying to help people by informing them is not easy, is a losing battle. The lie will win every time when the lie is that there is a place called Russia that is a communist nation and is armed with atomic weapons.

Truth is that China is the Global super power, and that became true starting in around 1965 and it got more and more true over time as the US military was quietly destroyed by what was perceived as it’s own leadership. By the time Bob Hope and USO shows aboard US navy vessels and at the US bases became the accepted norm, that was the beginning of the end of US as a global power.

Today, USA is perceived as a global power, but there are no more wings on that bird, the wings of the Eagle were denied. amputated, the bird is lame, cannot fly.

Screen Actor Guild killed the Eagle that once was US Military, making China the worlds strongest war power, but the Chinese do not know that, and are about to be taken by Britain, through Hong Kong at Beijing with Britain supported by Canadians who are using US Military equipment.

The current “Asian Hate” narrative is there to discourage compassion for the Chinese when the shit goes sideways there, and gets very, very real, the way it is in USA, all is very real under secret Canadian rule with Britain and SAG at  command.

============================

March 28, 2021: 2:20 pm:

Bonammassa again, he says I upset him. Yes, it is that personal, but is done in true terror pansy fashion, hidden in the open, in plain sight, where everyone can see it, but only few understand it.

That’s how real terror is done. In your face, but no one will fight against it, they just roll over and die.

[click2watch]

Can Bitcoin Win the Digital Payments ‘Gauge War’?

Simon Johnson is a Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management.

The following article originally appeared in Consensus Magazine, distributed exclusively to attendees of CoinDesk’s Consensus 2019 event.

The promise and potential of bitcoin as a technology is frequently described in terms of a platform. On top of bitcoin’s permissionless blockchain, the argument goes, all kinds of things could be built to reduce the power and profit of trusted intermediaries. If you fear and resent monopolies, particularly those that are becoming more obnoxious as the digital age progresses, this is an alluring future.

It may also be an illusion. Not only are the use cases so far rather limited, but increasingly implementations – upon closer inspection – turn out to be “permissioned” blockchains, which are actually some form of relatively centralized shared database controlled by trusted intermediaries.

The terminology and rhetoric may have changed, for activities such as organizing supply chains or clearing financial transactions, but the reality looks remarkably similar to what existed before bitcoin was invented. Bitcoin’s arrival, and the disruptive potential it vaguely represented seemed to goad various industries into exploring an old form of distributed database technology. But this is hardly a revolution.

Will bitcoin ever have a more meaningful impact on society than this?

Before we ponder that more deeply, let’s pause and reflect on what definitely already exists. Bitcoin has proved to be a remarkably robust means of making certain kinds of payments. It is also a store of value, albeit one that is highly volatile. Of course, bitcoin has also spawned a variety of other cryptocurrencies, which range from being reasonable propositions to completely unappealing.

In speculating on whether bitcoin and its imitators can progress beyond these modest beginnings, one important historical analogy is useful: the development of railways in the UK. Some initial railways were highly profitable (e.g., the Liverpool-Manchester line) and others were miracles of engineering (the Great Western) but in various senses less successful. Many of them were more humdrum. There was excessive competition in what became known as “The Gauge War,” as well as crazy moments of speculation and plenty of outright fraud. It was the first big capitalist boom, and it set the tone for pretty much everything else that followed.

A case study in disruption

What did railways really accomplish? There were three major impacts, some but not all of which were clear at the beginning.

First, railways broke the grip that canals had on the movement of heavy goods. Turnpikes, or toll roads, were fine for small-scale movement of passengers, but anything heavier needed to go by barge. Not surprisingly, canal owners were generally opposed to railway development, spawning fights that went on for years. This pitched battle was obvious to everyone who understood the transportation element in the pricing of coal and other traded goods.

Second, railways encouraged people to travel. The number of people traveling by rail, for example between Liverpool and Manchester, quickly surpassed the number who had been brave enough to take a stagecoach.

Third, railways created new jobs, but they also destroyed livelihoods. The people who ran and otherwise benefited from turnpikes did not do well. Over several decades, railways were a net positive on the jobs front – including many occupations that were relatively well-paid (although other jobs were most definitely dangerous and underpaid by any reasonable metric). The scale and scope of the economic and social impact was impressive – and likely a surprise to most people.

Most canals eventually went out of business, but what’s striking is how long it took. Some waterways remain financially viable at least until the end of the nineteenth century – roughly 60 years after the railway proof of concept was fully established – even though canal owners had done nothing new or clever to assure their survival.

A canal is a canal; there’s not much you can do to invest or upgrade this kind of physical infrastructure. The response on the side of the roads was quite different.

Over time, road surfaces improved a great deal. And the internal combustion engine, which gave rise to the automobile, proved to be a technological shift just as profound as putting a steam engine on wheels. Nothing lasts forever, as the owners of railway company stock discovered.

Take all of this back to bitcoin and assume that only the narrow version survives – solely a payments system. This could still be a major potential competitive threat to all forms of financial gatekeeper, but only insofar as bitcoin can outcompete its rivals among other means of digital payments. Various companies in this arena are trying to build railroads – some focused on functionality, others aiming for more elegant solutions.

But for the customer, it’s just about getting from A to B fastest at the lowest cost.

You really don’t care how Venmo works, or what happens when you use Apple Pay in a cab or receive a confirmation from PayPal, or even how your credit card works in a foreign chip & PIN sign system. All you care about is: did you know what the price was going to be, and could you settle in a way acceptable to both the payee and you. Various entities are holding risk within that payments system, but not you – at least not in a way that gives you any concern.

Bitcoin’s opportunity lies in how well it too can enable more seamless, low-cost digital transactions for people. (I don’t see bitcoin as a rival for cash, which will rise or fall in various societies, depending on whether people like immediate anonymous settlement – and how they feel about carrying around physical bundles with that characteristic.)

We go with what works

How will this shake out? Let’s take a lesson from Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Western Railway. Impressive engineering is good, but interoperability trumps it.

Brunel’s railway had a broader gauge than most other British lines, but it was eventually forced to adopt those standard gauges to connect with other lines. In the end, the network effect prevails – we go with what works more often and in more places.

Bitcoin may have helped spark the railroad age but there is no guarantee it will win. In fact, currently, it looks more like the Great Western – gets the job done, but at relatively high cost in a small community of users, and with features that can only be regarded as strange.

(The oddest part of the Great Western operation was a century-long contract (!) that required all London-Bristol trains to stop in Swindon, where there were monopoly providers of refreshments to that line. Lesson for crypto developers: long confirmation times and erratic spikes in transaction fees may seem attractive to some engineers; to ordinary customers these are discouraging.)

Bitcoin could still win the competition to provide better, cheaper, more reliable payments. Recent steps promised by Bakkt, for example, can be regarded as encouraging if they bring bitcoin closer to being used in mainstream commerce (e.g., for Starbucks). And every time I hear about the Lightning Network from a colleague at MIT, I also feel that the system is moving in the right direction toward low-cost, peer-to-peer payments.

Still, remember, the railway customer does not care if the railway will strengthen or undermine existing landowners or shake up the structure of power. Similarly, whether particular intermediaries will rise or fall is generally a matter of some indifference.

All that matters is: will the trains run on time, and how much does it cost to buy a ticket?

Boiler room image via Shutterstock

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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[j-kaiwa]

Discussion Article Jan 21st

Christian Wolmar, author of "Blood, Iron and Gold," on how trains changed the world and why the U.S. isn't seeing their greatest potential benefits.

If you’ve ever gotten annoyed at the meal service, or lack of it, on a cross-country flight, consider the plight of passengers a century ago traversing Russia on the Trans-Siberian railroad, the greatest transcontinental rail project of them all. As they rolled east toward Vladivostok, nearly 6,000 miles from their starting point, the crews stubbornly kept serving meals on Moscow time—until passengers were finally sitting down to a mid-afternoon breakfast, and digging into a hearty dinner at 3 a.m. Heartburn aside, they were still far better off than travelers of just a few years earlier, when the same journey took not weeks, but months of far more arduous travel.

Little details like this are half the fun of British transportation writer Christian Wolmar’s sweeping new history,Blood, Iron, and Gold: How Railroads Transformed the World. (Read an excerpt here.)He’s got an epic subject to work with. From their start in England in 1830, railroads spread like kudzu across the globe. They unified countries, created great fortunes, enabled the growth of new industries, and thoroughly revolutionized life in every place they ran. Yet the human tolls for some projects were ghastly, with deaths of native laborers running into the tens of thousands.

Wolmar doesn’t avoid these horror stories. But in his telling, trains ultimately emerge as forces of human progress. Though they’ve been eclipsed by automobiles as a means of travel—particularly in the United States—Wolmar predicts a resurgence. Not only are they more fuel-efficient, but as roads become ever more crowded and lines at airports grow, he writes, “Rail travel in modern trains is more attractive and pleasant than any other means of travel.”

He spoke recently with theAARP Bulletinabout the pleasures of train travel, and the past and future of the world’s railroads.

Q. A railroad—two rails, anyway—physically doesn’t look all that impressive. But you tell some surprising stories about what it took to lay down those rails in places around the world.

A. These were huge, unprecedented undertakings, and the stories of how they got built are quite dramatic. One of the most memorable and saddest stories is the building of the Panama railway. Not many people are aware of it, but it was the first transcontinental railway—very significant in its day. It’s just a little 50-mile railway through the jungle, but I estimate 6,000 lives were lost building it—around 120 people per mile.

Q. How did that happen?

A. It was built by a combination of Caribbeans, Irish and Chinese. What happened is that most of them died, except for the Caribbeans, who were immune to the tropical diseases. The most poignant thing I uncovered in my research was the fate of many of the Chinese workers. They were cut off from home, in difficult conditions, and many were going through opium withdrawal. They committed suicide en masse, in some cases asking other workers to cut off their heads with their machetes, or by simply walking into the sea.

Q. I didn’t learn about that in school.

A. You hear more about the work of the Chinese on the American railroad. Not long after the episode in Panama, they made a fantastic contribution to building the transcontinental railroad across North America, which changed everything for the United States.

Q. Did railroads really, as your subtitle puts it, transform the world? Didn’t they just speed things up somewhat?

A. It’s no exaggeration to use the word “transform.” You have to put yourself back in the perspective of people before the iron road. No one had traveled faster than a horse could gallop, and going more than 20 or 30 miles was a long journey.

Q. How quickly did all this occur?

A. It was rather quick. Within a short period of time from the beginning of the railways—in 20 to 30 years—you had tens of thousands of miles of track crossing the North American continent. People’s entire sense of the geography of places changed, and distances took on different meanings.

Q. How did life change?

A. Obviously, you could suddenly travel long distances quite easily. If you lived in a smaller city or town, you could travel 100 miles to a big city for business in a day, whereas before railroads that trip could well take a week. It changed life in other ways as well. People in New York and London suddenly had access to fresh milk, for instance. No longer did you have the sad situation of cows being kept in cellars in the middle of the city.

Q. How did people use their new freedom of movement?

A. Among other things, it really enabled the holiday industry. Here in Britain, around the late 1840s or 1850s, you started getting connections to seaside resorts. Before that, not many people were able to visit the sea.

Q. Trains have this aura of something out of the past. Do they really have any advantages today over other forms of transportation?

A. They have great advantages. One driver can take a couple hundred containers on the back of one train, whereas it would take 200 trucks. That’s 200 fewer trucks on the road, and a great savings of fuel, among other things.

Q. What about for passenger travel?

A. For people traveling by train, it’s a fantastic way to travel—far superior to cars in that you can sit down, read a book, look out the window, and not get exhausted just trying to get where you’re going. In London we have 3 million journeys a day on the London Underground system. If all those people got in their cars, it would be permanent gridlock.

Q. You write about the profound political effects of railroads. What were they?

A. Railroads were a unifying force for European nations. Neither Germany nor Italy were unified countries before the advent of railways. In both cases they helped create those nation states. In Belgium, they were seen as an important way of guaranteeing independence from Holland, from which the country had just broken away a few years previously.

Q. What about in the United States?

A. In America in particular, railroads are a fundamental uniting force. They started out allowing faster travel in the East and the South, but when they made that big jump across the continent, linking the two coasts, they became more important even than railroads were to Europe. They really created a United States that stretches from sea to sea.

Q. It’s interesting that a country that was such a leader in railroad development today has such an underdeveloped rail system.

A. The first major railway was in Britain, and much of the technology and practices that would be used around the world developed there, but it’s true that the United States quickly became the leader. At its high point, America had one-third of all the rail mileage in world. That’s not the case any longer, of course.

Q. Why do railroads in other countries so dramatically surpass those in the United States?

A. It’s part of a cultural ethic. It requires a strong state involvement to make intercity railways viable, and that hasn’t happened in America, where there’s always been a laissez-faire attitude toward railroad development. America realized that too late, and tried to compensate by creating Amtrak.

Q. You’re no fan of Amtrak.

A. Amtrak is a sad political construct. It could probably work more effectively if it weren’t so involved with pork barrel politics. It’s really a great shame. There’s no reason to spend that much money to run one train a day across the country, but there are places in America that have great potential for a really efficient high-speed rail system, if you only had proper investment.

Q. Like where?

A. From D.C. up to Boston is a perfect candidate for a dense intercity network. It has Amtrak’s Acela service now, but that has its problems. Track conditions really limit the speed of the trains in most places. There are perhaps parts of the West Coast and Midwest as well where passenger rail could be expanded.

Q. Any sign that anything is changing in the United States?

A. It’s a cultural thing. The Europeans have invested in high-speed rail, but until now America has not been willing to do that. But Obama has announced a big rail program, and perhaps now that will be reversed in a very historic way, and maybe America will get the rail program it needs

[ekkehard]

“Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor”

It was a glorious morning. The sun was shining and the wind was from the Southeast. Up especially early, a tall bony, redheaded young Virginian found time to buy a new thermometer, for which he paid three pounds, fifteen shillings. He also bought gloves for Martha, his wife, who was ill at home.

Thomas Jefferson arrived early at the statehouse. The temperature was 72.5 degrees and the horseflies weren’t nearly so bad at that hour. It was a lovely room, very large, with gleaming white walls. The chairs were comfortable. Facing the single door were two brass fireplaces, but they would not be used today.

The moment the door was shut, and it was always kept locked, the room became an oven. The tall windows were shut, so that loud quarreling voices could not be heard by passersby. Small openings atop the windows allowed a slight stir of air, and also a large number of horseflies. Jefferson records that “the horseflies were dexterous in finding necks, and the silk of stockings was nothing to them.” All discussing was punctuated by the slap of hands on necks.

On the wall at the back, facing the president’s desk, was a panoply — consisting of a drum, swords, and banners seized from Fort Ticonderoga the previous year. Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured the place, shouting that they were taking it “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”

Now Congress got to work, promptly taking up an emergency measure about which there was discussion but no dissension. “Resolved: That an application be made to the Committee of Safety of Pennsylvania for a supply of flints for the troops at New York.”

Then Congress transformed itself into a committee of the whole. The Declaration of Independence was read aloud once more, and debate resumed. Though Jefferson was the best writer of all of them, he had been somewhat verbose. Congress hacked the excess away. They did a good job, as a side-by-side comparison of the rough draft and the final text shows. They cut the phrase “by a self-assumed power.” “Climb” was replaced by “must read,” then “must” was eliminated, then the whole sentence, and soon the whole paragraph was cut. Jefferson groaned as they continued what he later called “their depredations.” “Inherent and inalienable rights” came out “certain unalienable rights,” and to this day no one knows who suggested the elegant change.

A total of 86 alterations were made. Almost 500 words were eliminated, leaving 1,337. At last, after three days of wrangling, the document was put to a vote.

Here in this hall Patrick Henry had once thundered: “I am no longer a Virginian, sir, but an American.” But today the loud, sometimes bitter argument stilled, and without fanfare the vote was taken from north to south by colonies, as was the custom. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

There were no trumpets blown. No one stood on his chair and cheered. The afternoon was waning and Congress had no thought of delaying the full calendar of routine business on its hands. For several hours they worked on many other problems before adjourning for the day.

Much To Lose

What kind of men were the 56 signers who adopted the Declaration of Independence and who, by their signing, committed an act of treason against the crown? To each of you, the names Franklin, Adams, Hancock and Jefferson are almost as familiar as household words. Most of us, however, know nothing of the other signers. Who were they? What happened to them?

I imagine that many of you are somewhat surprised at the names not there: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry. All were elsewhere.

Ben Franklin was the only really old man. Eighteen were under 40; three were in their 20s. Of the 56 almost half – 24 – were judges and lawyers. Eleven were merchants, nine were landowners and farmers, and the remaining 12 were doctors, ministers, and politicians.

With only a few exceptions, such as Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, these were men of substantial property. All but two had families. The vast majority were men of education and standing in their communities. They had economic security as few men had in the 18th Century.

Each had more to lose from revolution than he had to gain by it. John Hancock, one of the richest men in America, already had a price of 500 pounds on his head. He signed in enormous letters so that his Majesty could now read his name without glasses and could now double the reward. Ben Franklin wryly noted: “Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately.”

Fat Benjamin Harrison of Virginia told tiny Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: “With me it will all be over in a minute, but you, you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”

These men knew what they risked. The penalty for treason was death by hanging. And remember, a great British fleet was already at anchor in New York Harbor.

They were sober men. There were no dreamy-eyed intellectuals or draft card burners here. They were far from hot-eyed fanatics yammering for an explosion. They simply asked for the status quo. It was change they resisted. It was equality with the mother country they desired. It was taxation with representation they sought. They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.

It was principle, not property, that had brought these men to Philadelphia. Two of them became presidents of the United States. Seven of them became state governors. One died in office as vice president of the United States. Several would go on to be US Senators. One, the richest man in America, in 1828 founded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. One, a delegate from Philadelphia, was the only real poet, musician and philosopher of the signers. (It was he, Francis Hopkinson not Betsy Ross who designed the United States flag.)

Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, had introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776. He was prophetic in his concluding remarks: “Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law.

“The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repost.

“If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American Legislatures of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens.”

Though the resolution was formally adopted July 4, it was not until July 8 that two of the states authorized their delegates to sign, and it was not until August 2 that the signers met at Philadelphia to actually put their names to the Declaration.

William Ellery, delegate from Rhode Island, was curious to see the signers’ faces as they committed this supreme act of personal courage. He saw some men sign quickly, “but in no face was he able to discern real fear.” Stephan Hopkins, Ellery’s colleague from Rhode Island, was a man past 60. As he signed with a shaking pen, he declared: “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

“Most Glorious Service”

Close up of the Declaration of Independence

Even before the list was published, the British marked down every member of Congress suspected of having put his name to treason. All of them became the objects of vicious manhunts. Some were taken. Some, like Jefferson, had narrow escapes. All who had property or families near British strongholds suffered.

Francis Lewis, New York delegate saw his home plundered — and his estates in what is now Harlem — completely destroyed by British Soldiers. Mrs. Lewis was captured and treated with great brutality. Though she was later exchanged for two British prisoners through the efforts of Congress, she died from the effects of her abuse.

William Floyd, another New York delegate, was able to escape with his wife and children across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where they lived as refugees without income for seven years. When they came home they found a devastated ruin.

Philips Livingstone had all his great holdings in New York confiscated and his family driven out of their home. Livingstone died in 1778 still working in Congress for the cause.

Louis Morris, the fourth New York delegate, saw all his timber, crops, and livestock taken. For seven years he was barred from his home and family.

John Hart of Trenton, New Jersey, risked his life to return home to see his dying wife. Hessian soldiers rode after him, and he escaped in the woods. While his wife lay on her deathbed, the soldiers ruined his farm and wrecked his homestead. Hart, 65, slept in caves and woods as he was hunted across the countryside. When at long last, emaciated by hardship, he was able to sneak home, he found his wife had already been buried, and his 13 children taken away. He never saw them again. He died a broken man in 1779, without ever finding his family.

Dr. John Witherspoon, signer, was president of the College of New Jersey, later called Princeton. The British occupied the town of Princeton, and billeted troops in the college. They trampled and burned the finest college library in the country.

Judge Richard Stockton, another New Jersey delegate signer, had rushed back to his estate in an effort to evacuate his wife and children. The family found refuge with friends, but a Tory sympathizer betrayed them. Judge Stockton was pulled from bed in the night and brutally beaten by the arresting soldiers. Thrown into a common jail, he was deliberately starved. Congress finally arranged for Stockton’s parole, but his health was ruined. The judge was released as an invalid, when he could no longer harm the British cause.

He returned home to find his estate looted and did not live to see the triumph of the Revolution. His family was forced to live off charity.

Robert Morris, merchant prince of Philadelphia, delegate and signer, met Washington’s appeals and pleas for money year after year. He made and raised arms and provisions which made it possible for Washington to cross the Delaware at Trenton. In the process he lost 150 ships at sea, bleeding his own fortune and credit almost dry.

George Clymer, Pennsylvania signer, escaped with his family from their home, but their property was completely destroyed by the British in the Germantown and Brandywine campaigns.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, also from Pennsylvania, was forced to flee to Maryland. As a heroic surgeon with the army, Rush had several narrow escapes.

John Martin, a Tory in his views previous to the debate, lived in a strongly loyalist area of Pennsylvania. When he came out for independence, most of his neighbors and even some of his relatives ostracized him. He was a sensitive and troubled man, and many believed this action killed him. When he died in 1777, his last words to his tormentors were: “Tell them that they will live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it [the signing] to have been the most glorious service that I have ever rendered to my country.”

William Ellery, Rhode Island delegate, saw his property and home burned to the ground.

Thomas Lynch, Jr., South Carolina delegate, had his health broken from privation and exposures while serving as a company commander in the military. His doctors ordered him to seek a cure in the West Indies and on the voyage, he and his young bride were drowned at sea.

Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, and Thomas Heyward, Jr., the other three South Carolina signers, were taken by the British in the siege of Charleston. They were carried as prisoners of war to St. Augustine, Florida, where they were singled out for indignities. They were exchanged at the end of the war, the British in the meantime having completely devastated their large landholdings and estates.

Thomas Nelson, signer of Virginia, was at the front in command of the Virginia military forces. With British General Charles Cornwallis in Yorktown, fire from 70 heavy American guns began to destroy Yorktown piece by piece. Lord Cornwallis and his staff moved their headquarters into Nelson’s palatial home. While American cannonballs were making a shambles of the town, the house of Governor Nelson remained untouched. Nelson turned in rage to the American gunners and asked, “Why do you spare my home?”

They replied, “Sir, out of respect to you.” Nelson cried, “Give me the cannon!” and fired on his magnificent home himself, smashing it to bits. But Nelson’s sacrifice was not quite over. He had raised $2 million for the Revolutionary cause by pledging his own estates. When the loans came due, a newer peacetime Congress refused to honor them, and Nelson’s property was forfeited. He was never reimbursed. He died, impoverished, a few years later at the age of 50.

Lives, Fortunes, Honor

Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were at one time or another the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his pledged word. Their honor, and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.

And, finally, there is the New Jersey signer, Abraham Clark.

He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army. They were captured and sent to that infamous British prison hulk afloat in New York Harbor known as the hell ship Jersey, where 11,000 American captives were to die. The younger Clarks were treated with a special brutality because of their father. One was put in solitary and given no food. With the end almost in sight, with the war almost won, no one could have blamed Abraham Clark for acceding to the British request when they offered him his sons’ lives if he would recant and come out for the King and Parliament. The utter despair in this man’s heart, the anguish in his very soul, must reach out to each one of us down through 200 years with his answer: “No.”

The 56 signers of the Declaration Of Independence proved by their every deed that they made no idle boast when they composed the most magnificent curtain line in history. “And for the support of this Declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

RUSH EPILOGUE: My friends, I know you have a copy of the Declaration of Independence somewhere around the house – in an old history book (newer ones may well omit it), an encyclopedia, or one of those artificially aged “parchments” we all got in school years ago. I suggest that each of you take the time this month to read through the text of the Declaration, one of the most noble and beautiful political documents in human history.

There is no more profound sentence than this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…”

These are far more than mere poetic words. The underlying ideas that infuse every sentence of this treatise have sustained this nation for more than two centuries. They were forged in the crucible of great sacrifice. They are living words that spring from and satisfy the deepest cries for liberty in the human spirit.

“Sacred honor” isn’t a phrase we use much these days, but every American life is touched by the bounty of this, the Founders’ legacy. It is freedom, tested by blood, and watered with tears.