In the news…
LBJ gets short shrift in the new
movie, Selma.
Why am I not surprised?
The headline says: “Hollywood takes
history into its own hands.” The review is an op-ed piece in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch the other day. You can read it here. But the gist of it is that
the president who “did more to bring about social equality than any President
since Lincoln … had feet of clay;” and the real work of Selma’s legacy was done
without the sitting President’s help.
Hmmm. I always think of Dr. Martin
Luther King front and center facing off with frowning white guys with weapons.
So where was LBJ?
Maybe the truth is in an attendant
editorial cartoon showing a couple looking at a poster for Selma, the flick, with a caption reading: “It’s the original ‘I
can’t breathe’.”
*
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the news we
learn that in Richmond homeless folk are to be barred from under a new bridge
by a $53,000 chunk out of the taxpayers’ hides for a high-tech fence.
And the bridge is not that big.
But to hear the comments of various
poohbahs interviewed for the story by the ‘paper, the tone is as if the
homeless do not exist You may read the whole thing for yourself here.
What’s really going on is painfully
evident to we the peeps – our “leaders” are dancing on the heads of pins while
they are nowhere close to being angels.
*
So are Richmond’s homeless just as
invisible as the shades of the poor slaves who suffered mightily and were
buried on or near a plot other poohbahs want for a baseball park?
And it’s a baseball park that some
say will never attract the fans that have turned out for the sport since my grandfather’s
generation – Mooer’s Field, which was followed by Parker Field, and now The
Diamond – all in the same general area just off an Interstate highway.
*
Meanwhile, your humble scrivener
was rescued from all that folderol’s angst while “Adjudicating” at the
Appomattox Regional Governor’s School Literary Arts division where his faith in
humankind’s ability to deal with the world thrived surrounded by grace, humor,
and budding literary talent.
I speak, of course, of the several
dozen eighth graders from throughout the
counties, cities, and towns of Central Virginia in the admission’s process for one
of the region’s best secondary schools.
Absent was the denial, posturing,
and all-too-transparent façade of adults leading the charge for a fence to keep
homeless people from their age-old custom of sleeping under bridges…
I
was like – if not THERE, then WHERE? Fifty-three large would make a pretty good down-payment on a homeless shelter, but a fence? Come on.
… and the ducking, bobbing and
weaving of poohbahs defending the indefensible – suburbanites’ hootin’,
hollerin’, and drinking gallons of celebratory milkshake cups of beer in a
place that should be preserved, protected, and reverenced as a place of
remembrance for what some would rather forget.
