The way it really was…..

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act passing, some people took it seriously. Here is an example of what happened (from Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm p. 366:
“Blacks seeking to exercise their new rights at a Selma, Alabama , movie theater were assaulted by whites, and made a celebrity of an Atlanta restaurateur named Lester Maddox who chased them away with a pistol (the Los Angeles County Young Republicans unanimously passed a resolution commending Maddox and asserting that the federal government “has no legitimate business protecting civil-rights carpetbaggers in the South”).
Unanimously. You see, it was all about states’ rights with no animus toward Blacks. These assholes say the same thing today.
Here is a long quotes from George Packer’s excerpt from his book, published last May in The Atlantic: on p. 95 (if you do not recognize the name Sarajevo; it was a city besieged by Serbian forces and was the focus of the world’s attention for a long while due to the horrors inflicted on the population there):

“….. a woman in Sarajevo named Aida began to experience insomnia Though she had lived through the entire siege, she never counted herself among the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians with post-traumatic stress disorder, but now, two decades after the war, she lay awake night after night, unable to take her eyes off the American presidential campaign on TV. Something about the people at Donald Trump’s rallies was deeply familiar to Aida-their clothes, their faces, their teeth, the men’s mustaches, the women’s hair and makeup, the illogic of their grievances, their rage, their need for an enemy. She knew these people, and as she watched them her heartbeat raced, her breathing turned rapid and shallow. She began having flashbacks, not to the war but to the years just before it, when things once unacceptable even to think suddenly became commonplace to say, until every boundary of decency was erased. Moments in the American campaign brought up uncanny counterparts from those years in the Balkans. Late one night, during the Republican National Convention, Aida suddenly heard the voices of a million Serbs in the streets of Belgrade shouting for the head of a Kosovar leader -“Arrest Vllasi! Arrest Vllasi!”- while Milosevic cupped his ear and goaded them, “I can’t hear you!” In Cleveland they were chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Aida knew where it would all lead, and she tried to warn her American friends that Trump was going to win. They found this hilarious, especially when she offered them a refuge in her country, in her house- a hiding place in Bosnia after the shit hit the fan in America and her Bay Area friends realized that the other side had all the weapons. Trump’s victory inspired no “I told you so”s from Aida. After all, she had refused to see her own war coming.”

 

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