Sour Grapes Post Election 2012

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Black woman speaks on Tilikum

Here's a quote...." ... was quick to put up a call to action on its Web site asking for a boycott of all aquariums and whale and dolphin shows. The site notes it has "long been asking SeaWorld to stop taking wild, ocean-going mammals from their families and ocean homes and confining them with no semblance of a life to an area that, to them, is the size of a bathtub."


I am truly a woman of color --- and my perspective??   Does this sound anything like the ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN?   Always acting outside of God's intended purpose of a people or an animal...   and WHY.... Money / profit driven.....

Say I'm crazy of off-base if you want to.....

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

"Love is a won’erful thing. A mother al’ays loves her chillun. Don’t care whut dey do. Dey may do ‘rong but it’s still her chile. Den dere is de love uv’ va ‘oman fer her man, but it ain’t nut’in lack a mother’s love fer her chillun. I loves a man when he treats me right but I ain’t never had no graveyard love fer no man...."


- Sarah Fitzpatrick, former slave, 1938

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A Ship called COMFORT!

bed capacity: In casualty receiving, I have 50 beds," said Lieutenant Commander Dan D'Aurora, the Division Officer for Casualty Receiving on the USNS Comfort. "We've got 12 operating rooms; we've got 20 recovery beds. We have 80 intensive care beds, 400 intermediate care and 500 minimal care."





"This is essentially a hospital within a ship," he said. "In other words, they took a supertanker into the drydock, they hollowed it out like a canoe and dropped in the hospital, plain and simple."

A hospital that is now staffed by more than 550 medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and a variety of surgeons. They boarded the ship in the port of Baltimore Friday evening, arriving there on short notice from across the United States. Now, they are cruising toward Haiti at speeds of up to 24 kilometers per hour.

Ship pulled out of Baltimore, MD....  will probably be there six months!!! YEAH
Just so proud of my USA....


aid and benefits of a nearly $1 billion globally -- doctors and troops to the impoverished Caribbean nation. The U.S. Navy's floating hospital, USNS Comfort, dropped anchor TODAY -- day eight?? 550 medical staff, joining teams from about 30 other countries trying to treat the injured. Helping Haiti - my people!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A successful Slave Revolt


Haiti was created in 1804, the product of Toussaint Louverture’s and Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ successful slave revolt against the French. Illiterate Haitian peasants defeated Europe’s most advanced army through discipline and communal sacrifice. They repelled 50,000 French troops sent by Napoleon to preserve for France the “Pearl of the Antilles,” whose annual production of coffee and sugar had supplied all of Europe throughout the 18th century. Denied this lucrative supply post, Napoleon sold off Louisiana to U.S. President Jefferson: and thus, the territory of the United States was doubled thanks to the impertinent slaves of one-third of a smallish Caribbean island!

Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois and William Faulkner all had links with and a fascination for the dark courage of this determined people — Douglass was Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Haiti and Dubois had family roots on the island, and Haiti and its people figured in William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom. Even the Haitians’ opponents were charmed. A contingent of Polish conscripts under Napoleon’s ill-fated General Leclerc defected, and fought side by side with slaves who knew they faced either slavery, freedom, or death, yet chose freedom and the risk of death rather than submission. Much, much later, even under the opportunistic and cruel regime of Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) at the height of the Cold War, the Haitian government welcomed Polish citizens without visas as an expression of undying gratitude. Blue-eyed Haitians can still be found in the southwestern region of the country.

After Columbus’ first voyage to the present site of Cape Haitian, Queen Isabela of Spain asked him to describe the land he called “Hispaniola.” According to legend he took a sheet of paper, crumpled it in his hand and placed it on a table before the Queen, to describe its rugged and mountainous landscape. The land has been Haiti’s blessing and its curse ever since: it was the most fertile and productive land in the world in the 18th century, yet is now a partial wasteland of deforested hills. Today hunger and poverty prevail. In the marketplaces shopkeepers peddle a hamburger-shaped comestible made of clay and sugar, made to “deceive hunger” for citizens in one of the world’s hungriest and most densely populated countries.

Mountains beyond mountains....

The mountainous terrain —“Deye mon, gen mon” (beyond the mountains, more mountains) — has isolated the different parts of the country from each other, retarding true nation-building. The geographical barriers are compounded by the local Creole language, which, while expressive and colorful, cuts off the citizenry from world markets and culture.


When the French colonists brought thousands of Africans in chains to Haiti, the only interest they had in those slaves was their muscle power. They did nothing to educate them. Slave owners even tried to prohibit their slaves from learning to read and write. Then the unthinkable happened. In 1791 a slave revolt broke out in northern Haiti. Napoleon's armies could not quell it. Ten years of bloody struggle followed. Finally, the slaves forced their French masters to withdraw, climaxing the first successful slave rebellion in history. They were, however, a nation of illiterates.


While the Haitians won their political independence, they remained culturally tied to France. Only a tiny minority of Haitians ever mastered the French language. Still, French language and culture were placed on a pedestal. If you craved social status, you had to speak French. Haitians who spoke only Creole, an oral language, were looked down upon. Such cultural and linguistic snobbery created a tiny elite who knew French. The masses who spoke only Creole remained illiterate. Until the middle of this century, no one bothered to put Creole in written form. Only when a Methodist missionary turned oral Creole into a written language did the literacy door finally begin to creak open for Haiti.

Almost every one of Haiti's constitutions has decreed compulsory education. Unfortunately, the government has never found the money to carry out that mandate. In addition, Haiti's chief religion, voodoo, has no sacred book. Thus it does not provide a stimulus either to learn to read or to produce printed material in Haitian's heart language. How different from Christianity, whose converts hunger to learn to read from God's Book!

Not being able to read gives you a kind of blindness. You may have eyes, but your brain cannot interpret what you see on the printed page. As far as comprehending, you may as well be blind. Unless you can read, you are walled off from technological advances, from important health and medical advice, from agricultural breakthroughs. Even God's written Word has no power for you unless someone reads it aloud to you.

From a Nazarene article....

http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/linking.htm...... Haiti as our "Exhibit A." This small nation lies just east of Cuba on the western third of a mountainous island called Hispaniola. It was this island that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492.


Spanish settlers followed Columbus to Hispaniola. They tried enslaving the native Arawak Indians. As you might expect, some of the Indians resisted losing their freedom. They were slaughtered on the spot. The rest of their fellow tribesmen began dying from gross maltreatment. From the first page of Haiti's modern history thus oozes the ruthlessness that Romans 1:31 associates with godless human beings.

Things did not improve in Haiti. French pirates arrived, hiding in coastal coves. Some started plantations of sugar, coffee, cocoa, indigo, and cotton. Plantations needed lots of cheap labor. By then the Indians had all died. So these Frenchmen headed for Africa to recruit workers at gunpoint. At the height of the West Indies slave trade, more than 700 ships regularly crisscrossed the Atlantic. Their cargo? Chained human beings. For thousands of Africans, a tropical paradise dissolved into a living hell.

In the late 1700s those slaves successfully revolted against their French masters. Tragically, even liberty from colonial masters did not stop the bloodshed. Repeated periods of civil unrest, brutal kings, and cruel dictators led one American couple to write a history of Haiti called Written in Blood. Another author poignantly says that Haiti is a country "whose soil has drunk more blood than sweat."

A lot of reading on Haiti History

James Theodore Holly, a Black American who was the first Episcopal bishop of Haiti, once called that Caribbean island nation: "the Mary Magdalene of the nations, possessed by seven devils."1 Among the devils which Holly went on to enumerate was voodoo, that syncretistic religion practiced by about ninety percent of the Haitians. His negative evaluation of voodoo's contribution to Haiti echoes that of several other writers.


Monday, January 11, 2010

Free Digital Publication

The January 2010 Edition of Shades of the Departed has been published.  There are twelve articles--including a dreadfully good piece of fiction--written by a variety of family historians and family archivists, all edited by our friend, the footnoteMaven.
ancestories1.blogspot.com

All I have to do is

Just Keep on Livin.....    and there will always be a story to tell.   Race, culture, our environment..... It's always revealing.  

I noticed Sunday night, Senator Reid . . .negative remarks... he's forgiven by Obama.....

what's up??? 


To get ahead of myself......     my word for the day is

racial animus......people who hold a racial animus toward Obama



an-i-mus    –noun


1. strong dislike or enmity; hostile attitude; animosity.


Former Rep. Harold Ford said "I don't believe in any way Harry Reid --- DEMOCRAT FROM NEVADA --- had any racial animus. I think there's an important distinction between he and Trent Lott."

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Words of MLK

BLACKS IN AMERICA (From Birmingham jail, 1963): "Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands."




Monday, December 28, 2009

What is TIDE ?? 


The existing system was established by the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. It was designed to close gaps in intelligence-sharing that allowed a number of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers to enter the United States, although the CIA had identified them overseas as terrorism suspects.


The reforms set up the National Counterterrorism Center, which administers a huge database of terrorism information called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE.
My new word for the day....“Reasonable suspicion requires ‘articulable’ facts which, taken together with rational inferences, reasonably warrant a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of or related to terrorism and terrorist activities, and is based on the totality of the circumstances. Mere guesses or inarticulate "hunches" are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion.”


In the case of Umar Abdulmutallab, national security officials said, the information from the Embassy about his father’s concerns, while considered important enough to enter in TIDE, the raw intelligence database maintained by NCTC, was regarded as insufficient to cause the Terrorist Screening Center to enter Abdulmutallab in its master data base, known as the "Consolidated Terrorist Watch List, a national security official said.

Nigerian Umar.... Scary & Tragic.....

alleged failed transatlantic underpants bomber


A Justice Department official said Umar Abdulmutallab was released Sunday from a Michigan hospital where he was treated for burns suffered in the failed bombing. He was in a federal prison in Milan, Mich., according to the Associated Press. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Michigan on Jan. 8.


The youngest of 16 children of a prominent Nigerian bank executive, and the son of the second of his father's two wives, Abdulmutallab was raised at the family home in Kaduna, a city in Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north, relatives there said. He graduated with an engineering degree from City University in London. Later, his father sent him to Dubai to study for an advanced business degree.


In July, relatives said, his father agreed to his request to study Arabic in Yemen. The family became concerned in August when Abdulmutallab called to say he had dropped the course but would remain in Yemen for an undisclosed purpose. Several days later, they said, he sent a text message saying he was severing all ties with his family.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

I'm going to make a quilt reflecting this beautiful thought of MLK!!!


 I'm feeling the musics notes on fabric......

democracy....

to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
With this faith..............

MLK defined the African-American struggle for equal civil rights s "America's third revolution,".... one that was necessary to bring its disenfranchised black citizenry into the democratic fold.


     "Yes, we are in the midst of revolution.... but our struggle must be tempered by love....

We shall overcome because the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  With this faith... (he promised)   we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:08:02 -0500

To: bquiltin@hotmail.com
From: info@barackobama.com

Subject: Where we stand  


Beverly --

Early this morning, the Senate made history and health reform cleared its most important hurdle yet -- garnering the 60 votes needed to move toward a final vote in that chamber later this week.

This marks the first time in our nation's history that comprehensive health reform has come to this point. And it appears that the American people will soon realize the genuine reform that offers security to those who have health insurance and affordable options to those who do not.

I'm grateful to Senator Harry Reid and every senator who's been working around the clock to make this happen. And I'm grateful to you, and every member of the Organizing for America community, for all the work you have done to make this progress possible.

After a nearly century-long struggle, we are now on the cusp of making health insurance reform a reality in the United States of America.

As with any legislation, compromise is part of the process. But I'm pleased that recently added provisions have made this landmark bill even stronger. Between the time when the bill passes and the time when the insurance exchanges get up and running, insurance companies that try to jack up their rates do so at their own peril. Those who hike their prices may be barred from selling plans on the exchanges.

And while insurance companies will be prevented from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions once the exchanges are open, in the meantime there will be a high-risk pool where people with pre-existing conditions can purchase affordable coverage.


A recent amendment has made these protections even stronger. Insurance companies will now be prohibited from denying coverage to children immediately after this bill passes. There's also explicit language in this bill that will protect a patient's choice of doctor. And small businesses will get additional assistance as well.

These protections are in addition to the ones we've been talking about for some time. No longer will insurance companies be able to drop your coverage if you become sick and no longer will you have to pay unlimited amounts out of your own pocket for treatments that you need.

Under this bill families will save on their premiums; businesses that would see their costs rise if we don't act will save money now and in the future. This bill will strengthen Medicare and extend the life of the program. Because it's paid for and gets rid of waste and inefficiency in our health care system, this will be the largest deficit reduction plan in over a decade.

Finally, this reform will extend coverage to more than 30 million Americans who don't have it.

These are not small changes. These are big changes. They're fundamental reforms. They will save money. They will save lives.

And your passion, your work, your organizing helped make all of this possible. Now it's time to finish the job.

Thank you,
President Barack Obama

Thursday, December 17, 2009

D L Hugley spoke this morning on radio...

Rightly, that whenever America (predominantly White) behaves or reacts... please deconstruct the situation.  It is thru the lens of  RACE, Money, Fame, Power, Dominance

Which is why I also reflected on OJ Simpson, Jack Johnson..... The Tiger syndrome... is one that white sportscasters and news media are havin a field day on his head.... They could not beat him on the golf course... so thus his morals and life is to be foot-noted with scandal.

And again,,, white america... how dare you -- with all of your atrocities against mankind... Have you forgotten the Timothy McVeighs, the Don Edwards -- slick lawyer running for the highest office in the land, --- and simutaenously cheating on a wife who is battling cancer/mother of 4-5 kids--- same time he has an out of wedlock child, pays off to keep it silence.....   OOPSssss  that's over and forgotton... and not the biggest story of the year????


But my son Tiger.... yep I still claim that young kid!  Being saved by God's grace... I know he needs salvation for direction in his life!

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:   The Lord make his face shine upon thee,  And be gracious unto thee:Numbers 6: 24-25-26


The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee,  And give thee peace….

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Paul Lawrence Dunbar.. said


We wear the mask that grins and lies

It hides our eyes and shades our eyes

This debt we pay to human guile

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

And mouth with myriad subtleties

From my notes July 2009 . . . .


For Sojourner Truth, both racism and sexism mediated against the democracy with which Americans has become comfortable


I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de women at de Norf all a talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon

Her life stood in stark contrast to that of most 19th Century white American women. She, like most black women of that time, plowed, planted and hoed, did as much work as a man, endured the brutal punishment meted out by slaveholders, their wives and overseers, and fulfilled her ordained role of motherhood.

For antebellum black women – sexism was one out of three constraints.
1. Black in a white society
2. slave in a free society
3. woman in a society ruled by men

Most were slaves, and as such, denied the privilege enjoyed by white feminists—of say, theorizing about bondage—for they were indeed owned by someone else.

They were slaves because they were African and Black in skin color – color being the absolute determinant of class in antebellum America.

Absolute power for the master meant absolute dependency for the slave—“the dependency not of a developing child – but of the perpetual child.”

WHITES WROTE MOST OF ANTEBELLUM AMERICA’S RECORDS AND BLACK MEN WROTE JUST ABOUT ALL OF THE ANTEBELLUM RECORDS LEFT BY BLACKS