A while back, I wrote this piece on Trent Lott and his idiotic statements about Strom Thurmond. Tonight, I received this comment from a girl named Crystal:
I'am an 8th student who is in middle school in Brooklny NewYork.I think it was wrong that you wanted Segragation this would really would effect me and my friends if we had Segragation today because i have friends of many rasis and if we had to be separated i would of never met any of my wounder full friends that i have.My friends mean alot to me if i never would of met them my life would'nt be like it is today for me.
Crystal, thanks for reading and responding; I write this stuff for that very reason. I'm impressed that you are looking at sites like mine when other kids your age never seem to make it past the games and the chat rooms.
But you have a few mistaken beliefs that I must correct.
I don't support segregation and never have. The whole point of the piece was how stupid it was for Trent Lott to say such an idiotic thing. All I can guess is that you have been taught that all of us in the South supported segregation, and that simply is not true.
Yes, there are difficulties in race relations in the South, I've seen those same difficulties everywhere I've lived, from Bremerton, WA to Ballston Spa, NY, and from Youngstown, OH to Orlando, FL.
Yes, people in the South resisted forced integration, but the trigger for that resistance wasn't the integration; it was the force. Most communities, whether in the South or the North, reacted the same way when integration was forced on them; the resisted the force applied from the federal government, which often took the form of armed soldiers facing down unarmed citizens.
There's an old saying, "The ends don't justify the means," and while the end the federal government was fighting for was noble, the means they used were not, and cost us all decades of fear, hate, and mistrust.
I'm not going to lie to you and say that everything is great here, because it isn't. There are still bigots here, as there are everywhere, but they are a dying breed.
Again, thanks for reading, and writing to me, and I hope I've given you a little more information than you had before.
Take care.
Posted by Rich at February 11, 2003 10:19 PM