E Wayne Ross

From: The Onion

“I Wonder What Kind Of Message I’m Sending To The Troops”
By Jane Merrick
March 13, 2006 | Issue 42•11

I support the troops from the bottom of my heart. But my question is, do they know that? What if I’m somehow sending them the wrong message?

The other day I lost the magnetic yellow ribbon from my car, and I didn’t even notice until my neighbor pointed it out. Just think: It could have fallen off days or even weeks before! And there I was: driving up and down all over town just as happy as you please, all but announcing, “Jane Merrick doesn’t support our troops!”

I went to the gas station to buy another magnet right away, but they were sold out. So here I am without one. And the way everybody is around here, they’ll talk. What if this gets back to the troops somehow?

Or take the other night when my husband and I were watching Leno. He cracked this wiseacre one-liner about the president, and it just busted Ted and me up. Then suddenly, we both trailed off and stared at each other in ominous silence. I’ll admit the joke seemed harmless enough, but just imagine those poor soldiers, covered with the arid dust and sand of a foreign land, huddling for cover, engaging in pitched small-arms firefights with enemy insurgents on a daily basis. What would they think if they saw me sprawled out on the living-room sofa set, eating pretzels, cackling with irreverence at the expense of their commander in chief?

If I unwittingly sent a message to the troops that hurt their feelings, I am truly sorry. I would never knowingly make them feel that nobody back here in the homeland believed in them or thought they weren’t incredibly special, which they are. I don’t want to accidentally lower our troops’ self-esteem, especially in a time of crisis like this. Maybe after the war is over, that may be the time to raise questions about our leaders and laugh at the TV hosts, but certainly not now. Right now, we have to think about the troops. And, even more important, the messages we may or may not be sending them.

What would the troops think about our yard? And I don’t mean just about our flag. When I don’t bag our leaves, am I basically saying, “To heck with you, troops”?

Are the troops aware of all the remodeling I’ve been doing in the basement rec room? If so, what message are they getting from that?

I read in the paper that a lot of the troops are complaining about the war, and want to come home. They’re putting their lives on the line. It’s my duty to support them, but I get confused. What message am I sending the troops if I read articles like that? For that matter, what kind of a message are those troops sending themselves? They are the troops, but it almost sounds like they’re not supporting the troops!

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that last statement to sound anti-troops.

If the troops knew what I was thinking, what would they say? “First she has it one way, then she changes it all around”? Maybe they’re saying, “Who does this lady think she is? She doesn’t know what she wants! Our morale is sapped! We’re losing our will to fight!” America would be defeated by Iraq, and terrorists would rule over us.

Oh gosh, no! I just want to clear up any possible misunderstandings over previous mixed messages I might have sent the troops.

I support them, and I implore them to provide me with any feedback they may have on how I might be adversely affecting their daily lives.

© Copyright 2006, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

On March 6, Anne Braden, revered white anti-racist southern activist Anne Braden died at the age of 81 in Louisville, KY.

While I lived in Louisville I had the opportunity to meet Anne who was tremendous force in working against racism, segregation, and white supremacy.

“Braden catapulted into national headlines in mid-1954 when she and her husband Carl Braden were indicted for sedition for their leadership in desegregating a Louisville, Kentucky, suburb. Their purchase of a house in an all-white neighborhood on behalf of African Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade violated Louisville’s color line and provoked violence against both families, culminating with the dynamiting of the house in June of 1954. A subsequent grand jury investigation concentrated not on the neighborhood’s harassment of the Wades, but looked to the Bradens’ supposedly communistic intentions in backing the purchase, and they were indicted for sedition that fall. The couple’s sedition case made national news and earned them the ire of segregationists across the South, which was reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s condemnation of school segregation in its Brown ruling earlier that spring.

Only Carl was convicted, and that conviction was later overturned. The sedition charges left the Bradens pariahs, branded as radicals and “reds” in the Cold-War South, and they became fierce civil libertarians who openly espoused left-wing social critiques but would never either embrace nor disavow the Communist Party publicly because they felt that to do so accepted the terms of the 1950s anticommunist “witch hunts.” (From The Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression press release on Braden’s death.)

For a detailed account of Braden’s life and work, I strongly recommend the book Subsersive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Stuggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Cate Fosl. KAARPR press release continuted:

“Anne Braden’s memoir of the case, The Wall Between, was published in 1958, becoming one of the few accounts of its era to probe the psychology of white southern racism from within. Their case also introduced the Bradens to the civil rights movement blossoming farther south, in which white allies were few and far between. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., meeting Anne Braden in 1957, pronounced her “the most amazing white woman” in her unswerving dedication to civil rights. The Bradens soon joined the staff of a regional civil rights organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and began traveling the region to solicit greater white support for the movement. As the 1960s dawned, Anne Braden became a mentor and role model to younger southern students who joined the movement—a role she maintained for the rest of her life. Although she was suspect in some circles, Braden publicized and supported the student sit-ins in the pages of SCEF’s Southern Patriot newspaper, which she edited, and she encouraged a broader vision of social change that would include peace and economic justice. She was also instrumental in Louisville’s Open Housing movement in the later sixties, and among the leading white voices who helped to bring peace to the turbulent second generation of school desegregation, in which busing brought open violence to Louisville and other cities in the mid-1970s.

After Carl Braden’s untimely death in 1975, Anne Braden remained a central proponent of racial justice in Louisville and across the South, eventually evolving from pariah to heroine. Braden’s primary message was the centrality of racism in the U.S. social fabric, but she constantly stressed that civil rights activism was as much whites’ responsibility as it was that of people of color. “Hers has been among the most forceful and persistent of white voices for racial equality in modern U.S. history,” according to her biographer, Catherine Fosl, author of Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (2002).

In speeches delivered in the nearly six decades of her activism, Braden would frequently reflect on her odyssey from segregationist youth to anti-racist advocate: a process she called “turning myself inside out.” Reared in a middle-class, pro-segregation family, Braden changed as a young reporter covering the emerging civil rights movement in 1947 Alabama, where she had observed two separate and unequal systems of justice meted out in the Birmingham courthouse. She subsequently left the supposed neutrality of mainstream journalism to apply her considerable journalistic talents to the aid of African Americans in their quest to end segregation. Her efforts against southern racism, her friend and fellow activist Angela Davis reflected, “enabled vast and often spectacular social changes. . . that most of her contemporaries during the 1950s would never have been able to imagine.”

Decades later, Braden was still working against racism and for justice and peace. In the fall of 2005, she joined other Louisville activists on buses bound for the anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C. even though she went in a wheelchair. She was a frequent voice in the Rainbow Coalition nationally and a co-founder of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, as well as being active in local issues including police brutality, housing-not-bombs, environmental racism, civil liberties, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender and other human rights. In the 1990s she became the recipient of many awards, including the first ever Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, bestowed on her by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1991. She also became a teacher, offering social justice history courses at the University of Louisville and Northern Kentucky University. Braden was still teaching at the time of her death and was still fired by the passion for justice that had guided her adult life. She had completed a proposal for a local activist summer camp only the day before her hospitalization.

Braden was born Anne Gambrell McCarty on July 28, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Gambrell and Anita McCarty. Most of her childhood was spent in Anniston, Alabama, where she lived through her high school graduation. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1945, and held news reporting jobs at the Anniston Star, the Birmingham News, and the Louisville Times in the late 1940s. After Anne’s marriage to Carl Braden in 1948, the couple had three children: James, Anita, and Elizabeth. James and Elizabeth Braden survive their mother, along with two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Braden’s church was St. George’s Episcopal in Louisville.

A community memorial service will celebrate the life and work of Anne Braden on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, at the Memorial Auditorium, 4th and Kentucky Streets, in downtown Louisville. In lieu of flowers, donations will be received to support the continuation of her work for justice, payable to the Carl Braden Memorial Center, Inc., and sent to P.O. Box 1543, Louisville, KY 40201. “

The Nation has announced the launch of StudentNation—a new student-based web-page.

You’ll find details on The Nation‘s student programs and projects, activist resources, info on upcoming Nation events, links to student articles and blog posts, a question of the week, a collection of featured student websites, select Nation articles and, eventually, a progressive calendar and a student-produced photo blog. Be sure to check out the articles from the special issue on “The New Face of the Campus Left.”

Or, if the “liberal/left” Nation is not for you, check out thenew blog Phi Beta Cons, which is billed as “the right take on higher ed”—that’s right as in ultra right wing.

The blog, is sponsored by William F. Buckley, Jr.’s The National Review. The blog is described as “dedicated to keeping an eye on the politics of campus life.”

So far drawn postings from Stephen Balch, of the National Association of Scholars, on the Lawrence Summers resignation; David Gelernter on Yale’s admission of an ex-Taliban spokesman as a student; SUNY Trustee Candace de Russy on the “Jihad on campus”; and Anne D. Neal, of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, on what she describes as “the vast divide” between “academic elites & mainstream America.”

The Associated Press has distributed a story about the New York Slavery curriculum, which Alan Singer, a social studies prof at Hofstra University, developed with Mary Carter (Hofstra U), April Frances (Lawrence Road MS, Uniondale), Kerry Creegan (Massapequa HS, Massapequa) and with support from numerous social studies education colleagues.

The curriculum guide is a 2005 National Council of the Social Studies “Social Studies Program of Excellence” award winner.

The complete document-based curriculum guide, which was prepared for the “Gateway to the City” Teaching American History Grant Project is available on the New York State Council for the Social Studies web site.

The photo shows Singer speaking about New York’s role in the American slavery system, at Oyster Bay High School in Oyster Bay, N.Y.