History is a strong fucking thing...

[Cooley Hurd]

This moment, I'm sitting in the very room in which my father was born in 1923. No shit. My house was purchased by my great-grandfather in 1917. It passed from him to my grandmother, and then to my mother (who passed in 1999) and then to my oldest sister. I am a caretaker for my sister who suffers from diabetes.

Here I am, almost 90 years after my father's birth, in the VERY same room where he entered this curious world, and I'm contemplating today's ills.

One would think that the world of 1923 would be anachronistic to the world of today. But it's not.

Sure... they didn't have the internet. They didn't even have good roads on which to travel.

But, 90 years later, we're still dealing with nativism. With racism. And now the bizzare blood-lust happening in Worcester.

I have one simple plea to my fellow DUers. What the fuck have we become?????

[Journeyman]

1. We've become what we have always been . . .

Imperfect, transient beings, groping our way through the darkness of our ignorance, occasionally learning to shed light on our situation, and always looking for what may give us an advantage, be it personal or as a society.

I see vast differences between our world and that of our fathers. Not as many as any of us would prefer, but tangible, undeniably better differences. Are they under attack? Yes, of course. If history teaches anything, it's that struggle will always remain at our core.

Quite remarkable, by the way, that you write from within the walls of your ancestral home. My great-grandfather bought his land, too, but my grandfather was unable to hold on. He lost his when the nascent Depression first hit the midwest in the mid-'20s. He was fortunate; he arrived in California well before the deluge, and managed to acquire another home before his untimely death in his early 60s. That home was too small and there were too many competing interests when my Grandmother passed, so the land was sold. Today, I live in my own home, mortgage-free, and hope to pass it to my children. As I'm close to the sea, though, I've advised them to sell it quickly when I'm gone, that they might escape another, quite different but just as inevitable, deluge that is building.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. I write this from a middle-class street in a Northeastern city in Central NY...

...there's a few more crack-dealers than there were in 1923.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. KKK march on Washington 1925

Progress has been made but the journey is long

[Cooley Hurd]

4. I'm sure Gutzon Borglum is in the queue....

One of my favorite sculptors, but VERY effed up when it came to politics.