[speakeasy]

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/14/141235709/...eeing-race


Crazy that a judge in Louisiana in 2009 refused to marry a black and a white. Some places in America still feel like the 1800s to me.

[tenderman100]

We live in a big country. Not everything moves at the pace we want or think appropriate.

On the other hand, a large percentage of people who are living below the poverty line have a flat screen TV.

So, it's all a matter of perspective.

[blurb]

Quote:

A large percentage of people who are living below the poverty line have a flat screen TV.

So, it's all a matter of perspective.

Here's an interesting read: http://www.fredoneverything.net/DarkAgesII.shtml

This guy is funny and right on the mark:

Quote:

No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.

Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the frist American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.

Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.

And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hod-carriers in designer jeans, they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them. Their college degrees amount to high-school diplomas, if that, but they neither know nor care.

The things that have forever constituted civilization—respect for learning whether one had it or not, wide reading, careful use of language, manners, such notions as “lady” and “gentleman”--these are held in contempt.

[oldnemesis]

(10-14-2011 06:35 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

Some places in America still feel like the 1800s to me.

In my experience "some places" it something like 90% of the country. And it doesn't just feel like that, they live like that.

[Timoteo]

There are actually anti-miscegenation laws still on the books in some places, though not enforced. I believe a man was arrested in Texas a few years ago for living with his girlfriend. His bitter ex-wife blew the whistle on him, because there was a law on the books that forbid "living in sin." He was actually picked up for it, though I'm not sure what the resolution was.