Maggie's Farm

Hear! Hear!

Precisely, Jack. Some of us continue to hold those ideals. A lot of others copped out for cheap substitutes, among them being the very toxic approaches you noted.

In contrast, those ideals are why I walked into a hurricane shelter in.the middle of a ghetto in August of '69, and spent the subsequent 24 hours or so as their radio operator. I don't talk about this much anymore, mainly because it's too easily conflated with today's insipid virtue signalling. I doubt the virtue signallers would do anything like that, given the very real risk to life of the biggest hurricane anybody had ever seen coming straight up the river.

One last point occurs to me, one which I always took for granted until the events of this year. By the time the shelter calosed, pretty much all of us realised thar that the line the Professional Talkers had been feeding us about "blacks and whites" was largely fiction. Whether this made a long term difference, I can't say, apart from it's effects on me. I do have my doubts about it happening again in today's world.