Reply #26: This Forgotten Bit of History (And You Can Be Sure It Isn't Covered in MA Textbooks)

[Demeter]

is exactly why I have to laugh when people get all hot and bothered about the possibility of losing Kennedy's Senate seat to a Teabagger.

Those anti-everything people never left Massachusetts--they stay like mold. It's the fresh blood and the ambitious and the newcomers and the hungry who move. Massachusetts today is just as it was in 1912, only the mills are gone to the South or to Asia, and the Harvard boys no longer joint the militia.

I graduated from the school that used to be the Lowell Textile Institute. While I attended, the textile dept. was dying but still there, the machinery in drafty, pigeon-infested, unheated rooms, which were also used by various undergrad classes.

The anti-everything people are especially good at forgetting past crimes (unless they were the "victims" in which case there's no forgetting ever). but the immigrants, including at least one of my great-grandmothers, who fled the poverty of a farm in Poland to work the silk mills in North Hampton, MA, did not forget. They did forgive, however, and then died, leaving their descendants to improve the American population.