Caution Church Ahead : Why I Blog

[chemp]

Written by a good friend f mine.

link:

http://www.cautionchurchahead.com/2010/12/why-i-blog.html


My father was born in 1938, at a time when Fascism, the real thing, not Obamacare, was tearing through Europe and genocide was as popular as ice cream in some circles. When my father was born, it was thought by the average American that major league baseball would never be desegregated, yet by the time my father was nine years old, Jackie Robinson was playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, my father's favorite team. As my father entered young adulthood, the Civil Rights movement was entering full swing, and through the marches and the protests both peaceful and not so peaceful, the country changed dramatically not because the African American cause waited quietly for the white majority to come to their senses, but because they agitated for change, loudly, and with urgency.

When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, the idea that a black man could become president seemed impossibly far away, yet in forty years that's exactly what happened.

I was nine years old in 1972, old enough to be somewhat politically aware. I did not know much, but I understood what I saw on television, and I was confronted with two very different realities. In one reality, I saw Captain Kirk leading a crew of humans of every different race into space, treating everyone as equals. Sulu (a native of America's recent enemy Japan), Uhura ( a black woman) and Chekov (a Russian, America's current enemy) all worked together to explore space, and Star Trek, as goofy and old fashioned as it now seems, presented the world with a vision of what working together in the future might look like.

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