Blaise pascal

American Nation Politics
A Reflection of The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was taking steps-ninety years after the Constitution had been amended to establish racial equality-to move toward that end.
The transcript of this testimony was given to President Johnson and Attorney General Kennedy, accompanied by a request for a protectivefederal presence during the Mississippi Summer. There was no response.
The Mississippi murders had taken place after the repeated refusal of the national government, under Kennedy or Johnson, or any other President, to defend blacks against violence.
Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants,women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups.
Congress began reacting to the black revolt, the turmoil, the world publicity. Civil rights laws were passed in 1957, 1960, and 1964. They promised much, on voting equality, on employment equality, but were enforced poorly or ignored.
King now became a chief target of the FBI, which tapped hisprivate phone conversations, sent him fake letters, threatened him, blackmailed him, and even suggested once in an anonymous letter that he commit suicide.
In the Boston Globe, November 1977: A Hispanic family of six fled their apartment in the Savin Hill section of Dorchester yesterday after a week of repeated stonings and window-smashings by a group of white youths, in what appears to have beenracially motivated attacks, police said.
That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid beingcrushed into submission.
Madison feared a "majority faction" and hoped the new Constitution would control it. He and his colleagues began the Preamble to the Constitution with the words "We the people ...," pretending that the new government stood for everyone, and hoping that this myth, accepted as fact, would ensure "domestic tranquility."
If it happens only to the children of the poor, theproblem is manageable; there are the jails. If it happens to the children of the middle class, things may get out of hand.
Each time practicality pulled the woman out of her prison-in a kind of work-parole program-the attempt was made to push her back once the need was over, and this led to women's struggle for change.
There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look withinyourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules.
(Jefferson's personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died).
"When the guns boom, the arts die." Singer Eartha Kitt was invited to a luncheon on the White House lawn and shocked all those present by speaking out, in the presence of the President's wife, against the war.
Dostoevskionce said: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
"I learned the hard way there is no glory in a folded flag." (Viet Nam widow)
With such power in the hands of the courts, the poor, the black, the odd, the homosexual, the hippie, the radical are not likely to get equal treatment before judges who are almost uniformly white, upper middle class, orthodox.The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at the later trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the New York Times: "Then Lieutenant Calley and Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and fired. "People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect their children. .. ."
At 9:25 P.M. Joe was found dead. . .. Prison authorities as well as news media will label...