March 7, 2019 600 AM
Dear Editor,
Phooey!
From two of the three Democrat writers who regularly submit to the Sentinel, last week I received my second apology. Like the first, it was insincere. After apologizing for calling me “a son of the Jim Crow South” because he “dreamed” that I was raised in Mississippi, the writer shifted his discussion of lynching to Illinois and Indiana to try to support his premise that I am a racist. He claims to be “informed by the historical record.”
I invite readers to do two things: 1) look up the history of lynching at the NAACP web site; “About Lynching” at English.Illinois.ed, and
2) consider how stupid it is for white geezers to be discussing black and white relations in a small-town paper along a predominately Hispanic border.
Indiana, it turns out, was exceptional in that white lynching outnumbered black lynching. Illinois was unexceptional. Of the 4773 lynchings recorded from 1882 – 1968 (the only years records were kept) 1297 were white people. 79% of all lynching occurred in the South. The three states that staged the most lynchings were Mississippi (581), Georgia (531) and Texas (493). Only five states did not lynch, ever.
Historians agree that most of the race-related lynching occurred in poor rural areas where the educational level was low. In the past, I have stated that ignorance is the basis for all hate. I believe that to be the case with my detractors due to their narrow view of life itself.
Pay attention; this is not a dream. My family’s ancestral farm is in Illinois where I attended 8th grade and high school and where five generations including mine have tilled the soil. My grandmother was raised there. She grew up and attended school with African-American children of the servants in her household. The men in my family sweat in the fields. Domestic servants did not. My grandmother’s youngest son earned his PhD at Harvard in geology in the same era that a servant’s granddaughter earned her PhD in education.
Harry S. Truman’s executive order #9981 abolished discrimination in the armed forces “on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin” on July 26, 1948. I was born the year following, and as a brat, experienced nothing during my first 13 years of existence in the way of racism.
The nine years that I have lived in the Big Bend encompass my first encounters with the racism that is fabricated by infected minds, and they have been entirely through accusations by fact-starved, humorless, retired white men who believe they are God’s gift to “brown-skinned” people and that their personal salvation will come from the Democrat party.
Summation: phooey!
Rex Redden
South Brewster County
• • •
Dear Editor,
With the Dawn Comes the Light
On February 27th convicted felon Michael Cohen; President Trump’s former attorney and fixer-bully-enforcer, testified before the House Oversight Committee. His testimony was sickening, contemplating the intrigues of his boss seeking and obtaining the highest office in the American landscape.
Credible; with corroborating evidence in some instances, I would have welcomed it in some of my prosecutor trials. In others, defendants were convicted on less than a fraction facing Trump.
One commentator likened Cohen’s behavior with Trump “cult-like”. The same could be said for his supporters notwithstanding countless documented negatives.
Most disturbing is the disquieting ways it manifests with the President’s base, GOP Congressional defenders and conservative media enablers. The serial liar’s career Grifting ways and amoral lifestyle doesn’t seem to matter to them. Truth-bearers’ troublesome information receives a Knee-jerk Choir’s incessant “fake news” regardless of the fact-checked source.
Endings are predictable. There are many casualties of Trump’s malignant narcissistic personality disorder, https://www.rawstory.com/2019/03/harvard-psychiatrist-breaks-trumps-severe-continuousmental-disturbance/?fbclid=IwAR3mSDGsTeH6EsV_4Dmk2hXgTmqgbHgG9fluqG59qlGXiKhUA94pU3mhru8.
Everything Trump Touches Dies, by Republican strategist Rick Wilson, “exposes the damage Trump has done to the country, to the Republican Party he (Wilson) served for decades, and to the conservative movement that has abandoned its principles for the worst President in American
