My Ancestors

One thing I use this blog for is to document some of our family history for my children and grandchildren, if I should pass without telling them these things. I recently posted this on Facebook to a fellow Pollack's page regarding why so many Many Polish immigrants went to Chicago. SInce I grew up in Detroit of 100% Polish stock, I wrote this:

My ancestors moved to Detroit, which also had a large Polish community, e.g., Hamtramck. When my father, born in Detroit in 1913, started school at age five, he was bilingual, neither of which was English (Polish and Ukrainian). They put him in second grade where the teacher spoke Polish. He ended up graduating from high school at fifteen, lettering in swimming. My mother was also Polish, born in Standish, MI, before her family moved to Detroit. Polish was spoken in my home when my parents didn't want their children to know what they were saying, lol. I grew up in the Polish National Catholic Church, created to say the catholic mass in Polish, and centered in Scranton, Pennsylvania. My mother was a great soprano, who sang in the church in Polish, both PNCC and mainline Catholic in Boyne Falls, MI, which yearly has a Polish Festival the first weekend of August.

Immigration and Assimilation

My father was the son of immigrants from Poland. My grandfather was a baker, and started a bakery in Detroit. They lived over the bakery, and there was a yard out back. When my father started school, he was bilingual, neither language was English. They put him in second grade because the teacher spoke Polish. He did well and graduated from high school just before he turned sixteen.

I've been in cities where, in a certain area of town, a different language than English was spoken. It takes a while for total assimilation to occur. But it will. As long as we are an accepting culture, not an exclusionary one, they will be assimilated.

Dr Carson, do you know how to research in the modern world?

My facebook threw this up at me from one of my conservative friends:



I wanted to give him this reply:

Maybe because not everyone is insured yet. If we'd have expanded Medicaid in Georgia, part of Obamacare, six hundred thousand more people would have been covered (and using mathematics, at least three hundred thousand women), and be able to have their health needs met. This was part of Obamacare that Gov. Deal, and our Republican State Legislature, would not allow us Georgia citizens to have, even though we paid the taxes for it. And they did it for crass political reasons.

Women went to Planned Parenthood to get their healthcare needs met. They got birth control, that prevents the need for abortions. They were able to get mammograms to be on the lookout for breast cancer, and were able to get other healthcare that is specific to women. Abortions amounted to less than three percent of their business, and none of it paid for with government funds, which is specifically prohibited by federal law, and has been for decades. The latest videos are edited slanders against Planned Parenthood. To believe them is to believe a lie.

Are you going to believe a private interest group that has targeted Planned Parenthood and produced an edited video in order to besmirch an organization that does a lot of good for a lot of people. The video has been shown to be edited to make Planned Parenthood appear to be horrendous. It's a piece of propaganda, nothing more. That's why to believe them is to believe a lie, and the organization that produced them should be called out as liars. No one of any decency need believe what they assert.

The Lord of Darkness Appears

The Lord of Darkness, along with his evil spawn, have an article in the Wall Street Journal. Their warmongering is forefront. 

Never forget, Big Dick Cheney made millions on the Iraq war. He's a war monger and war profiteer. 

Why Are Christians SO Upset About This?

The 2015 National Prayer Breakfast was held this past week.

The National Prayer Breakfast is a yearly event held in Washington, D.C., on the first Thursday of February each year.

The founder of this event was Abraham Vereide. The event—which is actually a series of meetings, luncheons, and dinners—has taken place since 1953 and has been held at least since the 1980's at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue NW.

The breakfast, held in the Hilton's International Ballroom, is typically attended by some 3,500 guests, including international invitees from over 100 countries. The National Prayer Breakfast is hosted by members of the United States Congress and is organized on their behalf by The Fellowship Foundation [aka, The Family], a Christ-centered organization. Initially called the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, the name was changed in 1970 to the National Prayer Breakfast.
It is designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships. Since the inception of the National Prayer Breakfast, several U.S. states and cities and other countries have established their own annual prayer breakfast events.

Every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has participated in the annual event.

President Obama attended this year, and gave a few remarks. The right wing, the conservatives, the Republicans, went nuts in their condemnation. First, what did he say?

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

What do you think? Is that an outrageous thing to say? Fox News and the right wing seem to think so. Starting with the Crusades,

Die Hard Democrat

Ok, I'll admit, I am a die hard Democrat. I can never see myself voting for a Republican, because I don't believe in what they stand for and promote. I may not agree with the Democrat, like what Obama's doing with the TPP, but they're always, on the whole, a far cry better than what the Republican espouses.

The country is way worse than it was when I was growing up, and it started with Reagan. The forces that trashed this fair country for the last thirty five or forty years, backed, and were empowered by Reagan. I will never forget that after twenty of twenty eight years of being ruled by Republican administrations, we had the greatest economic calamity since the great depression, and that so-called fiscally responsible Republicans, for the second time, ran up enormous deficits. Their total economic viewpoint was shown to be absolute trash.

Reagan campaigned on balancing the budget, yet ran up the greatest debt, for every year of his administration, in the history of the country, which continued under Poppy Bush (HW). Clinton turned this totally around and was running surpluses by the end of his tenure, with a plan to pay off the debt by 2010. Poppy's boy, W, said we didn't need no surpluses, totally reversing the budget by his policies, and running a trillion dollar deficit by 2008, the year of the greatest crash since the Great Depression. Any Republican that denies this fact, and there are many, should be called out for their lying tongues, never to be believed again, and consigned to oblivion.

Thoughts on Valdosta Race Relations Post I

I had the opportunity, and to be honest, the pleasure, of attending the 30th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration Association's Founder's Banquet this past Saturday, January 3, 2015. We guesstimated about seven hundred people in attendance. There were many notable Valdosta citizens there, including Mayor John Gayle, City Manager Larry Hanson, city councilman Alvin Payton, city councilwoman Sandra Tooley, county commissioner Joyce Evans, state representative Dexter Sharper. along with many other lesser known, but very important citizens of our community.

Most of the tables seemed to be sponsored by different churches in the area, along with other charitable organizations, and probably the city government, considering the mayor, city manager, and chief of police were in attendance. I was with the Lowndes County Democratic Party table. I noticed the Republicans were nowhere to be seen.

However, on a sadder note, I also noticed there were merely just a handful of white people in attendance. There is no reason that we white people cannot honor the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr, and celebrate his memory with our African-American fellow citizens of our great country. He was highly instrumental in obtaining basic Constitutional rights to an historically oppressed and abused racial minority, and bringing it through peaceful, non-violent tactics and techniques, even in the face of the most vicious and violent opposition; an opposition that stretched all the way into the upper echelons of American government and society.

There is a greater, spiritual, context to these issues that MLK was aware of and talked about. We do well to leave what others tell us of MLK, and go to the source. Read, watch and listen to what he said, Then decide for yourself.