African American
In reply to the discussion: Dear Bravenak [View all]freshwest
(53,661 posts)All kinds of media is used to condition us to what we think is normal. I consider Americans, particularly white America, to identify so much with commerical memes they have lost what kind of culture they once had and it's partly why they are so desperate to cling to power. They 'got nothing.' If the media tells them they're are winning, they feel good. If it tells them they're losing, they go nuts. They have no real root.
I remember listening to Jimi when he came out and knew every song. It was a particular time in history.
I was working daily door to door to get the first black mayor elected in my town all summer. We thought he had a chance as we really needed a change. We had a much hated police chief who supported brutality.
Oh, the idealism of youth! We just knew the wave of the future would carry him into office.
Well, our candidate didn't win, but eventually we got an effective fully civilian pollce review board and things got more 'civilized.' Now things are going back to something much worse, from what I have read going on there.
Jimi came to town for a concert at the end of the summer. I'd saved up the money to go. But I was in the hands of a part of the family less educated and more conservative than the rest. My dad, who died the year after JFK, was more of an Eric Fromm socialist, All People Are Created Equal type, although he had his own business.
It was okay with that part of the family for me to go with black people into the black neighborhoods to get out the Democratic vote for my mayoral candidate, but they wouldn't let me go to the concert. They let me see the Rolling Stones, etc.
Maybe the idea of a 16 year old white girl seeing a sexy black man was too much for them? Oh, well.
I left home at 18 to be free of their belief system and soon took up with my Sam Rockwell type guy and they really hated that. They did like him eventually, as he was socialist and pro-union.