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Research


It is absolutely amazing how little research is done on information presented by people who are seeking the nomination for the Presidency. For Instance Planned Parenthood: taking this issue on based on altered video and audio along with misinformation on how the Government funding is used. These people will seek to defund programs that they know little to nothing about. We still have voters who are chewing on the old disproven bone that the current President is a Muslim! If they aspire to be the leader of the  world icon of freedom, then their focus needs to be on the big picture instead of the theatrics of politics. It is easy to pot shot, cherry pick and otherwise ignore facts however making choices based on true facts takes more work. Using real intelligence from reliable sources is what keeps us safe not speculative ideas from people who enlist or solicit information from unilateral  non mainstream sources. It clear to me that in this electronic age fewer people know the truth since fewer people bother to investigate news and the sources. These are the people who believe that anything on the internet is true regardless of the source. Truth begins with a basic understanding of the subject and subsequent personal investigation from other sources to back it up and again not speculative information.
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Failure to Communicate or Inform?


In the past 10 years it has become evident that America is not as progressive as Europe in spite of our industrial development. Britain has “socialized Medicine” where everyone has healthcare, the British Parliament discusses and resolves issues relating to the proper administering of the country’s needs rather than who marries who, who can live where or even what flag flies where. This Congress and the associated media has spent valuable time on innuendo, misconception and out right lies in some case to get their way with the voters. Shame on us voters for believing them. When a political “leader(?)” has to resort to subterfuge and disingenuous statements to keep or gain an office, then we need to provide a quick exit for them. Why does it take millions of dollars to gain election to a position that pays a lot less than the money spent to get it? There is an inherent flaw in the messages offered as truth and honesty to get to a high government (Local, State or federal) office. It is a failing on behalf of the voters to ascribe to the opinions of a heavily biased media who employ spokespersons who have a smattering of understanding about what real journalism is. These spokespersons are no more than sensationalists masquerading as experts. These people are as radical as any terrorist but using words as weapons. Their under and uninformed comments serve to inflame rather inform. WE as voters need to look behind the curtain of misinformation and  strip them of an audience for the illusory presentations  they assail us with on a daily basis. These are the times when the world bullies are on the move and using the same tactics  to spread THEIR propaganda. We  do not have a failure to communicate but more a failure to inform.

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Diet Soda


8 Things That Happen When You Finally Stop Drinking Diet Soda

Prevention‎June‎ ‎13‎, ‎2015

Every think, “Why should I give up soda?” (Photo: Getty Images)

You’ve decided to give up diet soda—good idea! Maybe you weren’t hitting your weight-loss goals or couldn’t stomach that long list of ingredients anymore. Or perhaps you heard one too many times that it’s just not good for you.

Whatever the reason, eliminating diet soda from your diet will improve your health from head to toe. Research on diet soda is still in its infancy, but there’s enough out there to identify what you can look forward to when you put down the can and cool down with an unsweetened iced tea instead.

Migraines disappear and focus sharpens.

(Photo: Getty Images)

It turns out the headaches you expected from a diet soda withdrawal didn’t materialize. And now that you’ve quit the stuff, you probably find yourself thinking clearly for the first time in a while. That’s because the chemicals that make up the artificial sweetener aspartame may have altered brain chemicals, nerve signals, and the brain’s reward system, which leads to headaches, anxiety, and insomnia, according to a review in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And a 2013 animal study found that rats that drank diet soda had damaged cells and nerve endings in the cerebellum—the part of the brain responsible for motor skills. (If you’re still drinking diet soda, take a look at what’s happening in your body right now.)

Taste buds are more sensitive.
It’s not your imagination: Without your usual diet soda chaser, you may find that food has more flavor. It has subtlety. It’s more enjoyable. That’s because the artificial sweeteners in your diet soda overwhelmed your taste buds with an onslaught of sweetness. Aspartame ranks 200 hundreds times sweeter than table sugar. Splenda? 600 times. In fact, brain scans show that diet soda alters sweet receptors in the brain and prolongs sugar cravings rather than satisfies them. “We often see patients change snack choices when they give up diet soda,” says Heather Bainbridge, RD, from Columbia University Medical Center Weight Control Center. “Rather than needing sugary treats or something really salty like pretzels and chips, they reach for an apple and a piece of cheese. And, when they try diet soda again, they find it intolerably sweet.”
(Ready to eliminate harmful sugar from your diet for good—and lose weight for life? Check out the Sugar Smart Express!)

The scale finally goes the right way.

(Photo: Getty Images)

While you may have started drinking diet soda to facilitate weight loss, quitting it may actually do the trick. A recent 9-year study found older adults who drank diet soda continued to pack on belly fat. The study piggybacks on research that found each daily diet soda increases your chance of becoming obese in the next decade by 65%, and a study published in Diabetes Care that found drinking diet soft drinks daily was associated with an increase in metabolic syndrome—obesity, high blood-pressure, high triglycerides—which leads to heart disease and diabetes.

Bones strengthen.
Putting down the soda may be the best way to improve your bone strength and reduce your risk of fractures. One 2014 study found that each daily soda increased the chance of hip fracture by 14% for postmenopausal women. And another found that older women who drank cola had lower bone mineral density in their hips. The jury is still out on why soda has this effect, but the science pretty clearly suggests that a soda habit weakens your bones. (Diet soda’s not the only sugar-free food making you miserable—check out 6 gross things that happen when you chew gum.)

Your attitude towards food changes.
Since diet sodas have no calories, people drinking them often feel it’s okay to indulge elsewhere, finds Bainbridge. Often she sees her diet soda-drinking patients make poor food choices, like a burger and fries, a piece of cake, or potato chips, because they think they can afford those extra calories. Plus, soda often accompanies unhealthy foods. “Sometimes those poor choices are built up habits,” she says. “You’re conditioned to have soda with chips, fries, or something sweet. When you eliminate the soft drink, you also break the junk food habit.”

You handle booze better

(Photo: Getty Images)

It’s a fact: Diet soda gets you drunk faster. When you mix it with alcohol, your stomach empties out faster than if you used regular soda, causing a drastic increase in blood alcohol concentrations, according to an Australian study in the American Journal of Medicine. And when you add caffeine, look out. Another study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research found that bar patrons who mixed drinks with diet colas were intoxicated much more easily and frequently. Your best bet for a mixer? Club soda, which is naturally sugar- and calorie-free. (Try these slimming Sassy Water recipes to stay hydrated and make your taste buds happy.)

Fat storage and diabetes risk decreases.
Our hormones may explain the great paradox of why people gain weight when they switch to diet soda. A study in Diabetes Care found that drinking two-thirds of a diet soda before eating primed the pancreas to release a lot of the fat-storing hormone insulin. When the pancreas is overworked from creating insulin to control blood-sugar levels, diabetes rears its ugly head. And a recent study in Japan found that middle-aged men who drank 1 or more diet sodas daily were much more likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a 7-year period.

Kidney function improves.
Now that your body no longer has to make sense of the unpronounceable ingredients in diet soda, your kidneys can get back to clearing toxins, stabilizing blood pressure, and absorbing minerals. One study looked at 11 years of data and found that women who drank 2 or more servings of diet soda doubled their chances of declining kidney function.

By Jordan Davidson

This article ‘8 Things That Happen When You Finally Stop Drinking Diet Soda’ originally ran on Prevention.com.

More from Prevention: 

19 Foods That Aren’t Food 

25 WORST Diet Tips Ever (How Many Are You Still Following?) 

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Efficacy


It is possible that the sitting representatives are merely elected officials who are always looking forward to the next election rather than doing the job they were elected to do right now. It appears that the Dupublican party overall in many states have taken it to the poor just as their big money handlers wanted. The laws introduced to save money and make  government more efficient. The problem is that the beneficiaries are people who have no monetary problems, no health problems and no other way to survive without the subsidies from the States and the Federal Government. The real issue is: since too many Americans of voting age have no idea of the way Congress works and the true nature of politics. Modern politics are not about serving the people, it is about serving their monetary backers ( sometimes their future employers) and themselves. It is unfortunate  that too many of us  are unable to see “the forest for the trees”.  The most frightening thing is  so many cannot get beyond their personal biases to realize that the folks who inform us are entertaining and not informing. The so called “news” is no more than forums for the  ideas that sound correct but cannot stand “light of day” scrutiny. I can soap box on this forever and only the few real readers will get it. Sorry there aren’t more  folks who do.

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Other Reasons


When Eric Cantor lost his re-election bid, it was a defeat of a reasonable but able to disagree lawmaker. His loss  put more stress on an already distressed and malfunctioning Congress. We have observed and heard from and about many fringe voting blocs whose interests do not coincide with the majority of Americans yet they have an undue influence on our electorate. We unfortunately, the everyday voter complain about our Congress and all other elected officials but we tend to turn a selective deaf ear to the events that affect us for years down the road. We have largely ignored the role of a Congress that has done little to fix our fiscal and other problems while castigating every President since Eisenhower. We need to ignore the media coverage as much of it is hype, erroneous and particularly biased. Where we need to put our focus is on the lack of real information coming from the Congress. Recently the speaker was overjoyed over a supreme court decision on the President’s appointment during a bogus recess which was applied to keep the President from making appointments. The problem is that this court case which cost taxpayer dollars is just another wasted effort by our Congress as this court decision which was so loudly touted has no effect on the issue that was brought before the court. Now that the Dupublicans  have control of the Congress , we will continue to see poor legislation and mismanagement.  If we continue to let these 535 want to be kings and queens run this country any way the see fit in our names, we will continue to go downhill at the pace of a landslide. The whole idea of  modern Congress is merely one of control over special and pet projects that only slightly are for the public good. Now that Mr. Oconnel   ll become the Senate majority leader we will see the Congress become more of a “no: Congress and us all down the proverbial rabbit hole. This is  food for thought. It should be apparent to us all that this Congress is comprised shortsighted , antebellum members who cannot reconcile the idea of a non white (and possibly non Southern) person sitting in the oval office. These folks are as big liars as the Iranians, the Saudis and several other middle eastern countries as well as the Russians. Ladies and gentlemen we are still at war and it is local. There is a quote from the cartoon strip “POGO”- “we have met the enemy and it is us”

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Thats Right!!


This article was printed in a local paper and I am reprinted it in total.

GOP’s ‘hell no’ faction

By Jim Hightower

 Ah, August – that time of year when the going gets tough … and Congress gets going.

On vacation that is. And, to be fair, maybe Congress needs a vacation. All the stress of not passing laws and constantly thwarting any attempt by President Obama to fix America’s problems seems to be straining their sanity.

For starters, if you thought that, surely, partisan posturing by far-right congress critters couldn’t get any nuttier, you’d be wrong. Last month, the GOP claimed that all the talk about impeaching President Barack Obama is being led by – guess who? – Barack Obama!

If you’ll recall, the top Republican leader, John Boehner (having discovered that the larger public is appalled that his party would even consider wasting time on such extremist nonsense) tried to do a political backflip. Impeachment talk, he fumed, is “a scam started by Democrats at the White House.” No Republican lawmakers, he barked to the media, are even discussing it.

Boehner, Boehner, Boehner! Apparently he didn’t hear Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who’s No. 2 on his own GOP leadership team, tell Fox News that he refuses to rule out impeachment. Or Rep. Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, exult that “it would be a dream come true” to impeach Obama, and that he has pursued advice from experts on how to proceed. Or Iowa’s Rep. Steve King, saying flatly, “We need to bring impeachment hearings immediately.” How about Randy Weber of Texas, who put it unequivocally: “The president deserves to be impeached, plain and simple.” And Georgia’s Jack Kingston confirmed that: “Not a day goes by when people don’t talk to us about impeachment.”

Still, Boehner did receive some backing on his claim that no one in the GOP has given a moment’s thought to impeachment. The always-insightful tea party radio ranter Glenn Beck, for example, waded in with this question to his audience on a recent broadcast: “Have you spoken to one person (pushing such an idea)?” he demanded. “No one” has used the “I” word, he snapped. But, in fact, Beck does know one person who has: Himself! Also, Sarah Palin! And at least a dozen other likeminded sparklies on the way-out far-right horizon.

OK. Congress did do one thing. Incapable of legislating, they litigated. Boehner filed a frivolous lawsuit against President Obama, charging that he’s been governing unilaterally by issuing executive orders. But there are big problems with their suit.

One: Obama has issued far fewer executive orders than did his GOP predecessor, George W. Two: Their suit claims the president defied Congress by inadequately implementing the Obamacare health reform – but, hello? Republicans fought that reform tooth and nail and are still trying to stop it from being implemented, meaning they’re suing him for not doing something they don’t want done (another indicator that Congress does need to take an extended leave for mental health reasons). And three: As they vacated the Capitol, howling House leaders said that, in their absence, Obama should immediately deport the terrorized and traumatized migrant children who fled to the U.S. this summer from the gang violence and implacable poverty they faced in their Central America homes.

Again … Hello? The GOP’s call for deportations was a demand that – get this – the president should act unilaterally, by issuing an executive order.

These ideological zealots are nutty, but they’re clogging the roadway, preventing any of the progress that America desperately needs. As a result, not only is the public fed up with them but voter turnout is plummeting this year as people see that the “hell no” faction has turned democratic participation into a farce – so why bother?

Put away all hope for honesty or seriousness, ye who enter the nut house presently known as Boehner’s U.S. House of Representatives. Their antics could be laughed off – except that they’re draining the vitality from America’s democracy.

Jim Hightower is national radio commentator, columnist and author.

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Does Canada Have It right?


The Daily Ticker

Sponsored by

3 ways America should be more like Canada

By 23 hours ago Daily Ticker
Its middle class is thriving, its people are universally liked and its government actually works.

Fifty years ago, this description might have fit the United States. But not now. America’s middle class is shrinking and its global reputation is spotty. Congress, meanwhile, creates more problems than it solves.

So for guidance on how to fix America, why not look north to Canada, where the mood is upbeat and life appears to be getting demonstrably better? The New York Times recently reported the Canadian middle class is now the world’s richest, surpassing the U.S. for the first time. In the 2014 “better life index” recently published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada outscored the United States in 9 of 11 categories, including education, safety and overall life satisfaction.

The poverty rate is lower in Canada, and every Canadian citizen has government-provided health insurance, which might explain why Canadians enjoy longer life expectancy than Americans and are considerably less obese. As for the government, Canada’s national debt amounts to about $18,000 per person, compared with $55,000 in America.

So what is Canada doing right?

It has a more stable banking system. Canada has virtually never experienced a financial crisis, and there were no bailouts north of the border in 2008 when the U.S. government committed $245 billion to save dozens of U.S. banks. The differences between the two countries are somewhat accidental. In the United States, distrust of a strong central government all the way back in the founders’ days led to a system of state-chartered banks vulnerable to political meddling, and therefore riskier than the big, nationally chartered financial institutions that operate in Canada.

“In the United States, instability was permitted by regulators because it served powerful political interests,” Prof. Charles Calomiris of Columbia University wrote in a 2013 paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “In Canada, the banking system was not used as a means of channeling subsidized credit to a favored political constituency, so there was no need to tolerate instability.” The legacy of that today is a malleable U.S. banking system that, among other things, was deregulated in the late 1990s at the behest of banks themselves — which contributed to the 2008 collapse.

The financial crisis and the abuses that led to it are still holding back the U.S. economy. Shoddy lending standards were a major cause of the housing bust, which has whacked $3 trillion off the value of Americans’ real-estate assets — even with the year-long recovery in the housing market. That’s a huge loss of wealth that continues to hold back U.S. spending. And it’s just part of a 25-year debt binge Americans are still working off. With far fewer lending excesses, Canada didn’t really have a housing bust or a credit crisis to recover from.

Money doesn’t dominate politics. Canada has much stricter rules governing campaign contributions than those in America, where campaign-finance laws are getting weaker on account of recent Supreme Court rulings striking down limits on spending. Tougher limits in Canada give people and businesses with money to spend less influence over laws and regulations. “Every single one of my voters thinks that is terrific,” says former journalist Chrystia Freeland, now a Canadian member of parliament, representing a district in Toronto. “There is a lot less influence of the really wealthy and single-issue interest groups. A regular person has a much bigger voice.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress report spending half their time, or more, raising money for reelection efforts rather than legislating. Freeland estimates she spends less than 5% of her time doing that. There’s virtually no chance the United States will ever adopt a Canadian-style parliamentary system, but Congress could pass new laws or amend the Constitution in order to limit the corrupting influence of Big Money in politics. Were that to happen, however, it would probably make incumbent politicians more vulnerable to challengers. Maybe next century.

There’s less hostility toward immigrants. Canada, like the United States, has limits on the number of foreigners it allows into the country to work. But the whole issue of immigration is far less politicized, and there’s a broad understanding that skilled foreign workers help the economy. Canada actually recruits immigrants, part of a deliberate effort to attract talented foreigners most likely to contribute to economic growth. In the United States, the quota for skilled immigrants is far below the number U.S. firms would hire if they could get them. Despite appeals from many businesses, Congress is paralyzed on reforms that would let more skilled immigrants in, partly because that issue gets conflated with separate reforms aimed at stemming the flow of unskilled illegals.

Canada has its own problems, needless to say. Its government-run healthcare system draws complaints of long wait times for care and trailing-edge medical technology. Some economists think a housing bubble may be forming, for instance, and trends such as rising income inequality affect Canada just as they do every other industrialized country. Plus, it’s cold.

In the Land of Moderation, however, such challenges seem manageable. “We’re less anxious because we didn’t have the financial crisis,” says Freeland, “but Canadians should guard against smugness.” Now there’s something you’re unlikely to hear an American politician say.

— Siemond Chan contributed to this article.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback To Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.

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A Post From Martin


No surprise

women get things done

Abel Oldsworth, my reticent friend, told me he was not surprised that the Congressional Gentle Women or Gentle Ladies, as they are addressed, collaborated in getting compromises underway during the government shutdown and debt default messes.  It’s their gene based intuition or mind reading capabilities.

My wife reads me like a book.  For example, the other night, I was scanning concert attendees prior to its start and musing over some improper thoughts.  She poked me in the ribs and said, “Quit that!”

I had not even said a word.

As some Congressional Men snipe and investigate to stall legislative fixes, Gentle Women’s intuition and caring will again get solutions going.

He recalled the leadership of a former one.

There once was a Congress woman named Bridgett,

Who believed in fixits for legislation with glitches.

She reached across the aisle

In a nonpartisan style,

Outclassing the partisans who preferred just to ditch it.

Yeah for the USA

Happy Thanksgiving

Martin Egelston

 Battle Creek Enquirer

11/9/2013

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Back story on Uncle Tom’s Cabin


Study: Slave’s stay inspired ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’

  • FILE - This May 17, 2005, file photo, shows the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine. A professor of American literature at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., Susanna Ashton, says her research shows Stowe harbored a fugitive slave from South Carolina here just before she started writing her novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Ashton suggests that the painful story of slavery told by John Andrew Jackson prompted Stowe to begin writing the famous novel. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

    View PhotoAssociated Press/Robert F. Bukaty, File – FILE – This May 17, 2005, file photo, shows the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine. A professor of American literature at Clemson University in Clemson, …more  S.C., Susanna Ashton, says her research shows Stowe harbored a fugitive slave from South Carolina here just before she started writing her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Ashton suggests that the painful story of slavery told by John Andrew Jackson prompted Stowe to begin writing the famous novel. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

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CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A Clemson University professor is convinced that Harriet Beecher Stowe might not have written “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” if it not for a fugitive South Carolina slave she harbored for a night before starting the history-making novel.

The book, which fueled the abolitionist cause and helped put the nation on the path toward the Civil War, was published in 1852 after being serialized the previous year. It became a bestselling book of the 19th century, second only to the Bible.

Stowe mentions harboring the slave in her Maine home in a late 1850 letter to her sister. She writes that “he was a genuine article from the ‘Ole Carling State.'” While it is well-known to historians that Stowe harbored a slave, neither her letter nor her later writings mention his name.

Susanna Ashton, a professor of American literature at Clemson, says her research has convinced her the slave Stowe harbored was John Andrew Jackson. He was born a slave on a Sumter County, S.C., plantation and escaped in 1847, fleeing to Charleston and then stowing away between bales of cotton on a ship heading north.

Ashton’s conclusions appear in this summer’s edition of “Common-Place,” the journal of the Massachusetts-based American Antiquarian Society.

After fleeing, Jackson settled in Salem, Mass. But when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850 by Congress — meaning even slaves who had escaped from the South could be returned to their owners — Jackson headed north through Maine to Canada.

Jackson later learned to read and write, went to Europe and his book “The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina” was published in in England in 1862. After the Civil War, Jackson made a living as a writer and lecturer.

In his book, Jackson recalls the encounter with Stowe, mentioning her by name.

“She took me in and fed me, and gave me some clothes and five dollars. She also inspected my back, which is covered with scars which I shall carry with me to the grave. She listened with great interest to my story,” he wrote.

In Stowe’s letter to her sister, the original of which is in the Beineke Library at Yale University, Stowe notes the effect that night had on her family.

“There hasn’t been anybody in our house (who) got waited on so abundantly and willingly for ever so long. These negroes possess some mysterious power of pleasing children for they hung around him and seemed never tired of hearing him talk and sing,” she wrote.

In a recent interview, Ashton said: “Was it Jackson who was hidden by Stowe as a fugitive in Brunswick Maine? I’m 99.9 percent sure. That seems absolutely true. I think he was an inspiration for the novel. I think his pain touched her and helped her to act.”

Ashton said after “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published, a lot of blacks and former slaves wanted to meet Stowe and sought her endorsement.

“She was one of the biggest celebrities in the United States and had huge political and cultural clout,” Ashton said. “It was only when I looked at the dates more closely I said wait a minute, Jackson met her before she wrote ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ That’s how the remarkable nature of this encounter began to unfold for me.”

Stowe would later say she had a vision in a church in Brunswick — the pew is marked — where she imagined the ending of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and went home to write.

Ashton suggests Stowe never mentioned Jackson in her later writing because she would have had to admit she violated the Fugitive Slave Act.

Katherine Kane, executive director of the Harriett Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Conn., pointed out that critics have said Stowe, as a northerner, was writing about a section of the country where she had little firsthand experience.

Although born in Connecticut, Stowe spent 20 years in Cincinnati, just across the river from Kentucky, a slave state.

“I don’t think we want to devalue the time in Cincinnati,” Kane said, adding that Stowe was an abolitionist who would have seen owners hiring out their slaves for work. She also had servants in her household who were former slaves and collected stories of others writing about slavery, Kane said.

So, did Jackson prompt Stowe to write the book?

“Quite frankly that might be,” Kane said, although she noted that it seemed Stowe was moving toward the book for some time.

“When you look at her accumulated letters from that time, you see it starting to build,” she said. “But it gives me goose bumps that Dr. Ashton has been able to identify this unnamed person who was in the household at the time.”

She added: “From the Stowe Center’s point of view, we are trying to use all this history because it’s important to us all today. Here we are still talking about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and its impact, and the more we know about the individuals who inspired the story, the better it is.”

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Worth Reading & Remembering


I have reprinted this article in total because many of us never knew about it.

Editor’s note: CNN will debut “We Were There: The March on Washington — An Oral History” hosted by Don Lemon Friday at 10 p.m. ET and PT. LZ Granderson is a CNN contributor who writes a weekly column for CNN.com. The former Hechinger Institute Fellow has had his commentary recognized by the Online News Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He is also a senior writer for ESPN. Follow him on Twitter @locs_n_laughs.

(CNN) — On August 13, 1963, in a last ditch effort to derail the pending March on Washington, Strom Thurmond took the Senate floor and hurled a series of vicious, personal attacks against the man organizing the largest protest in U.S. history.

Thurmond called him a Communist and a draft dodger.

He brought up a previous arrest and accused him of being immoral and a pervert.

LZ Granderson

LZ Granderson

The man Thurmond was attacking was not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In fact Thurmond used King’s own words — secretly recorded by J.Edgar Hoover — in his attacks against the march’s deputy director.

“I hope Bayard don’t take a drink before the march,” Clarence Jones, King’s lawyer and close friend, said in the recording.

“Yes,” King replied. “And grab one little brother. ‘Cause he will grab one when he has a drink.”

The story behind ‘I Have A Dream’ speech

“Bayard” would be Bayard Rustin, the most important leader of the civil rights movement you probably have never heard of.

Opinion: Congress, stand up for civil rights

Rustin was imprisoned for challenging racial segregation in the South before the phrase “Freedom Rider” was ever said. He taught a 25-year-old King the true meaning of nonviolent civil disobedience while the great dreamer was still being flanked by armed bodyguards. And before addressing the crowd of 250,000 that gathered at the National Mall nearly five decades ago, famed actor and activist Ossie Davis introduced him “as the man who organized this whole thing.”

No, the reason why you probably have not heard of Bayard Rustin has nothing to do with the significance of his contributions to the March on Washington or the civil rights movement in general. His absence is epitomized by the sentiment woven between the lines of that joke between Jones and Rustin’s protegé. You see, the organizer of the great march, the man who held a fundraiser at Madison Square Garden to help fund the bus boycott in Montgomery, the intellectual behind the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Council was also unabashedly gay. And it was the discomfort some had with his sexuality that led to his disappearance in our history books.

“We must look back with sadness at the barriers of bigotry built around his sexuality,” wrote NAACP chairman emeritus Julian Bond in “I Must Resist,” a collection of Rustin letters. “We are the poorer for it.”

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of arguably the single most important event of the 20th century — as well as the speech that defined it — there is a natural inclination to evaluate how close we are to achieving Dr. King’s famed dream.

Why some movements work and others wilt

With President Obama in office, it is silly to suggest no progress has been made. But considering that the wealth gap between black and white families has nearly tripled over the past 25 years or that a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 40% of white Americans don’t have a friend outside of their race, who can view the election of one man as King’s dream being fulfilled?

Yes, the residue of the Jim Crow era still poisons the air like mold spores after a flood, manifesting in unjust laws such as Stop and Frisk and clusters of failing schools in poor black neighborhoods.

But after recently reading the full text of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, it occurred to me that perhaps the reason why we’re still divided as a nation is because we haven’t figured out what is keeping us apart.

Despite being a leading voice for racial equality since the 1940s, Rustin’s marginalization is a direct reflection of oppression of a different sort. Thurmond used it as a weapon to attack the March on Washington. Adam Clayton Powell, a black congressman from Harlem, used it to gain power. Other black leaders, like Stokely Carmichael, used it to question his place in the movement.

March on Washington: Fast Facts

You see as big and as looming and as destructive as racism has been and continues to be in society, we must remember it is only a branch.

The root of the problem, the reason why we continue to struggle with equality, is our pathological intolerance, an intolerance no collective group of people has proven to be immune to.

“I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today, and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

Dr. King’s dream has not been fulfilled because we began betraying the integrity of his dream the moment we started scrubbing Rustin’s life out of Black History Month lessons and civil rights movies.

We betray that dream each time a black person claims offense to the notion that gay rights are civil rights, as if the black community is the only community capable of being oppressed.

We betray King’s dream each time a white elected official is allowed to say things about the gay community in ways that would never be tolerated if directed at the black community.

I don’t say these things because I view the history and plight of these two minority groups as being exactly the same — they are not.

I say these things because racism and homophobia — like anti-Semitism, sexism and xenophobia — all have the same mother. And as long as concessions are made for one, we will never be free from the clutches of the others.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian award. It was established by President Kennedy 50 years ago. Considering the anniversary of the march, it is fitting that Rustin is among the 16 being honored with it in November.

But like King, he was more than August 28, 1963.

He was a giant.

And so while the medal is special, the best way to honor him is to talk about him, all of him, both now and in the many years to come. Bayard Rustin spent his life fighting for peace and equality and he did so unashamed of who he was. It’s about time history, and the people he helped most, stop being ashamed of him.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of LZ Granderson.

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