0521blog

Shut Your Mouth

Remember the Alamo but forget about slavery. Revising history for public gain is nothing new but it seems that Texas is bringing it to a whole new level, down. They don’t want you to avoid being woke, they want you to take a long, long, permanent nap.

What more would you expect at a time when Texans cling to the lie that trump won the election, that antifa forces, whoever they are, were responsible for the attack on the capitol and while the Texas GOP is busy ramping up anti-abortion laws that would essentially prohibit all abortions out of deep seated religious convictions or something like that.

And now the great Loan Star State is about to embark on the holy crusade to whitewash, that’s an intentional pun, its history and to make sure that Texas whippersnappers understand that the state is pretty much perfect and always has been and let’s have some happy news to offset all the gloom and doom and destruction as symbolized by the left wing, commee, socialist revolutionaries back north.

Lynchings? Not here. Black Lives Matter? Never existed. Anti-Mexican discrimination? Never heard of it. The 1619 Project? Not in my state. The insurrection at the capitol? Shut your mouth. Believe in the Alamo fairy tale and Sen. Ted Cruz’s trip to a Mexican resort while he told electricity-starved constituents to go light a candle. Patriotic education, Christian heritage, guns and boundless prosperity? Now you’re talking and give me that old time mythology, it’s good enough for me, pardner.

Texans, from the ghosts of John Wayne and Davy Crockett to real life Gov. Greg Abbott are sick and tired of all this talk about how slavery was a central point in shaping the nation and how racism and talk of white supremacy and white privilege permeates America. And shut my mouth about any talk over “critical race theory,” that left wing, commie invention that racism is part of the fabric of daily experiences for people of color and has shaped the country’s legal and social systems and that most people want nothing to do with changing a system that largely benefits white people. That’s pure hogwash down here among the tumbleweeds and Gila monsters.

Texans are considering a slew of bills to revise the history curriculum in its schools to avoid critical examinations of the state’s history, including the state’s abhorrent past embrace of slavery and racism. A bill under consideration would make sure that the Alamo complex in San Antonio made no mention that the leaders in the Texas revolution traded in slaves. The six-month rebellion known as the Texas Revolution, resulted in a new state Constitution that legalized slavery seven years after Mexico had abolished it. Another bill was defeated that would have required schools to teach about the Jan. 6 assault on the capitol and I assume that is because of the widespread belief among honorable Texas gunslingers that the insurrection was really just a school class trip and that there were few if any Trumpers participating.

Another limits discussions of current events in schools, denies course credit for political activism by students and bans teaching The 1619 Project, an initiative by The New York Times, that places the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national narrative on U.S. history. Pure BS, at least in Texas.

Changing school curriculum in Texas is really a big deal because the country is a huge market for textbook sales around the nation.

For those who are kept from learning the truth about Texas and slavery, after Texas was declared a U.S. republic in 1836, the new constitution made slavery legal, prohibited any slave owner from freeing his slaves without the consent of Congress and barred Congress from making any law that restricted the slave trade or emancipated slaves.

What’s next, y’all, denial of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, Soviet Crimes, that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, evolution?

George Orwell had a few words to express the revision of history in totalitarian and authoritarian societies and Texas, words like “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” “memory hole,” “Newspeak”, “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime.”