Month: September 2023

I laugh sometimes when I read some folks on a facebook posts trying to be “clever” and they use the phrase “the chickens came home to roost”..I laugh because usually they have no idea what that means. Today Sept. 11th brings back the memory of a horror that happened in the United States when without warning thousands of innocent people went to their death. The real horror was because this kind of thing was not supposed to happen to “us”. Well for some of us this meant something else. Most Americans don’t like to think about the fact that for most of the last 150 years or more. The United States has been the enemy, raining horror and death down on more innocents than I can name. Take time out for the Nazi horrors of WW II. But then the USA came right back as the number one source of death and horror for the world. Particularly the people of color of the world. The “zeal” with which America went about trying to wipe out it’s “Native” population. The way they looked the other way when thousands of people descended from slaves were lynched as whole families watched for a different kind of “Saturday Night Live” entertainment. The seemingly endless bombing of thousands of innocent people by airstrike and drones during the Obama and Bush “jr” administrations bullshit “war on Terror” ..The useless killing of people who had done us no harm and were in their own country in the senseless war in Vietnam. I can actually go on and on for pages here. I actually had American bombs dropped on me while working in a children’s hospital in West Africa. What the term “the chickens came home to roost” really means is when horror or evil happens to YOU that has it’s origins in the evil you have done. I weep for the people who died on 9/11. They were innocents too …But in truth it was the most fitting example of “the chickens came home to roost”….it was sad. People who our country had abused and bombed and starved at will …who we thought could not touch us, found a way. But on the scales of morality we had it coming.

One of my best childhood “September memories” is back in 1958. In Atlanta the “Southeastern Fair” was a BIG event. We waited all year for it. In that year there were appearances by two big “cowboy” movie stars. At each actors station there was a line of kids trying to get close , and for a dollar fifty you could get your picture taken. One line told all the little “colored” kids to get out of line or move to the back. In the other actors line after a while he saw that the Black kids were getting pushed back and he came down from the stage and walked past all the white kids to the back of the line and shook hands with all the Black kids..then he went to lunch..if you understand history and “jim crow” behavior …this was unheard of. 65 years later I still remember that…..a hint ..it was not the actor with the white horse and the mask.