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What we ARE, is mostly due to accidents of birth or to our own success or failure to correct for such accidents or to capitalize upon them. Dudley was born a Midwestern Republican WASP, a member of the Post World War II Baby Boom Generation or "Boomers," two years after the YEAR OF THE BOMB, nine months after Bill Clinton was born, one month after Dave Letterman was born, and two months before O.J. Simpson would be born. A week after his birth, during the first week of June, a
huge
blizzard struck the Midwest, then according to some (who might just be nuts), ALIENS of extraterrestrial origin crashed their space craft in New Mexico. Within a year,
Israel would conquer Palestine, Gandhi would be assassinated, and the United Nations would ratify a Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, which governments World wide would ignore. News that systemic racism against Indians, Blacks, Latino Americans and others, and the Chauvinist and Homophobic oppression of Women, Gays and Lesbians would no longer go unchallenged seemed to hit the White Male dominated Establishment in US society pretty hard a decade or so later, especially when bodies of martyrs began to pile up and the non-violent tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., patterned after Gandhi's tactics in South Africa and India against an oppressive minority ruling class began to become effective. Very unfortunately, agents of the US Federal, State, or local governments were just as likely as not to be seen enforcing laws against Freedom as defending laws protecting Freedom, sometimes beating and killing those who protested oppression, while violence and sometimes murder of those who dared to speak out was often unpunished or celebrated. Of course, none of these events had anything to do with each other, so far as anybody can prove, but they provide interesting background to unfolding events in Southeast Asia, where rigged elections turned out puppet leaders, as similar rigged elections did for puppet masters in both Moscow and Washington DC all around the world during these years, when anyone even bothered to hold an election of any sort, yet there are still those who believe the Cold War propaganda that their own side did no wrong, while the other side was pure absolute evil itself, or the other side's degrees of evil justified evil, and the peoples of such countries as were forced under the heel of anyone learned to resent the heel, regardless of how pure those wearing the boot saw themselves. To those under it, a heel is a heel!
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Republican lower middle class WASP boys were programmed to think of themselves as the inheritors of the right to rule without equal the greatest empire in history; to grow up and try to rise above the laboring world of their parents, possibly to become President; to go into business for themselves; to become a boss and by doing so escape being a "slave;" to do better than their
parents (and apparently to expect to be held up). The flip side for WASP girls was that they were conditioned to wear panty girdles, but doll themselves up to please and seduce their men, and make motherhood and perfect subordinate partnership with their first husbands in all they endeavored to do, the most fulfilling life they could imagine or perform for the good of WASP male dominated hive. A second class citizenship despite having recieved the vote earlier in the century. In the fifties and sixties, there was such a thing as "having to get married". Bastards were also looked down on and treated as second class citizens. No one wanted to be a Bastard. The word was used as a dirty word, a name one called someone one wished to demean; a classification one desires to avoid. Following the "Police Action" in Southeast Asia, Nam vets would be as welcome at American Legion events as "Bastards at the family reunion", according to one commentator, until it dawned on the Legion it was going to die without new blood, so Posts started donating money to Viet-Nam Memorials, but they still choke on calling ten years of waging war and dropping many more bombs than during all of W.W. II, and millions dead 'a war', and take refuge in it not having been declared 'a war', which only means it was an illegal war, but that kind of talk doesn't get anybody to the picnic table, so it is hushed up. So much for the heroically preserved and repeated truth that will set you free, the truth we are extolled to kill for, possibly die for, the first casualty of ...the "Police Action".
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