I don’t know why more churches haven’t thought of this. A $900+ bottle of wine, the perfect way to reach the sophisticated wine connoisseur.
Find more at the Holy Observer.
Clarence Thomas vs. Daddy
“I complained bitterly about the oppression of blacks and told him that a revolution was coming, He assured me in return that America was the best country in the world, but I stood my ground and argued right back at him, and my newfound insolence made him furious. “I don’t know why I worked so hard to help you, boy,” he said more than once. “I never thought you’d go to some damn school way up north and have all this foolishness put in your head.” [snip]
“How could a black man from the Deep South who had survived the worst kind of bigotry possibly refuse to admit that America was tainted and corrupt and had to be rebuilt from the ground up? Was he a coward, or just a fool?”
The gulf between the two men widened as Clarence continued on in college.
The Holy Observer
An excerpt from The Holy Observer’s disclaimer:
If you are offended by any of the content on The Holy Observer, there is probably some good reason why you shouldn’t be. If you can’t figure out what that reason is, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not smart enough to understand why you shouldn’t be offended, but it probably does.
The greatest man I’ve ever known
“One Sunday he saw that my shoes were unpolished… I replied that if I stopped to polish them, I would be late for church. The next thing I knew, I was lying in a crumpled heap against the wall with Daddy standing over me saying, “You better not be late for Mass, boy!”… I polished my shoes as fast as I could and ran all the way to church, getting there just in the nick of time.”
“We saved nearly every part of the animal…. Portions were given to friends and relatives, while the rest went into the freezer to be saved for a rainy day. Daddy always seemed to be preparing for rainy days. Maybe that’s why they never came.”
“blisters come before calluses, vulnerability before maturity”
“Because of man’s fall from the Garden of Eden, Daddy said, it was our lot in life to work ‘from sun to sun.’ Once, years later, I got up the nerve to tell him that slavery was over. ‘Not in my house,’ he replied.”
“In Pinpoint I was a little Negro boy growing up among hardworking but uneducated people. From there I moved to the confusion and squalor of a run-down tenement in Savannah, where I led a life of being cold and not knowing when I would feel warmth again, of constant, gnawing hunger and not knowing when I would eat again, a life in which knowledge trickled in by the thimbleful when I yearned for floods of truth. To stay there would have doomed me to a dismal life of ignorance, perhaps even crime– a life lost before it started.”
“But as I grew older , made my own way in the world, and raised a son, I came to appreciate what I had not understood as a child: I had been raised by the greatest man I have ever known.”
Justice Thomas’s grandfather was a hard man.
My Grandfather’s Son
There are so many great passages from Clarence Thomas’ memoir, it makes it difficult to narrow down, so I will share a few for the next several days. Enjoy.
“The damn vacation is over,” Daddy [his grandfather] had told us on the morning we moved into his house. I thought of the filthy outdoor toilet behind Pigeon’s [his mother] old tenement and tried to figure out what vacation he was talking about.”
“Old Man Can’t is dead– I helped bury him” –Myers Anderson (Daddy)
“… we missed school only once in all the years I lived on East Thirty-second Street. That was not Daddy’s fault: he warned us that if we died, he’d take our bodies to school for three days to make sure we weren’t faking, and we figured he meant it.”
”I was honest with Juan [Williams] about my view of the race debate, which I found increasingly exasperating. I didn’t care which schools blacks attended, so long as they recieved a good education. As I told another reporter, ‘I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral, I’d fight against it with every breath in my body — but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write.’ Nor did it matter to me if certain neighorhoods were predominately white or black so long as they were safe and blacks could freely choose to live in either. I was sick and tired of the theories and statistics that had come to dominate the discourse on both sides of the political fence. What mattered to me were individuals and their problems, but most of the people I met in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, seemed hell-bent on winning arguments instead of solving those problems. Juan understood my pent-up frustration with this self-serving, irrelevant debate, a constant struggle that never seemed to change anything for the people who needed our help.”
What do you think?
The FairTax
So why do I like the FairTax?
It is really simple to me, the biggest advantage is this: Taxes are a deterrent. No one questions this. It is why “we” put really high taxes on cigarettes. If you want to discourage an activity, tax it. The converse is also true. If you want to encourage an activity give a tax break. So why in the world would we want to discourage INCOME? Don’t we want people to be productive? If we tax consumption instead of income we are now discouraging consumption and encouraging conservation. This would not just be good for your pocketbook but good for the economy and yes even good for the environment. Why the environment you ask? The FairTax does not tax the sale of used items. Want to avoid paying taxes on a car, buy a used one, don’t want to pay taxes on a house purchase, buy a used one. I really believe we could take a lot of power out of the hands of selfish politicians and put it back in the hands of the selfish people and that is a very good thing.
