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I didn't align with the man politically, but I admire how much of his life he spent working to improve this country for others. A life well lived.
He's known politically for ending racial segregation.
He was 80 when he died and not all that young when he took a stand. We are closer to barbarity in time and in fact than we are comfortable acknowledging. Vale.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23869499
[1] also from 1948: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm
"If our difference of opinion is so inclusive that we can agree on nothing political, our differences have gone from mere opinion into the depths of ideology. Here the institutional framework is affected. You and I would not want to live in the same city; we could not feel safe in one another's presence; each would be afraid of the effect which the other might have on the morals of the community. If I were a Nazi, and you a democrat, you would not like the idea of my children living next door to yours. If I believed that you were a good enough creature—poor deluded devil—but that you were not fit to vote, scarcely to be trusted with property, not to be trusted as an army officer, and generally subversive and dangerous, you would find it hard to get along with me."
Keeping in mind that Linebarger was writing with an eye to being "unobjectionable on the score of security by the Department of the Army", and from other dots scattered through the text, I would not be surprised if the last sentence had had a more concrete reference than its abstract wording suggests.
[2] reasons for optimism: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/18/politics/peggy-wallace-ke...
George Wallace (1963): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace%27s_1963_Inaugu...
George Wallace's grandson (1996) asked why his grandfather did such horrible things to other people.
(Apparently left to his own devices, Wallace might've been more moderate. But his constituency demanded more, as in The Candidate, so he declared "I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again.")
He was my representative before redistricting. If you don't know his story, it's worth taking the time. He got himself beat up to unconsciousness so that the rest of the United States would not be able to ignore the brutality of its racist South.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_(civil_rights_leade...
I genuinely hope to see an America someday in my life which expects and enforces the highest of its politicians again. There was a time where being a politician was respectable and honorable. It’s the position they should hold. I hope we regain that societal cohesion again. I think John Lewis was one such politician.
He is missed.
I didn't align with the man politically, but I admire how much of his life he spent working to improve this country for others. A life well lived.
He's known politically for ending racial segregation.