[Granville-Hough] 10 Sep 2009 - What goes around comes around
Trustees for Granville W. Hough
gwhough-trust at oakapple.net
Mon Sep 11 18:47:25 PDT 2017
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:00:21 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: What Goes Around Comes Around -10 Sep 2009
Recent Immigrant-bashing Law Brings back History (1993 or 2009).
The illegal immigrant-bashing law recently passed in 1993 which
prevented illegal immigrants from getting CA driving licenses is much in
the news these days. The arguments are highly reminiscent of those I
heard in Mississippi 60 to 65 years ago which had to do with coping with
an unwanted but exploited racial group in our midst. The arguments could
be about school integration, voting and pole taxes, or miscegenation. I
recall how careful one had to be in those arguments because there were
groups watching to identify a wrong-thinker, whose storage houses and
barns could catch fire, or whose fences could be cut so crops could be
trampled by livestock, or whose house could be burglarized (as no one
had locks.)
All I have to do to remind me of those times and those arguments is to
take any of the current articles or oral statements on driving licenses
or health care and make some simple substitutions: for the phrase
ôillegal immigrant,ö put in ônigger;ö for the ôRepublican Party,ö put in
ôWhite Citizens Council,ö or ôKu Klux Klan.ö
So for those of you lining up to sign petitions about these types of
issues, please consider the precedent you are following.
Granville W. Hough
Laguna Woods, CA
Just think!! I saw and read there were Republicans who so objected to
our President speaking to school children that they prevented the
children from listening. It takes an old Cold War soldier back to the
days of McCarthy and others who blacklisted patriotic Americans. I
personally was in charge of designing a stockade in Panama Canal for
holding 5000 Communist and Communist sympathizers. We were to use the
old hangars on Albrook Air Force Base. When a staff intelligence officer
came to check our work, I asked him where these expected Communist
prisoners were coming from. He acted as though I was a real ignorant
fellow and said, "Oh, there's that many in the Panama Canal, alone."
Well, I was there two more years, and I never met one of them.
Something that only a few old soldiers will remember is the "chain of
command" incident in the Fourth Army headquartered in San Antonio, TX,
during the Truman Administration. There was a Republican (perhaps a
Texas Senator or Representative) who learned that we had every soldier
learn the chain of command from his squad leader through his platoon
leader, then on to the Commander in Chief, the President of the United
States. This fellow hated Harry Truman so much he went bunkers over this
fact. We also had pictures of the higher commanders in each Day Room
(Recreation Room). We were told informally that if this politician ever
visited our batteries, we would save ourselves a lot of harassment if we
just removed the pictures of the Secretary of Defense and of President
Harry S. Truman until this visitor left. So in a larger sense, what goes
around comes around. Old Soldier Granville.
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