Well, isn’t that just utterly charming! A man of conscience. A man with a sense of morality, which he is allowed to express by walking out of the NFL game he was attending when the players took a knee for the National Anthem.

How lovely that Mr. Pence is allowed the freedom to express his opinion by his actions while the NFL players are, in certain circles, roundly castigated, called names, and have their patriotism question for doing the same thing our Vice-President did today. Does Mr. Pence understand the issues which are present here, or is he just angry because someone has the nerve to be publicly critical of this country and to express it in acts of disrespect towards the flag that represents our country?

I have news for you, sir.  The United States of  America has not been a Garden of Eden for a great number of people who have lived within her boundaries. This includes, first and foremost, black people of all ages, but also includes Catholics who have been persecuted and murdered in this country. Justice for black men and Catholics has been all but nonexistent for centuries, and the prison system is filled with black men who have been incarcerated for the same crimes for which white men have been let go. Perhaps I can excuse this under the laconia that having been brought up white, middle-class, and in relative wealth, it is hard for you to understand what is happening in the urban jungles of America.

In other words, the promises of the Constitution which are supposed to be for “all men” have been a bad joke for certain classes of people. This also happens to include poor white people, what the rich and privileged refer to as “poor white trash.” The working poor.  The lunch bucket crowd. Those people who went down into the coal mines of the rich and were paid a nickel a day while the owner of the mine lived in luxury which would have made Henry VIII green with envy. They labored 12 hours a day, seven days a week until they were finally fed up with such slavery and formed unions. Then the mine owners, supported by our wonderful government, sent in troops to kill the protesters and bust the unions. They labored in unsafe factories and died because it would have chewed into those all-important profits to enact certain safety standards.

If you like having a 40-hour work weeks with benefits, it was protest – and men willing to die for fair treatment – which gave that to America. Had it not been for those men standing for what was right, we would still have the kind of child laborers shown the picture above.

You know what would have been the more honorable thing to do, Mr. Pence? Stay for the game and afterwards, announce to the world that you are publicly inviting the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement to come to the White House for discussions of what can be done to heal the racial divide in this country.  Now it’s true that they might not have been receptive, since unfortunately, some of the BLM people think the government owes them everything and they have no responsibility to help change. But it would have been a class act on your part and would have put them in a bit of a corner if they did not respond. But class has really never been the act of the American Capitalist rich. The history of America shows us over and over again that with them, it’s money, money, money, and people are either useful tools to make money or annoyances which must be dealt with. They take care of their own, or as George Carlin once said regarding the rich kleptocracy which runs this country from Washington DC,  “It’s a great, big country club – and you ain’t in it!”

A hundred and fifty years of hate-filled, drooling-on-their-shoes, “Christian” rednecks is bound to bring the patience of even the best people to an end. If we haven’t already seen the first shots in it, I fear that with neither side listening to the other, we are in for a real, shooting civil war, just like we have seen in Third World countries around the globe. Neither side completely represents the Christian viewpoint on this issue of race relationships. Neither side appears to be willing to give an inch from the positions they have taken. Both sides have point on which they are right and points in which they are simply dead wrong – but get them to admit that????

Pfffffffffffffftttttt………….fat chance!

These are just a few quick thoughts I had today when I heard about VP Mike Pence walking out in protest from the NFL game he was attending. If anyone is reading this and is angry that I appear to be “unpatriotic” or totally on the side of BLM, let me assure you that if I see another justifiable police shooting and then see BLM leaders ignoring the behavior of the dead thug to attack the police, I will take to the keyboard to rip into their hypocrisy  just as hard as I have ripped into VP Pence today.

Hypocrisy has no color, and I have no problem calling it out when I see it.