Venting

I just needed to vent. I'm watching the news and they are talking about ACORN and some of the calls they have been receiving. One woman stating that Obama should be hung. I just wanted to cry and correct her English. The closer the election looms the more I realize that racism is alive and well. I love this country but when are we going to grow up. My husband has heard incredibly racist remarks from neighbors and it just makes me sick. These are people that I have called friend. Seriously where do you draw the line? I just want to say in my support for Obama race never entered my mind. I simply think he is the better man for the job.

Jesse Helms

Some of Jesse' kinder moments:

On civil rights protest in 1963:
"The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights

Soon after the Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) ran into Mosely-Braun in a Capitol elevator. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." He then proceeded to sing the song about the good life during slavery to Mosely-Braun (Gannett News Service, 9/2/93; Time, 8/16/93).

While working on the 1950 campaign of Republican Willis Smith against Democrat Frank Porter Graham, Helms helped create an ad that read "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man. (FAIR 9/1/01, The News and Observer 8/26/01)

Helms once claimed that "The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian."

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker noted in his memoirs that Helms had "the 'humorous habit'" of calling all black people "Fred".


Shall we have a moment of silence for this kind Christian man?

The Closet

Shirts neatly folded
Stacked in orderly rows
Whites with the whites
Blue with the blues
And down below
Set in decorous lines
A regiment of shoes
Each paired with their
Appropriate mate
Lying in the corner
Soon to be discarded
A neglected heap
Of the faded and torn
Everything as it should be
Coded and categorized
It makes life so simple
Never having to search
Never having to think

copyright Sherry Obsheatz

Damaged Goods

Damaged goods, inflicting damage
A sickness festering in the dim
Light of hate
Sharpened on the grindstone
Of ignorance
Spewing forth putrid slights,
N*gger this and n*gger that
Fag this and fag that
Whore this and whore that
The virus running ever deeper
Manifesting in false smiles
Bottled in sugar-coated insults
And sold to us as
Thug this and thug that
So gay this and so gay that
Bitch this and bitch that

And the ones in their lofty perches
Laughing and gloating
At the teeming masses of
Poor and working folk
Ever satisfying their
Greed machine
All the while nurturing
This multitude of abominations

copyright Sherry Obsheatz