I Should Be the Poster Boy for Colored People

At Christmas I tend to go red-cheeked for the holidays. Tell me that's not colorful!

The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is not terribly interested in me as a member. For one thing, I'm not black, native American or Latino. If I were Asian they would only be slightly more interested in me. Secondly, I'm a conservative and vote Republican and that by itself will cost you your colored card. Now if you are Democrat and progressive, you get a pass. Democrats like Rachel Dolezal or Elizabeth Warren can fudge their racial credentials because, unlike me, they are liberals and therefore, by progressive groupthink, cannot be other than what they say they are. Even the palest President in a century, Bill Clinton can get away with calling himself the "first black president" in US History because he carries the right party card.

I would like to make the case that I am, in fact, "colored" despite the abuse I'm going to take from my progressive friends for saying so. Why?  Let me enumerate.....

1. I am, in fact, not white, but a pale pink - sometimes more of a beige! This is my natural state. If I am white, my wife will say, "You look terrible!" and put me into bed with a hot water bottle and aspirin.
2. Sometimes, in winter, I am a pale blue!  If I sit too close to a fireplace I turn a nice cherry red.
3. In summer, I go a nice light brown or tan color. If I spend too much time in the sun, I go a bright red except on my butt which remains a pasty white by contrast.
4. If I get sick I turn yellow sometimes and again get sent to bed with a hot water bottle and Tylenol (in case it's the flu - she doesn't want me to get Reye's syndrome from taking aspirin)*
5. Also, the fact is that WHITE is a color. In fact it is all colors put together. Ironically, the color black is actually an absence of reflected colors.

In point of fact, then, I'M A RAINBOW! I'm all kind of colors all at once. Not in the LGBTLSMFT sense, mind you, but I am actually a blending of many colors. So when you are talking about colored folk, I demand you include me in that group. I'm a color too! My politics or religion should have nothing to do with whether or not I'm a colored person. The great truth is that we're all colored people and once we get used to that idea, we can stop shoving people into artificial groups by the color of their skins. A wise man once said that what's really most important is not the color of our skin but the content of our character.

All us colored folk say, "Amen, Dr. King. Amen!"

© 2018 by Tom King


* I know Reye's Syndrome only happens to kids, and I know that I'm 64 years old, but my Sweet Baboo knows me all too well and she isn't so sure I'm grown up enough to be immune to childhood diseases yet.

Gloating When You Win Is ALWAYS a Bad Idea

A lot of my readers are Seventh Day Adventists. There was a major vote at the church's General Conference Meeting in San Antonio last week on the subject of who decides whether it is permissible to ordain women to the ministry. Before your eyes glaze over, this isn't about that.

Stuff like the picture above has been popping up on SDA Facebook member sites since the big vote last week went "NO". Nothing actually changed with regard to women in the ministry. The vote merely said that the General Conference President and his aids will decide, not the local conferences and churches. The president of the General Conference is one Ted Wilson, who, like George W. Bush, is the son of a previous General Conference president, Neal Wilson. Adventists as a group are rebellious Protestant with a long history of ignoring popular opinion and going with Scripture for their source of authority. We even demand that our church's resident prophet conform to the Bible - something she, herself, recommended.

But, if you are an SDA and saw the picture above, your mind probably went immediately to last week's contentious vote on women's ordination? I kow mine did. 

The controversy reminds me of the kerfuffle over the Confederate battle flag of recent weeks. As the flags are being torn down one by one from monuments and government property throughout the South in response to a massive media campaign to eradicate the flag from display, Southern folk have felt compelled to hoist the Confederate Battle Flag in their homes, at NASCAR events and everywhere else you can imagine over the last couple of weeks. 

Many, especially liberals and Yankees assume that flying the Confederate battle flag is racist. They really don't understand the situation. Stuff like this is an expression of rebellion, something Americans have done since before 1776. You will note that neither group, pro-ordination Adventists nor the children of the soldiers who lost the Civil war have gone out blowing things up or occupying some city park to raise "awareness". They've just raised their banner here and there. It's more about tweaking the noses of the victors - in essence saying I'm not going away just because you say so. Most Southerners care not a fig for racism, but do care about being from the South and resent people trying to crush what they see as their heritage. In the same way, I find a majority of Adventists who voted "yes" last week, or would have if they'd had a vote, are more angry that the power to decide that issue was held in the hands of Ted Wilson and his confederates.

This flag is the actual racist Confederate
Flag - Southerners abandoned it long ago.
It is, therefore, not useful for fomenting racial
unrest if you're looking to promote a meme that
all white people (at least Southerners) are racist.

For most Southerners, the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of rebellion, fried chicken and potato salad, peach pie and watermelon. Most of their fathers who fought in the War Between the States thought it was about states rights and few of the men in the battle lines standing under THAT flag owned slaves. If there was another flag that was an easily recognizable symbol of the South, most Southerners would fly it.

Besides, the battle flag was actually NOT the flag of the Confederacy, but the flag of the troops and so is far less racist than the flag shown to the left. If you want to ban the real "racist" flag, this is the one chosen by the high-born plantation owners and slave-holders who wrote the entirely racist Confederate constitution? This is the flag you ought to be getting hacked off about if someone flies it. The battle flag was flown by armies that thought they were fighting for their rights.The battle flag flew over men who thought they were fighting against government overreach. For instance, I fly my Texas flag and my Texas Navy flag up here in very liberal Washington State as a symbol of pride and my resistance to current government overreach. I fly it alongside the Stars and Stripes. I do so because my home state has resisted progressive socialism successfully and we're kind of proud of that.

Adventists, meanwhile, at least those who felt the vote on women's ordination was more about the centralization of power in the hands of a few high up administrators than it was about women in the ministry, are searching for ways to express their frustration. They are not rebelling against the church, but against the kind of high-handed strong-arming that can take place if too much power is settled in the hands of a few. Even the GC said it wasn't about whether women could preach but about who, as President Bush once colorfully described it, is the "decider".

Ironically, both the battle flag and pictures like the one above are more about who's going to tell who what to do than they are about the issues they purport to be about.  It will be interesting to see whether the church cracks down on the rebellious murmerings of the members who had hoped last week's vote would affirm the 1903 GC's move to decentralize the power and authority of the church's world leaders. It won't help if they do crack down on expressions of discontent by Adventist members, anymore than ordering Southerners not to display the Battle Flag did anything other than to stimulate sales of the flags. If the church leadership truly wants unity, it should look around for ways to put more decision-making authority in the hands of the unions and the conferences and divest itself very publicly of the mantle of authority they wear. That authoritarian leadership style looks more and more like another top-heavy church organization we all know and fear. This is not the time for sermons on the headship doctrine. It is time to reaffirm that Jesus is our Lord and it is to him we are directly responsible.

Just one man's opinion

© 2015 by Tom King

My Racist Computer

Political Correctness Steps into the Twilight Zone

I knew political correctness had gotten out of hand, but I didn't know just how bad it was.  I got a note last night from an editor. I had to read it a couple of times before I was able to comprehend the instructions I'd been given.

The article I was writing was about how to enable a CD burner in Windows XP.  I described the process of installing and setting up a new CD burner in a PC.  One type of CD burner is an IDE drive.  And IDE drive works on the same sort of connector that and IDE hard drive uses.  In fact, to save space, instead of hooking up an extra cable, you can chain the new CD drive to the same IDE ribbon cable that you have your primary hard drive connected to.

But to do so, you have to set jumpers on the CD burner to the "slave" setting, so that the the hard drive is the "master" drive.  I described how to set up the master/slave relationship between the hard drive and CD burner.  Easy peasy - no problem.  Then I got a rewrite request from the editor it said:

• "Not sure about the technical terms and it may be correctly used, but can you write around the "slave the drive" and the "master/slave" references. That's the only change but I didn't want to make the change myself and mess up the set up process by choosing the wrong words."  -Editor

When it finally struck me that the editor was asking me to remove the "racist" terminology from my article. I've done a couple of articles on hooking up CD's and DVD drives in the past using the same "master/slave" terminology because that's what it's called.  If you've ever installed hard drives, you're familiar with master/slave drive settings. Apparently, the D.S. editor found these terms offensive and wanted me to "write around" the terms - meaning find another way to say the same thing without actually saying "master/slave". 

When I stopped laughing, I revised my article and I sent this explanation to the editor.

• I tried to clarify the whole Master/slave thing for you. The problem is that these are the correct terms. Computer people do not find them racially insensitive. The slave is a secondary or subordinate drive, but no one calls them that or would understand what your were talking about if you called them that. The installation instructions clearly label where the jumper pins go for the "master" or "slave" positions.
  
  I really can't eliminate the words without inventing new terminology which would sound a little ridiculous. I tried to clarify the article a little in case the problem was understanding what a "slave" drive was.
  
  Anyway, until Bill Gates signs an Emancipation Proclamation for CD burners, we'll just have to make do with the terms as they are.........   ;-)

 I put the little winking smiley face in there to let her know I was joking. I doubt it will help.




Tom