¿Que esta chingadera?

 I managed the stairs the other day, stiff-legged with my bum knee in a brace, and walked outside for a while to enjoy some fresh air.  It was sunny in only the way sparkling winter sunshine can be.  There was a brisk, cold wind blowing steadily from the north, but out of the wind and in the sun it felt toasty warm.  I carefully sat down on some brick steps to enjoy being outside for the first time in so long.  They were warm from the sunshine and felt delightful.  I could hear the wind soughing through the trees and watched them swaying.  A flock of small birds, too far away for me to make out what they were, flew low across the ground. 

I was wearing a thick terrycloth robe, navy blue, that absorbed the heat of the sun and kept me toasty warm.  I decided to take off my knee brace and get some sun on my leg.  It was the second one I've had to wear. The first was a plaster half-cast put on in the hospital, wrapped tightly in bandages.  This one was removable.  Held on by Velcro stays it had metal braces on each side and was made of some thick heavy black material.  It was more comfortable than the plaster cast, but not by much.  So anyway, with my leg stretched out straight I undid the Velcro straps and gently slid it off.  Ahh!  My leg felt cold for a second as the light sweat under the brace evaporated, but then the sun warmed the skin.  When the first cast had been taken off and replaced by the brace, my leg above and below the knee was covered by a black bruise, purple around the edges.  But now it was a fading yellow and I could see no swelling.  I took a chance and tried flexing the knee.  No pain.  So I did it again and again.  My leg actually felt better.  In a week, maybe two, I should be walking normally, my ribs and collar bone knitted, my bruised and battered lung recovered, and all that has passed merely another fading memory that, by and by, I will forget all about.

 I was browsing a well-known rightish blog when I came across this exchange in the comments to a post:

"Given everything we know about women, it’s amazing to me that male homosexuality is still so stigmatized.

Given everything I know about women, it’s amazing to me that femicide is still so stigmatized."

And those rightie-tighties wonder why women would rather run screaming into freeway traffic than have anything to do with the alt-right or dissident right or whatever they call themselves.  You have to wonder how many bodies some of these commenters have on them.  If they had wives -- like that would ever happen --  they are the type who would destroy them with verbal and physical abuse.

These righties very especially hate white women and blame them for everything they don't like about the world today and say the most scurrilous things about them.  It seems that if they could push a button and all the white women in the world would vanish, they would mash that button flat. 

Being a mating pair (to use an ethological term) is good in so many ways.  Of course, there are bad matches and all sorts of potential troubles, but if the two of you are compatible, like each other -- or dare I say love each other -- life is so much better.   Caring about one another, having a deep, abiding affection, a pleasure in each other's company...and so much more in this emotion, this feeling, we call love is, it seems to me, very much what life is about; at least a very significant part of it, a part without which this weary life can seem unbearable.
 

Funny, nobody talks about love any more. It used to be the most important thing between a man and woman.  Now it's supposed to be sex.  I wonder why that changed.  Or if it really did.  Looking at ads and articles in magazines from the 1930s, there was a lot of female nudity. And before the Hays code the movies were getting pretty raunchy. In one of them you can even -- gasp! -- see Claudette Colbert's nipples. 
I've written about all the blatant sex going on in the 1930s.  And the birthrate was low.  But by the 1940s there was much more of an emphasis on courtship and love, and a lot more public prudery -- and when the boys came home after the war there was a baby boom.  Correlation?

Speaking of sex...well, kinda...one time I was chatting with some friends and someone asked what was the award or contest or game they were most proud of winning.  People mentioned scholarships and sports triumphs and culinary feats and so forth. When it came to me I blurted out, "A wet tee shirt contest!" It was true, too.  I've gotten scholarships but I never felt proud that I did so, only relieved and thankful. I'm not a sports person so my happiest sports memory is being kicked off the high school softball team for hitting a home run and then running around the bases the wrong way.  I thought everybody was cheering me not yelling at me.  (Why was that a happy memory?  Because I didn't want to play on the stupid team but I had to for character development or something.  I sure didn't see that happening.) I've never entered any kind of cooking contest although I like to cook but I have entered wet tee shirt contests, not as my own idea but at the urging of boy friends or el jefe.  And I win!  So, frivolous as it is, I get a rocking (jiggling?) vanity high -- and a proud male squire. Men are so easily pleased.  Fortunately.  Well, at least men who actually like women.  It seems there are fewer and fewer of those every day.  Whose fault is that?  Hmm.... Opinions differ.

I don't really understand the complaints about places and things named for American Indians demeaning them.  They were named after Indians out of admiration and respect and an acknowledgement that Indians were an integral and important part of the American story.  One of my relatives was Billy Two Moons Aenoheso, descendant of some very tough hombres who fought Crook and Custer, Terry and Gibbon, back in the old days.  But he never thought much about that, as far as I ever knew.  When it was his time to serve his country -- yes, his country -- he joined up and fought in Viet Nam, being pretty badly wounded there.

His wife, Arvelos Whitewolf Crazymule, was a direct descendant of Hump Back Woman, a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre.  If anyone had a right to hold a grudge against white America, it would have been her, but, as far as I ever knew, she did not.  The past is the past, and it is this present we live in that we have to get through as best we can.  Both passed away a few years ago, however, and I wonder whether, if they were resurrected into today's woke world, they might feel the need to harbor resentment.  And, after all, it is a hard thing to be on the losing side of history, to be defeated and your culture, your way of life, your worldview, your personal and ethnic self-esteem be erased, leaving you no choice but to adapt to the conqueror's culture or die.  But at least American Indians were defeated by a foe that did not belittle and denigrate them but honored them in defeat, putting their visage on the two most commonly circulated coins in the years after the Indian Wars were finally over -- the Indian head penny and Indian head or buffalo nickel.  Not much, you may say, but still.... 

Among my ancestors was one William Hebb.  Born in England in 1755, he came to America in 1776 as a soldier in the British Army to fight the revolutionary colonists.  But he had no love for the King and felt sympathy for the Americans' cause and deserted.  He then joined  the Third Continental Light Dragoons, aka Lady Washington's Dragoons, which formed the life guard of George Washington, serving under Lt. Col. George Baylor.  He fought at Germantown,  Brandywine, and survived the so-called Baylor Massacre at Tappan, New Jersey in 1778.  This latter was a night ambush in which 67 of the regiment's 116 men were killed or wounded and Baylor was captured. Hebb was seriously wounded in this action and he was discharged and returned to Virginia to recuperate.  While there, he married a cousin of George Washington, the widow Jemima Washington Jenkins.   The regiment was reformed under Lt. Col. William Washington and sent to the Carolinas where, after recovering from his wounds, Hebb rejoined his regiment, which had amalgamated with the First Continental Light Dragoons due to the heavy casualties it had sustained, and fought at Cowpens, Santee River and Eutaw Springs.  Hebb was wounded at Gilford Court House and returned to Virginia, but recovered in time to participate in the siege of Yorktown.  After the Revolutionary War, he became an active abolitionist and was forced to leave Virginia and settle along a tributary of the  Ohio River.  For his service during the war, he received a pension of $8 a month.  He died in 1833 at the age of 78.  His son, Thomas Hebb, fought in the war of 1812, serving in the Virginia militia. Five of William's grandsons fought for the Union in the Civil War.  

I never knew about this ancestral line until just recently when one of my aunts sent me a a family genealogical monograph.  Reading through it, it seems that I also have French Huguenot and Welsh ancestry.  I had known about my German Anabaptist (Pennsylvania Dutch) and English Quaker ancestors and was aware I had a Knickerbocker Dutch ancestor.  I had thought that the Knickerbocker was the first of my European ancestors to arrive in America, sometime in the 1630s, but it seems my Huguenot ancestor, Abraham Vautrin, arrived some years before then, in 1624.  And, of course, my northern Cheyenne ancestors arrived a few years before that!  So I'm pretty anchored in the good old US of A.  So I guess, whatever happens to our beloved country, I'll ride out the typhoon or go down with the ship.  And since I'm descended from multiple lines of the persecuted -- Anabaptists burned alive by Catholics and drowned by Lutherans, Quakers jailed and exiled by the Church of England, Huguenots massacred by Catholics, American revolutionaries warred against by the brutal British Empire and, of course, the Indians...-- I and mine will manage to endure, survive and eventually prosper again despite what suffering we may be forced to endure as hated white devils.  At least I hope so.

I mentioned this conclusion to a friend and he pointed out that almost all these ancestors of mine fled their persecutors and emigrated to a more congenial land, so why shouldn't American whites do the same, ditch the USA and go where they're wanted. I asked where is that? He did not know. Do you?

Interesting research paper:

Identity Development and Its Relationship to Family History Knowledge Among Late Adolescents