Happy 200th Birthday Frederick Douglass

This will be a quick one because I am simply up to my eyeballs with work I have to get done in other areas of my life today.  I feel like I'm making excuses, being preemptively defensive, but those are issues I have struggled with all of my teen and adult life.......sorry.

I learned that today is the 200th birthday of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist of the 1800s.  It is unfortunate that I feel the need to mention that Douglass was an Afro-American, but this seems to be a tag that is placed on him, as though that made him unusual due to is intellectual prowess.  Humans are humans and if you strip the skin off of all of us, we're all the same.  Same brains, same spinal cords, same organs, same skeletons, same musculature.

I have known one of Frederick Douglass's great thoughts for many years and want to share my thoughts around it.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

I used to read this as if "power" were to "concede" something, it would "demand" something in return.  Recently, oh.......starting about 11/9/2016, I started to interpret this differently.  I do not, now, believe that my original understanding was what Douglass meant.  I do not know for sure what he meant, but I now think that what he meant was that the powerful people in our world will not give up anything unless people demand  that they do.  Furthermore, that demand needs to be, has to be, must be a "demand" or demands that ultimately cause 'pain'.  I'm not talking about physical pain, nor am I talking about a slight bit of emotional discomfort.  I mean a great deal of emotional pain, with no let up until the concession that is necessary is given.  Just as with operant conditioning, what pain is meaningful to the person to experience it,  must be identified first, otherwise the demand will not cause pain.

I believe we are working on many different fronts, to combat d. j[ackass] trump and in doing so, we may not know exactly what is causing the pain, but I believe the pain is being felt.  We must continue.  

The Congress is a much easier nut to crack.  Make it clear that if they do not bend to the peoples' will, they will no longer maintain their positions of power.  They will be voted out.  We are also traveling down this path correctly, from the way I'm seeing things.  The special election in Georgia's 6th congressional district in April may inform us of our success, but the real measure of our success will be the mid-term elections in 2018.

I also want to quickly look at another Douglass thought/quote that I only learned today:

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Douglass was truly brilliant.  His meaning here is obvious, but rather then looking at Afro-American history to see this point, I suggest we look at our current older white male and female, violent, bigoted population, trump's constituency.  Something I have understood for decades is that each generation of white American's are getting less and less bigoted.  Each generation of white Americans seem to be understanding more and more that we are all humans and are leaving skin color behind them.  I certainly see this in the 'millennial'  generation.  So, I have more and more hope as I grow older that we, as humans, are moving towards humanism at a steady pace.  It is the Electoral College that has made this appear to not be the case in our recent elction, but I believe we are now at the beginning of the end of the Electoral College.

So..........Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass!  And.......thank you for sharing your wonderful and beautiful thoughts with us.