Wednesday

    Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“Be the master of your petty annoyances and preserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It is not the mountain ahead that wears you out...it is the pebble in your shoe.”

                                                           Robert Service

Trivia question of the day:

Who was the last MLB player to hit .400 or better for a season. Answer at the end of the blog.

At home I have three pair of reading glasses. One pair on my coffee table to use when I read, a pair near my laptop to use when I am doing research and writing my blog, and finally a pair on my night stand for even more reading. At one point I could not find any of them. Throughout the day they surfaced one at a time until I had them all back. This is not the first time this has happened. I don't know who keeps coming in and hiding my glasses like that, but I eventually find them. By the way, I have two pair in my car but somehow those are never hidden from me.

I am a historian and this is what history tells us about dealing with difficult circumstances in the past. Here is one example. Hannibal crossed the Mediterranean from Carthage (present day Tunis) to the present day Spanish Riviera and headed east with the aim of defeating Rome. He brought 32 war elephants with him. He assembled a considerable army on the way east because the people he encountered had been under the heel of the Romans for centuries and wanted revenge...Hannibal had many volunteers especially in France. After crossing the Alps and entering Italy from the north Hannibal encountered the vaunted Roman legions. It was no contest. The horses used by the Roman cavalry had never seen, heard or smelled an elephant and panicked. Hannibal's horses were used to them. An entire Roman legion was annihilated and this happened more than once. The Romans decided that they could not defeat Hannibal in open combat so they chose to combat Hannibal with terrorism. The Roman army went behind Hannibal's army and began the slaughter of anyone and their families that had aided Hannibal or did nothing to stop him thus discouraging volunteers and it cut his supply lines. Then they went to Carthage and leveled it. The order was to not leave one stone standing atop another, to salt the earth so nothing would grow and poison their water sources. This had the desired effect and Hannibal eventually was defeated. The point I am making is the Romans killed thousands of civilians behind Hannibal's army and the destruction of Carthage would leave the Carthaginian army no place to come home to and no families to greet them. It destroyed their dedication and the Romans prevailed. What can we learn from this? It is cruel but the open slaughter of innocent civilians as we have seen recently cannot under any circumstance be a one way street. If it is, then the slaughter will continue. Savage and brutal attacks require savage and brutal responses...history has proven it time and again. 

                    This Date in History   March 25

1774 On this date the British Parliament passed the Boston Port Act which was part of the so-called Coercive Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the ports of Boston and Charleston, SC to any shipping not condoned by the British navy, a blockade if you please. The Boston Port Act also had a glimmer of hope for the Bostonians in that if the city coughed up the equivalent $1 million dollars to repay the English merchants for the loss of their tea in the famous Boston Tea Party, they MIGHT lighten up on the blockade. That was bullshit because the British brought in the military commander of the British army in the Colonies, General Thomas Gage, and made him the Governor of Massachusetts. The Bostonians and the colonies in general saw correctly that this was the first step toward martial law and England’s attempt to isolate New England and Boston in particular from the rest of the colonies. It did not work, y'all. The rest of the colonies gathered together and began sending supplies to New England via different avenues and the colonies overwhelmingly decided to tell those British merchants to suck it up because they ain't repaying them anything for the lost tea. If you take all the things the British Parliament burdened the colonies with collectively, it is a wonder the Revolutionary War did not start before Lexington and Bunker Hill. In addition to the Boston Port Act they gave us the Stamp Act which decrees that every scrap of printed matter must have a British designed stamp on it at a cost to the colonists. The income from the Stamp Act was to be used to finance the British Army in the colonies. In other words, the colonists were going to provide pay for their own invaders. Parliament also passed the Quartering Act. This act decreed that it was the responsibility of the colonists to provide quarters for the British troops, the colonist’s own homes if necessary. There were other acts but these three were the most obnoxious and clearly led to the Revolutionary War and the creation of this great experiment in freedom known as the United States of America.

1932 On this date the United States Supreme Court reversed the conviction of nine young black men from Scottsboro, Alabama for rape of two white women. It all started when two women riding on a train told police that nine black men also riding on the train had forcibly raped them. The nine blacks were soon arrested and charged with rape. The Alabama court found out these two women are not “flowers of the South” but are professional prostitutes and later on admit that they made up the rape story. That did not stop the Alabama court and they proceeded on with the case against the black guys. As you might suspect, they were convicted and sentenced to death. The liberals all over the country jumped out of their chairs and ran to the defense of the black men in this unbelievable outrage. The black men never even met their defense attorneys until the day of the trial. With the conviction overturned, the Alabama courts were not done yet. The nine were arrested again; convicted again and sentenced to death again and again the United States Supreme Court stepped in and put a stop to it. The nine men are finally permanently released but not before spending about 10 years in prison unnecessarily. Prejudicial hatred has no limit.

1911 On this date a fire broke out in a box of rags in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company located on the lower east side of New York City. This building lacked the basic safety features like outside fire escapes and sprinkler systems. There were fire hose connections at regular intervals but each and every one of them had not been tested in so long that all the valves were rusted closed. Not only that, the three elevators operated only sporadically and on this date, they all went to the bottom but the doors would not open nor would the elevator move upwards meaning that those in the elevators were doomed. The greedy owners have access to a stairwell that took them to the roof and they were able to escape by running to the roof of the next building. As you might expect all of the production workers were women and the greatest majority of them were immigrants. 146 women were killed in this conflagration. The upside from this is that all buildings in that part of New York ended up with outside fire escapes and eventually sprinkler systems, but it was too late and not enough for those ladies in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.

Answer to the trivia question:

The last MLB player to hit over .400 in a season was Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox.

                          Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow