B. U. G. S.

Al Parker may have quit us because I gave him such a hard time. Let me say it AGAIN: My comments are not aimed at YOU, they are what you make me THINK of. ALL of us have the “Oh, it’s hopeless!” moments, including me. I hit Al on it, but it could have been anybody.

It HAS been me.

In the course of that piece, I mentioned the person I will always think of as The Crying Machine. He is the guy who would come out to picket with us, disagree, and then cry and run away. We are speaking here of a grown man.

The Crying Machine was just a different version of the “Greatest Generation Tough Guy approach to wimping out. When they backed integration for children, it would have been pretty obvious if they had said, “I am an obedience-trained chickensh**.” I will give them anything they want.”

No, the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation always said, “I MADE my sacrifices. I got PAPERS to prove I’m not chicken! But a tough, Practical Man like me knows you can’t fight City Hall.”

The Crying Machine thought that, if he showed True Emotion by openly weeping, it would be different from just turning tail and running.

I figured that out in my teens.

The picketing I spoke of came within an inch of succeeding. In my clearance files for Top Secret, I found out years later that we had almost beaten a combination of the city newspaper to keep the integration we made public from being mentioned and the business community.

We came within an inch because our little group had no way of knowing we were within an inch. Covering THAT up was, after all, what the newspaper was in it for.

The Crying Machine and others finally discouraged us, “It’s all HOPELESS! See how few of us there are and how many of them!”

One teenager in a North Carolina town DID succeed, practically alone, and made national news with it.

Today I am amazed at how few mixed couples there are on television, compared to the number there COULD be. The Science Fiction Channel pushes it the way others did in the pre-Mantra days just a short while ago. Their first original movie had a mixed couple, informed me that no one but me had ever complained about it, and have never shown it since.

It was true bomb, is their BBC show, Dr. Who with its black girl friend.

But if you never notice any of this, if you do not see the fight AS IT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON, if you sit around and moan for the days when there were no blacks on TV at all, your fight will peter out, just as ours did with the picketing.

Listen, you dumbass, OF COURSE you see no victories. That’s what media power is all about. For God’s sake, if all you have to do is moan, leave the army and go commit Seppuku in a corner.

This is an ongoing war. We take casualties. We suffer defeats.

Get used to it.

Bu tin real armies of the past, a defeatist was simply shot.

Go thou and do likewise, or JOIN us.