Re: [Redbadbear] Unusual -- maybe even for Massachusetts

Your post, Ken (attached), is what I expected from your direction.

I've seen my share of natural disasters.  Generally, even if there's a mandatory evacuation order, for instance, it's generally left up to the individual to make his or her own decision. Put another way, it's their lookout. As recently as last summer's horrific fire season, we ourselves had to discuss and work through possible reactions and decisions should the worst come over the hill to us.  Granted that urban traffic situations can be super challenging but it's been my experience and observation that almost everyone uses good sense in these calamity situations.  The reaction of the Massachusetts governor  fits the standard pattern of contemporary and frequently cavalier "liberalism" which, in the name of what's best for "the people", embraces top down social engineering -- replete with civil and criminal penalties for those who don't conform.  Your personal sarcasm, Ken, simply tells me that I've hit home.

Natives have very long memories.  Massachusetts proper was the source of English assaults on Native people -- which included, in the name of the King, paying bounty on the heads of Abenaki men, women, children, and babies.  When the English headhunters complained that the heads were heavy and smelly in the summer hunting season, Massachusetts, again in the name of the King, approved scalping.  I could go on with other things, but until the Maine Indians in the mid '70s forced a pact on Massachusetts, that state was seizing, on almost always spurious grounds, Native children and adopting them out to Whites.  That pact, as I've noted before, served as the seminal model for the national 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act -- which mandates that Native children remain with their parents, or their relatives, or in some cases, with other Indians.

No, I don't especially like Massachusetts -- despite the presence of many good people therein.  I'm far from alone on that.

H
HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

I have always lived and worked in the Borderlands.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE (Mississippi et al.):
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in Fall 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.) 

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my very well-reviewed 
"Organizer's Book" -- the inside story of the massive Jackson
Mississippi Movement, the murder of Medgar Evers, and more.
And with my new and very substantial introduction:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: [email protected] 
  To: [email protected] 
  Sent: Friday, February 08, 2013 8:31 PM
  Subject: Re: [Redbadbear] Unusual -- maybe even for Massachusetts


    
  It's not clear to me what is supposed to be "unusual." Three feet of snow is indeed unusual for Massachusetts, but it's not that unusual, and it's not yet clear how much will actually fall. Your prejudice is against the state is merely routine pseudopopulist pretension, found abundantly among the Bay State's own right-wing talk radio hosts. Legally enforced states of emergency in blizzards, floods and other emergency conditions are no more unusual than those conditions themselves.  This blizzard is evoking inevitable comparisons to the "Blizzard of ''78,"  the great storm of 5-7 February 1978, which remains legendary in southern New England. In that one. roads were closed to non-emergency vehicles for several days. Your effort to stick in a plug for Baron Castine is a non sequitur of monumental proportions, so I suppose that one can unequivocally count as "unusual."

  Here in my own neck of the woods, the North Country, the Kingdom, and l'Estrie, the storm is almost a non-event. Locally, the forecast is for about 5 inches of snow.  The White Mountains often serve as a barrier against storms coming from the south, so it's not unusual that we get a lot less snow than points south.

  Hanover Winter Song:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=malGzIWRBIs
  Mon Pays:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH_R6D7mU7M


  Ken Hill

  On 8 February 2013 16:37, Hunter Gray <[email protected]> wrote:
  >
  >  
  >
  > Our best prayer thoughts certainly go to our friends and any others in the East whom the massive snow storm is engulfing.  I've seen super heavy snow stuff much of my life and, if it's tough in the "hinterlands", it can be Hell in the big cities.
  >  
  > I've just heard on CNN that the Governor of Massachusetts, a state which, despite the precense of many good people, I've always seen as a cross between a rabbit hutch and a too precious garden, has warned all drivers without legitimate business to stay off all the state's roads or face a possible one year in jail.
  >  
  > I gather from earlier news sources that he also doesn't like guns.
  >  
  > So much for Big Government "liberalism" in one of the cradles of puritan bigotry.  If France hadn't lost its nerve about 300 years ago, the Baron Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint Castin, a French Basque and emissary to the Wabanaki (Abenaki) nations in the North Country, would have gone with the Native legions down into Massachusetts-proper and burned it all out and away.  (Since Baron Castine had, simultaneously, seven Native wives, it's quite likely that most Wabanaki people have something of him in them.)
  >  
  > H
  >