The US's Troubled Race Relations History

Here's a bit from Tom Ricks' The Best Defense blog:

... I didn't know until last weekend that baseball great Jackie Robinson, in 1944 a lieutenant in the Army's 758th Tank Battalion, was court-martialed back then for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. He was acquitted on all charges and honorably discharged later in the year.

He also had been turned away when he tried to play for the baseball team at Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was told to report instead to "the colored team" -- which didn't exist. A big joke.

Ricks addresses the DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell) policy for "handling gays" in the military. Sadly, the US has a long history of bad decisions and a slowness in meeting the rest of the world's standards in human relations. England eliminated slavery long before the US. Most Western countries got rid of bans on gays in the military years ago, but it drags on in the US. Worse, hypocrites like John McCain, have the power to drag their feet and prevent change. It reminds me of the fillibusters and long harangues by politicians in the late 1950s and 1960s over racial integration. There is something in the water in the US that encourages digging in heels over social issues. (Actually, it isn't the water, it is the fundamentalist Christian religion spread amongst a number of denominations that creates the problem.)

You would think a people would look at themselves in the mirror, feel shame, and make a pledge to "never again" behave in such a unjust, socially backward way. Sadly, that never seems to happen. Instead, the give ground grudgingly and dig in their heels just a bit down the road on the next "issue" and refuse to give ground.