'Twas the Night Before Prom and all through the Gym. . . .

Almost fifty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, students at a high school in Georgia said, "Enough!", and organized a non-racially segregated prom.

Good for those students! But how would you like to live in a town that discovered that "separate but equal" is inherently unequal fifty years after almost everybody else?

* * *

Now let us consider the Republican Congress. The Republican Party in Congress--I do not know if it applies to Republicans at loose in the real world--has made it clear that they will oppose anything the President wants to do. It is not because the President is a Democrat, nor because what the President would like to do is so awful: even when the President proposes things the Republicans proposed first, they oppose him. The President is Black. He has been elected to the Presidency twice, but he is Black. He has no right to go to a White prom.

* * *

I am every-time-startled at the sight of the wall that separates Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora. It is the most asinine, hopeless, and humiliating way to try to deal with human migration. If Congress had all the money in the world, and used it to build a wall all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to San Diego, it would not stop migration. But the wall is so satisfying! The wall would be perfect if it were painted brown on the southern side, and a kind of pinkish color on the northern side. When we had proms--a Brown prom there, and a White prom here, it might be fun to invite a mariachi band over to play at our prom, but not to dance.

Maybe someday, but not yet.

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