General Chat

ffs?

Google is your friend...

Hi all,
I have read through to page 21,all very interesting but what does ffs mean,could someone PM me please.
Gill x

Sylvia, I know what you mean about news. When we have holidayed in US we always feel cut off from the world!! The only time it was different was the time we flew to Atlanta the day after Princess Diana was killed, everyone wanted to talk to us then. We found there was very little if any UK news on US T.V.

Ah, yes I see what you mean about Katrina Janey. We did actually witness what went on from a distance as it was on our TV.

Sylvia, that sounded scary for somebody not used to the way of life there.

That is my christmas name, I have used it for 4 years now.

When we were in Austin, we subscribed to an English Sunday paper ..... had it sent airmail to New York and then regular mail down to us. It arrived on Thursday


About the middle of the following week (ie 10 days after publication), we would see some of the European and world news appearing in the local paper, the Austin American-Statesman (grand title that!!).

At that time, Lyndon Johnson was President ........................ between them he, his wife, daughters and sons-in-law owned every media outlet in Texas.



Guess what all our news was????


The Johnson family activities, followed by American news


We really and truly believed that WW3 could have broken out ....... and we wouldn't find out for weeks.


THE best place to get news and information was from the newspaper put out by the students in the Journalism department at the university.




We had to have xrays taken for immigration into Canada. When we went to pick them up, the whole clinic was waiting to see us and talk to us


........................... this strange couple who were going to live in an igloo and drive a dog sled.


Honestly!

That's what they really believed.

What I was getting at was that Katrina was the *proof* of the racism. It's hard for anyone to pooh-pooh allegations of racism when something like that happens. Not that many in the US don't.

You were immersced in racism in New Orleans -- in the effects of centuries of it. The people you were seeing probably had grandparents with family members who were former slaves. In 1864, my great-grandparents were mostly adolescents or children. Some people in New Orleans have great-grandparents who were enslaved. History isn't that long ago. Imagine if your great-grandparents had been born into slavery. What would your life probably be like today?

And if it was what life has been like for the ignored black population of places like New Orleans, what would you likely think about the white population, in their secure gated communities or travelling in their comfortable tour buses, all because their ancestors owned slaves or benefited in other ways from a slave economy, or at the very least were never enslaved?

I haven't been to Cuba for quite a few years; back then, it wasn't overrun by tourists, and the economy hadn't been smashed as badly by the embargo as it has today. Then, people were interested in talking with me, about their lives and their country. Today, to hotel staff, I'd just be a rich gringa with yankee dollars. They'd still be the friendly people Cubans are for the most part, but they don't have the luxury of getting personal with tourists. Tourists have money and things, and they need the money and things. Passing the time of day with everybody whose suitcase you carry might just get tiresome.

That said, I will say of the entire US service industry, and that definitely includes white people, that their reputation as friendly and helpful far exceeds reality. I find pretty much all USAmericans, including service industry workers, so utterly uninterested in anyone but themselves that it is pointless to try to engage them.

That wedding I went to ... my then partner's brother, in Texas, was the groom. The recent university graduate, courtesy of the US mlitary, soon to be schoolteacher, who had to bite his tongue on our tour of their Dallas suburb when we were about to ener "N*town". I spent the night before in the company of the mother and sisters of the groom and a couple of other bridesmaids. The bridesmaids all fell asleep. I sat talking with the mother into the wee hours. At the end of the night, I could name her great aunts in Peekaboo, Idaho (yes), and tell you what each of her children did for a living, and her grandchildren's names ... and she couldn't have told you whether I was an orphan.

It's that navel-gazing self-absorbed utter lack of interest in the world outside themselves that is a large factor in the foreign policies they adopt and support, in my opinion.

Racism was well and truly alive when we lived in Texas

.... there were areas of Austin that whites did not go, and vice versa.

I don't drive, never have driven. When OH had to go out of town, I had to ride the bus (or rather 2 buses) from our apartment to the university. The bus from the apartment to downtown in particular was used only by poor whites and blacks, going to their domestic jobs. I have never felt so uncomfortable anywhere as on those mornings when I got on that bus ..... I could feel the glares directed at me. I wasn't fancily dressed at all, I was a lab technician after all!!, but I was that little bit better dressed than the others.


We went back to Austin a couple of years ago, OH had a meeting to attend and I thought it would be neat to see what had changed. Unfortunately, my back began to act up and I was unable to walk around. BUT we stayed in the Hilton Hotel ..... and that had been built right in the middle of the biggest "no go" areas for whites back in 1967/68. Strange, eh?



When I told my boss that I would be leaving ..... the replacement he hired was a lovely black girl called Jeannie. He had a nice big grant at that time, so she started working about 2 months before I left ..... we became pretty good friends. Her husband, also black, had been a Marine but was now out of the forces.

She warned us of possible "blow ups" in Austin if the weather became too hot (fortunately it didn't) ................. said she would pass on word soon enough for us to get out of town. OH's sister and cousin came to the US to join us on the drive up to Canada (an end of university trip for them). They were riding the Greyhound buses from New York down to Austin. The Greyhound station in Austin was right in the centre of where the blow-up would occur, which is one reason why Jeannie told us about it. We had an alternative arrangement ........... they would phone us the night before they were due to arrive in Austin, and we would divert them to another town if anything had happened or seemed about to happen within 24 hours.


We went out with Jeannie and her husband one night .................. ate out and then to a 3 ring circus. Bear in mind this was several years after blacks were supposed to have all rights.


We got some looks, especially at the restaurant, that made me very uncomfortable. There were two reasons for the "looks" ............ blacks in that place (and it wasn't very fancy!), and a white and a black couple out together.





There was one neat outcome from there ................. we had become very friendly with an Afrikaaner couple from SA. The wife L also worked in the same department as I did, and I introduced her to Jeannie. After I left, Jeannie and L used to have lunch together 2 or 3 times a week.


It was years later that L told me that she had never spoken to a black as a friend before I introduced them.

Neither she nor her husband believed in apartheid .............. but it still wasn't possible for her "back home"






ps ..... Ann, I like your new name!!!

And no I did not see them there as service workers there for the benefit of tourists. I see no human being like that, neither do I treat them like that. I don't even really see the colour of their skin having got Moroccan nieces. I would have been prepared to chat and pass the time of day, give them a smile but we could sense the barriers were up and we were not used to that. That is what we found strange, and sad.

And, having travelled a lot in US and OH having worked for and with Americans we are well aware of the low payed service workers and the need for tips, we are not ignorant.

Ok Janey, sorry, maybe that didn't come out right. I was not actually criticizing the black people of New Orleons, actually I loved it there. It was more the uncomfortable feeling we had, maybe and probably deservedly that before we got to our room in the hotel from arriving in the hire car we had to tip three times (remember we don't tip as much in England (or didn't then) as in the states. Never having been one to 'see' the colour of somebody it came as a shock to feel despised. But I can see that we were being lumped together with white people from their area/country. This was before Hurricane Katrina by the way back in the 90s. We had been to Florida and to a lot of other places in the South including Memphis but nowhere was the hatred for white people as apparent as in N.O.

I'm afraid I find it difficult even to begin to say something about "racism against whites" in New Orleans. Ann, surely you noticed Hurricane Katrina. There is no doubt in the mind of anyone who is honest that the people of New Orleans were left to die -- and they *were* left to die -- because they were black. And poor. Mostly because they were black.

When houses fall down cliffs in California, when brush fires threaten communities in California, people aren't left to burn and die of thirst. Those people are white. And rich. White and rich go together like black and poor.

Hold their hand out for tips? What do you suppose they live on? You do understand that their jobs don't provide health insurance, for instance (there being no public health insurance in the US), and that on the wages those jobs pay they can't buy health insurance for themselves? Do you have any idea what New Orleans was really like? Secure, gated enclaves of rich white people, patrolled by private security companies -- and not at risk of flooding. Impoverished but real communities of black people with decades, centuries of roots in that place, but no economic opportunities.

Did you see today that blame has been placed on the US corps of engineers for the failure of the levees in New Orleans -- the event that caused the death of hundreds and destroyed the city? The US government knew this; scientists had long been saying that the levees would not withstand a hurricane of Katrina force. The US government **left those people to die**, not just when the hurricane happened, but long before.

Would it have done that for Boston or Los Angeles or Tampa? Surely none of us thinks it would.

You were seeing racism in action, and you completely missed it. You thought it was all about you. Who it was about was the black people you saw only as service workers there for the benefit of tourists.

Thank you Janey and Sylvia, I am learning more all the time. Sylvia that must have been a real culture shock, bad enough when we visit and police and security guards all carry guns. However we will not be far behind. Some of our police in Gloucester (they are actually armed response but out on ordinary duties) have been spotted armed with guns. A frightening thought.

Janey, you say racism in the South US we visited the Southern states on a fly drive ending in New Orleons. We found the (implied) racism unpleasant but it was against whites rather than the other way round, and the black population certainly knew how to hold their hands out for tips.

Can you imagine what it was like for me .............. an innocent mid-20s English girl, never seen a gun in real life .................... to end up in a town where everyone carried a loaded rifle across the back window of their pickup truck


where it was legal to carry a hand gun in the glove compartment of the car ..... as long as the compartment was not locked (it could be closed). To lock the glove compartment made it a hidden weapon and that was illegal.

where people like the electrical technician in the university department where I worked said he had taught his eldest son to shoot ............... at the age of 6. And he would teach his youngest son to shoot when he turned 6


where the same guy said that if anyone put even one toe on "his" property, he would shoot and then ask questions later.


We lived 2 blocks from a small mall, which had the grocery store and a small branch of department store .................. we used to walk there. No-one else walked, there were no side walks .................. we used to walk on the grass, until that guy told me what he would do, then we were too afraid to ut a toe on someone's lawn! So we walked in the middle of the street!!



I felt such relief when we "landed" in Canada

No.2 had come to Ontario before the massacre (May 1970) - he had graduated from Kent State the year before - and got to hear it on the news like all of us. More shocking for him than for yer average Canadian, indeed.

I woke up that morning in my friends' apartment in southern Ontario, sun shining, nothing left there but a couple of matresses on the floor where the two of us still there had spent the night, exams all finished, leaving to go to home town at noon ... the end of my first amazing year as an independent person and of a whole phase in life and the unknown but exciting stretching ahead, almost 18, and suddenly it was the end of the 60s, and the end of innocence, and another nail in the coffin of decency. Unarmed, non-violent protesters shot dead by their own military (the US National Guard in that case).

The problem with USAmericans is they learn nothing. What killed the Vietnam adventure was television -- not so much the images of the horrors in Vietnam (a documentary by a British woman whose name I can't remember, for example), not the photos of the bodies of women and children slaughtered at My Lai, but the images of bodybags carrying USAmerican boys. The only people who count. Too many of them, and it must be a bad thing.

So they didn't learn that they had done something horrific, unforgivable, shameful. They learned that whatever glorious goal they were pursuing had just got too expensive. And next time, they were all ready to go invade somebody else's country and kill a few thousand more innocent people. Until the bodybag count and the tax bill adds up, presumably.



The clock tower mass murder in Texas, btw --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
-- he was a former US marine.

Austin isn't the place you expect to find crazed gunners; laid back central, vs. Dallas, as in Arizona Tucson is vs Phoenix -- John McCain isn't from Tucson. ;) The twice I've been to Texas (for a couple of weeks each time, a wedding and a funeral) ... the racism, the guns, the beer, the racism ... well, not much different from most of the US, especially the south. But enough for me not to want to go back ever.

Good gosh Janey

Kent State

now that would have traumatized him to begin with!




OH went to the university in Texas the year after some guy (veteran of the US army) went up the university tower and shot people .......... something like 20 or 25 people were killed or injured.

That happened in February 1966

Many of the people with whom we later became friends had been on campus that day ........ outside, on their way to lunch at the cafeteria.

The campus community was still traumatized when I got there .... the tower had only re-opened to allow tourists to go to the upper floors in February 1967.




sylvia

1969-1971 I was on university campus in Canada, and attending/organizing Vietnam War protest events. Some of my professors were war resisters. (This in itself has long been a contentious issue, since they brought with them their peculiarly USAmerican outlooks and approaches to sociology, politics, etc.) One was a Quaker ... can't say clergy, since they don't have 'em, but a Quaker community leader.

At the same time, my ex-No.2 (a musician in the southern US now, but then a recent graduate of Kent State, Ohio, the year before the massacre), was living where I now live, about a block from where I lived for a couple of years when I came here for law school. He had come to Canada rather than participate in that filthy war. At that time, all he needed to do was show that he had a job (he worked in a fish 'n chips shop!). He went home not long after, and the tale of his experiences with the military for the next few years is harrowing. He lived in fear of the knock on the door for some years ... as did my great-grandfather almost exactly a century before.

I got to know a particular resister - a "deserter" - rather well. He was an example of what Syylvia mentioned: the fact that it was the underclass being used as cannon fodder in Vietnam. He was poor white -- a high school dropout from Utah. He had joined up voluntarily at 18 because he thought it was a better idea than waiting to get drafted. He made known that he was a conscientious objector (I believe he was of some religion that qualified), and was promised that he would be assigned to helicopter maintenance. He then learned that this would involve sitting in the door of a helicopter shooting anyone who got close. He left. He was caught and imprisoned in the stockade, I forget Fort what. He escaped. He came to Canada. He was just a kid in a lousy situation. He didn't refuse to defend his country. He refused to participate in his country's vicious assault on another people.

The draft exempted people at school full time, which of course also favoured the rich and powerful. Garage mechanics like my friend, though younger than graduate students, say, in fact just kids, didn't have a hope.

Stories like these are why some progressive people in the US actually favour a draft - a real draft. Not one that allows loopholes if your daddy is rich and powerful.

The tactics used in the US to recruit more bodies for this atrocity in Iraq are the most slimy, underhanded efforts you can imagine. Young students are in fact required to register - I believe all young US men, but presumably still not women - have been required to do so since Vietnam. The recruiters target schools where students have essentially no future, and target the students without their parents' knowledge or consent - and we're talking about under-18s, getting them ready to sign up. Of course, in the US, the only way for many people to get a postsecondary education, even if they have the brains and the marks, is to join the military first, because even at state schools tuition fees are so high that parents working minimum wage jobs can't even afford health insurance, let alone university tuition.

All in the name of oil, or whatever interest the rich and powerful decide is worth the lives of other people, people in their own country or someone else's.

I think that we have a much better life than if we had stayed in England!


We met at Liverpool University. I am Lancashire born and bred .................. and still have the accent to prove it!

OH was from Chester, but has lost most of his accent (except when he has a beer tooo many, or gets excited at a rugby match!)

He got a PhD, and went teaching at Blundell's School in Devon in 1964.

Then he wanted to do a little bit of research ...... there were grants available for school teachers to do just that, with two provisos. Pupils at the school had to be involved, and the school had to provide access to the laboratories during the summer.

The Head of the school refused point blank to allow the summer access.

So OH decided to look around for another job.

We weren't serious at this point, just good friends.

Problem was that once having left the university system in the UK in those days, it was practically impossible to move back in.

Sooooooo .... he was offered a Post Doctoral position in Austin, Texas, with the idea that this would provide a step in the right direction.

At that point we got serious about each other!


After I had been in the US about 6 months (and he had 6 months left on the contract), we talked about what to do next.

We really weren't ready to go back to the UK and settle down, which had been the plan. So he looked around for jobs over here.

He got 3 interviews, and the one that really interested him was the one at the university here in British Columbia .......... they wanted someone to teach First Year Biology and didn't care what kind of research he was doing.

The job fitted him to a T because he always wanted to teach ............... and also do some research.


So we came up here for 2 years, but after about 6 months we knew this was "home".


There is also the true fact that if we had stayed in the UK and he had stayed teaching in the private school system, then I could quite well have held him back because my accent was "not right".

Terrible but true, in those days!



What I like best about over here is that credit is given to people for what they have achieved, not for what they have inherited or because of their parents.


I don't think either one of us has ever regretted leaving England ................. although there are things we miss, of course.


Like a country pub :)))))

Interesting that you moved from UK to US and then to Canada. Do you regret it at all? Do you think you have had a better life?

Ann

I doubt if I would have known much about the Vietnam War if OH had not moved to Texas from England in February 1967, then I followed after we married in August 1967.

It was all gung ho war ....... at least according to the politicos. And Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, was in the White House.


Plus the Swiss chef, an acquaintance, being re-classified in February/March really brought it home.

I can tell you that we watched every post with interest, and some alarm, after that in case there was an "official" letter, and made sure that we had enough money for OH to buy a plane ticket out of the country in a hurry if need be. I was to follow later if it did happen

The OH was only 29 at that point ....... the chef was 33 or 34.

One of our close friends was also Swiss, and was on a 2-year contract, with visa to match. He had to leave the US by October 1968, and was also classified 4F. He decided to stick it out to the end of his contract, partly because there were things he still wanted to do and see ............. but he also had the air fare home tucked away "just in case".


As well, Rick, the Australian, telling his stories was also a wake-up call.


Needless to say, we didn't know why so many of the troops were black until years later ....... after we had left the US



sylvia

Sylvia, sorry I had not seen your post. Thank you that is very enlightening, I have to admit to being a bit ignorant about Vietnam. As a young Mum of two children in 67/68 I am afraid I tool little interest in politics or what was going on the other side of the world. My OH demobbed from the RN in 1968 and we also had the upheaval of moving away from my home town so you can see where my interest was directed. It is interesting to read about it from the perspective of somebody in the States.

I guess, from what we read, the American soldiers have not learned a lot. But there are rotten apples in all armies and there has been a bit about the behaviour of our military in Iraq again this week in the newspaper (dating back a few years now) I find it shameful that they behaved so.

No, war is not glorious and I too blame governments.

You know

I think I have a unique view of the Vietnam War


One that I doubt anyone else on these boards does have.

Note only was I an adult when te Vietnam War started, but we lived in the US from 1967 to 1968

My husband, an Englishman, was ranked 4F by the US draft ........ just as they did to all resident aliens below the age of 40.

In spring 1968, some of the draft boards under orders from official Washington started re-ranking resident aliens (or Green Card holders).

Suddenly people in the US on 2 year working or student visas were re--ranked 1A ..... which means draft call-up imminent.

One Swiss-born chef working in Texas received a letter saying he was now 1A, and would be called to report within 3 weeks. Some very well-connected people at the country club where he was working said they would sort it out and he wasn't to worry ........ he didn't believe them, and was on a plane out of the US witin the week.


They probably would have "sorted it out", and got him reclassified back to 4F ..... that's what they did for their own sons and friends.


Ever wonder why there are so many black people and poor whites in the US Army??? Now it's because ti is one of the few ways out of the ghetto, and nto a decent paying job.

In the Vietnam War it was because they had the draft, and those people did not have the clout, and didn't know anyone who had the clout, to avoid being called up

George W Bush (aka Dubya) had the clout and knew the people in high places.



The OH was not re-classified .................. but we were very glad when he got a job outside the US.


Most of our friends in those days were from overseas.

The most enlightening was the Australian who had actually served some time in Vietnam ............. the Aussies were there as well, in case any of you do not know that.


He said that he would never want to be in another fight with the Amricans!

Their idea of fighting the Viet Cong was to go into the forest with all guns firing, laughing, talking, making as much noise as you might imagine.

As a result ..................... the Americans were practically massacred. The Viet Cong could hear them coming from miles away, had plenty of time to set ambushes, etc.



The Aussies in contrast would infiltrate into the forest, then sit quielty for days or weeks, and then pounce ...... their sector was soon out of the hands of the Viet Cong.



From what I've read of the 1st and 2nd Gulf Wars, and the Afghanistan ..... the Americans have not learnt much over the last 40 years.



Just a little perspective on the the guy who wrote that poem and his probable experiences.


I also lived through WW2 in northern England, with bombs falling within a couple of blocks


war is not glorious


soldiers are to praised for a lot of what they do ........... but there are and always have been rotten apples in the barrel


and too many soldiers, while not rotten, have acted as victors have always acted after wars.



I do not blame soldiers for going into Iraq on an unneccessary war ......... I do blame the American and British governments for sending them there.



sylvia