Going Somewhere

WHAT WITH ALL the busloads of brown skinned people being forced onto buses in the south and sent up north for those damned Yankees to deal with, one's thoughts turn to buses in the south in general, seemingly a recurring American motiff. It was after all a dark skinned lady in the deep American south, Rosa Parks, who sparked a revolution by simply simply boarding and sitting on a bus, up frot, where blacks weren't allowed. It turned into a fad, a "craze, if you will. For some reason the sture story of Rosa Parks got lost, as they say, in the shuffle. American school children were taught about the incident as if it were entirely serendipitous, coincidental, as if Rosa Parks was just a tired old black woman, getting off work, trying to get home, and too tired to walk to the back of the bus and sit where she was supposed to. So, she thought, to hell with it, I'll take my chances. Actually, Ms. Parks was a serious, professional political activist whose choice of seats on the bus was quite deliberate, pre meditated, intended to provoke a certain response, which it of course did. she succeeded in starting the trouble she so dearly wanted. "Freedom Riders" were people, mostly black but some whaite, who emulated Rosa Parks, boarded buses and sat in other than the required color coded sections, mixing races, fomenting rebellion. It came to a climax in the early sixties, when thousands of passenger - protestors finally forced change. Hell with it, just sit where you want. All this non conformity and change was too great a shock to the conservative south; hence was born "Reverse Freedom Riders", in which buses were loaded up with black skinned people and sent north, to places like the Kennedy estate in Massachusetts, and fancy, upscale honkie enclaves. If it sounds familiar, it should. Southern white right wing rednecsks forcing minorities onto buses and sending them as far north as possible is nothing new, you see. And, as now, the victims of reverse freedom riding were wholly uninformed or misinformed about their destination and their circumstances and opportunities upon arriving there. And so, despite my best efforts to convince people otherwise, it does sometimes almost indeed seem.....as if...history repeats itself.