When I went to bed at around ten o’clock last night, Kim was in the middle of an imaging session. And, by that I mean he was sitting in the camper doing research on his target while the telescope was doing the heavy lifting, so to speak. He was yawning as much as I was, but since he’d been waiting days for this opportunity, he wasn’t giving in to sleep that early. Don’t know how he did it, but he lasted until the wee hours of the morning. He was trying really hard to be quiet when he came to bed, but I woke up anyway, asking what time it was and how the imaging went. To my surprise, he told me it was about 3:30 and that imaging was still going. He’d finished one target and since the targets in the night sky change throughout the night because of the Earth’s rotation, he went for a second target, programming the scope to shut down after shooting the darks. In other words, he went to sleep before the telescope did.
I was up shortly before 7:00…no hurkle-durkling this morning. It was not
light enough to sit outside watching the birds, so I sat quietly in the early
morning darkness of the camper doing battle with two pesky flies by the light
of my computer. By 7:45, the sun was up enough for the birds
to be chirping and the neighborhood rooster to be crowing every five minutes. Headed
out shortly thereafter for my walk.
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One of the podcasts keeping me company on my walk was History This Week
(24 mins). This episode was about the ‘Children’s Crusade’ (Birmingham, 1963),
a march that reignited the fire of the Civil Rights Movement. Prior to this
event, fewer people were attending meetings, sit-ins and marches. The main reason was
economics: the number of adults who were willing to volunteer, get arrested and
possibly risk their jobs for missing work and protesting was dwindling. Recruiting
teenagers had an appeal because they had less to lose and more to gain if segregation
ended. The episode also highlighted how the actions of Bull Conner, a white
supremacist who enforced racial segregation in his
duties as Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham and denied civil rights to black citizens,
unwittingly served as a catalyst for federal legislation ending segregation.
The website nmaahc.si.edu (National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Smithsonian website) probably gives the most concise overview of the event: On May 2, 1963, more than one thousand students skipped classes and gathered at Sixth Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham, Alabama. As they approached police lines, hundreds were arrested and carried off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. When hundreds more young people gathered the following day for another march, white commissioner, Bull Connor, directed the local police and fire departments to use force to halt the demonstration. Images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, being clubbed by police officers, and being attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, and triggered outrage throughout the world. The narrator said that Bull Conner had simply underestimated the power of television.
The publicity generated by Conner’s violent tactics against students was
just the
kick in the pants that President Kennedy needed to express federal support for federal
civil rights legislation and the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Bill of
1964.
Two things about this episode: 1. The attitudes and tactics of Bull
Conner and people like him make me seethe. Race is a human construct; I believe
that God views all humankind equally, He doesn’t see race, and 2. One student
participating in the march talked about someone having a section of hair
blasted off her head by the force of the water from the fire hoses. That statement
stunned me, so I asked Kim if high-pressured water from a fire hose (100 lbs.
of pressure) could take the hair from a person’s head. We had an interesting conversation
about the power of water, but the short answer to my question was yes, it
could.
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Occasionally the subject of Sam Elliott will come up in our
conversations. Haven’t seen him yet this
year; not that he’s a close friend or anything like that but it would be
comforting to know he’s still around. Sam
Elliott is just a bicycle-riding character who lives down Picacho Highway that
we’ve talked to over the last few years and look forward to seeing when we’re
out here. The first year, it was easy to hear him coming because his bike had a
rhythmic squeak and usually, we’d hear it early evening before it got dark. Based
on his stories and his demeanor at times, it was our assumption that he may
have been heading to the local bar in Eloy.
Last night we may have had a Sam Elliott sighting as we were sitting in
the camper eating supper. The bushes
that surround our campsite have been severely trimmed right where our ramp
opens up, so it affords us a decent view of the road…well, hacked off would be
a better description of what happened to the bushes. Anyway, a gentleman of his
basic description went by on a bicycle, pulling a trailer. I am hopeful.
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We have to be up early tomorrow
morning for the Coolidge Day 5K walk…Kim is participating, I’m going as his
support system. 😎 He set up a target, programmed the scope to do a meridian flip and thought when he checked to make the flip was done properly that he was going to program it to shut down in a couple of hours so he could go to bed. Instead, when he went to check the scope, he found that the sky had clouded over so he shut it all down and brought the card back so he could look at the images. Now he may or may not get eight hours of sleep before his race.
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