Monday, February 27, 2012

THE HELP

I thought the Academy Awards missed the mark on Best Picture. "The Help" should have won hands down. Since I don't know the ins and outs, I can only say no comparison with "The Artist," which I thought was boring. To me, "The Help" celebrated courage with which every older American can identify, especially Southerners. I think I have done this before but ADD that I am, can't really remember. However, here goes, "on behalf of every Southerner, I apologize and asked forgiveness for our prejudicial treatment toward African Americans. We were ignorant. It was a cultural thing during the time of "The Help" but that is no excuse. 

We didn't have the same experiences as"The Help"e but were just as prejudice and it was wrong. My brother ran a country grocery store and had a lot of black customers. Much of the business was what was called then, "on credit." I can never remember my brother ever refusing credit to anyone. I would actually go with him to deliver groceries to black families, which he didn't have to do. My brother had a "good" heart and was especially attendant to widows or those having it "hard" as he would call it, usually involved female, several children and absent father. I didn't understand it all, as I was about 14.  I would often smile because he could be so funny. He would say, "look at this, these people have a TV." (there would be a TV antenna on their usual ramshackle house, owned by their landlord. I would usually laugh and say or think, "Oh Corb., poor people shouldn't have a TV, right?" Most of the the time, we would laugh. Blacks who traded with my brother were a subculture, different from "The Help" in a sense but like "The Help" as to class (which we definitely had).  When my brother left his grocery store (too complicated to go into: involved IRS, sugar to bootleggers, etc. but, the black community owed him thousands and thousands of dollars that he forgave. I don't know if he ever came around on whether poor people should have a TV. 

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