Dalton RobertsThis town has not done a good job honoring Bessie Smith. We built a blues hall. Then when we didn’t really want blues performances, we turned it smoothly into a “cultural center” when the only thing cultural about Bessie was her blues.
I think the Riverbend folks wanted to honor her when they came up with the Bessie Smith Strut, but it never was a “strut.” It was an inch-along, frontal lobe-to-posterior crawl down M.L. King Boulevard with a few blues music stages, but there were always enough drunks in the crowd to keep you nervous. Statistics show that 2 percent of the population is insane, so one never knows when that 2 percent is drunk and going to act up.
We are security freaks in a gun-crazy society. We are unwilling to accept the risks our addiction to guns imposes. We do our silly little security checkpoints in public buildings and cancel our struts, seeking peace when there can be no peace. You cannot have your security and your gun phobia too.
Yes, sir, I believe in the right of every citizen to bear arms. I have one. If someone broke into my home, I would try to use it. I would not figure they were there to study the Sunday school lesson with me.
But let’s accept it; we are not just an every-citizen-has-the-right-to-bear-arms society. We are gun crazy. So many people are armed with assault weapons of all kinds that peace of mind in public is a thing of the past. We will either get used to that fact, or there will be no more struts or large collections of people in public places at public events from this time henceforth and forever.