Status Updates From The Fifties: An Underground...

“Your generation must come to terms with the environment. Your generation must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility… You go out into a world where mankind is challenged […] to prove its maturity and its mastery— not of nature, but of itself.”

And we have been failing ever since!

A President who listened to science and let it guide his agenda? What a thing to imagine. JFK and Carson are both rolling in their graves at the current administration’s ignorance.

A woman in the late 1950s/early 60s publishing something like “Silent Spring” is unfathomably courageous. Sexist reviews could never dim your sparkle, Carson. The world wasn’t ready for you.

“We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.” Wiener you were ahead of your time

I’m actually going to be fucking sick

“Among the earliest test subjects [of the effects of radiation exposure] was Ebb Cade, a Black worker at the Army base [who was] brought back to the base hospital after a car crash. He was […] injected with ‘large doses’ of radioactive plutonium.”

And then his doctor complained that Cade disappeared before they could sample more of his organs and bones. Perfect.

“There were more than 200 open-air experiments with insect-borne diseases in population centers beginning in 1949, none of them disclosed until the mid-1970s, some of them still classified.”


Oh!

Long list of all the operations researching the use of insects as “delivery systems” for toxins… which were, of course, performed on and around the American public. The government wouldn’t do that… oh, yes, they would!!!!!

“Such an ‘increased mastery of nature,’ he wrote, ‘may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave.’”

“…he had been reaching out to union leadership to warn them of the job losses that would come with automation—“
“…accusing corporations and capitalism itself of calculated inhumanity.”

This guy’s kinda my hero

“We can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima… The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend [..] and to confine our personal efforts to those fields… most remote from war and exploitation.”
Norbert Wiener

“His hope was that human capabilities would be amplified by their electromechanical counterparts. His fear was that technology would be dehumanizing and that people would eventually be dominated by their increasingly intelligent machines.”

“…including Wiener’s fear that automation by purpose-driven machines could cost millions of people their jobs.”

1948 btw

“…he was fluent in a dozen languages, and socially inept in all of them—“

Gaines I see you slipping jokes in here

“Thanks in part to Hitler’s personal physician, who considered the use of DDT an insult to Aryan health, the typhus-ridden German army lost the Battle of Stalingrad.”

“…and that is how she wrote about the sea in all her books until her last: as the firstborn world, the family home of every form of life.”

“The gunfight never happened because when the line of cars filled with Klansmen drove up, they faced 40 Black men with rifles and just kept driving. […] ‘That really started us to understanding that […] resistance could be effective if we resisted in groups, and if we resisted with guns.’”

I know that’s right

“I guess if I’d a had any sense I’d a been a little scared, but what was the point in being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”

“…she arrived at a vire of American democracy not as a fixed reality but as a hope and ambition, a promise whose fulfillment was the nation’s reason for being.”

“Waller claimed self-defense, and there was little evidence to contradict him, but the verdict and sentence were decided in the usual southern manner— in a matter of minutes, by an all-white jury.”

“…first of all, nobody gave us anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me, it took 72 years of organizing, grassroots effort… [W]e had to fight every inch of the way for every advance, and against constant resistance.”

“So, in 1958, at the age of 38, she enrolled as an undergraduate history major […] where she began the climb to the summit of her career.”

“‘It is then that you take one small laborious step after another,” she wrote. ‘Forget the goal, forget the possibility of failure… This is the time when the mind forces the body to do more than it can.’”

“Friendless and shunned by the anti-Semitic German community, she found herself most at home with the African American women who were her neighbors. They too were shunned and denied the standing of citizens. They too were poor and displaced people in flight from discrimination and its cruel enforcements.”

“Though the families were poor, they seemed to her more vividly alive than her own.”

“We were not about to be deprived of the privilege of serving our country […] by virtue of some stupid regulation about being gay.”

“For bringing gay men together as nothing had ever done before, World War II actually served as an accelerant of gay liberation.”

“When the allies liberated the concentration camps, they did not set free all the [gay men]. Those with previous convictions in Nazi courts […] were forced to serve out their harsh prison sentences, with no credit for time served in the camps.” WITH NO CREDIT FOR TIME SERVED IN. THE. CAMPS.