It's weird the connections that turn up sometimes. These past couple weeks I've been re-reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles for the series of diaries I'm writing about it for the Reader's & Book Lover's Group. And there's a passage from one of the stories which came to mind when I read about this week's Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.
Come with me below the jump and see if you agree.
In the story "Way in the Middle of the Air," a small southern town is shocked to learn that all the blacks are leaving. All over the South, blacks have pooled their resources and secretly built their own rockets. Now every last one of them is going off to Mars to start a new life.
Sam Teece, owner of the local hardware shop, is outraged. How dare they?
"I can't figure why they left now. With things lookin' up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here's the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin' anti-lynchin; bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want? They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go."
He rants at them; he mocks them; he threatens them; but inexplicably they don't want to stay in a community where they have to defer to him and lower their gaze when he looks at them, and say "Yes, sir" when he speaks, and worry if he's going to come knocking on their door late some night with a length of rope. No, they don't realize how good they got it.
And so they go.
Now granted, things are better than they were when Bradbury wrote this story in 1950. But when I hear folks say that the Voting Rights Act isn't neccessary anymore, I can't help but hear Sam Teece on his porch, complaining, "What more they want?"