Melungeon

 Yesterday the Snoocher Bear introduced her dad to a new word. The word is Melungeon.  What is a Melungeon? Apparently it is a mixed race person from back in the hills. Ideally it would be someone negro, white, and native American. Abraham Lincoln may have been Melungeon, and so was Elvis Presley.

The word is interesting. Somehow it reminds Kadizzle of the Hoopleheads. Perhaps the Melungeons, and the Hooples are related. If you attend a Tea Party meeting you might well think you are among a different breed of people. They believe Trump won the election, they believe there are child sex rings run by the Democrats, and of course they believe a gun can solve any problem. 

When you mix things together you often get strange results. The worst mixture is mixing the Truth with a Republican politician until it comes out a lie. 

Kadizzle often thinks way back to his college days and the psychology courses he took.  Someone did an experiment where they bred all the dumbest rats to the dumbest rats. It developed a breed of stupid rats. On the other side they bred all the smart rats to the smart rats and got more smart rats. The good news is when they put all the rats back together they quickly reached average. 

Humans have a problem here. The smart ones do marry the smart ones, and the dumb ones do marry the dumb ones. The problem is too often the smart and the dumb do not cross breed. Another problem is the dumb ones often outnumber the smart ones because they have more children. What is the result? You know the answer, a lot of dumb ones who believe in Trump. 

Mixing up genes can turn out well.  Lincoln and Elvis proved that. Can your cure stupid? Maybe, you can. The school system is our only hope. Republicans know the ignorant are there to be abused and want the most ignorant they can produce. That is why Republican promote charter schools, home schools, and poor teacher pay. 

Another history lesson. Kadizzle at one time worked in the coal fields of southern West Virginia. The coal companies needed a good supply of stupid people so they made sure the schools were terrible. It worked. People had no skill but shoveling to sell. Then something changed in the sixties. Mechanization came to the mines. Who would maintain the machines that were hydraulic, electrical, and soon to be computerized?

What a turn around, now the coal companies had to build their own trade schools and improve the public schools. Dumb was fine, but too dumb did not get the job done. Once people got smart they formed unions, just one more problem, and one more thing the Republicans had to destroy. 

Footnote: While researching Melungeons Kadizzle came across other names for them. One name struck home. Sometimes they were called Scotch Irish. As a child Kadizzle would sometimes ask what nationality the Quinns were. The answer was often Scotch Irish. Could Kadizzle be a Melungeon?