Off to Florida!

Some of you know that I am departing for Florida today until Tuesday to enjoy some sunshine, manatees and beaches with E. and R., formerly known as the 58 Ibbetson ladies. It's a very timely trip, namely because the beautiful snow of last weekend has devolved into cold, rainy yuckiness. I'm happy to head toward sun. I actually am packing shorts, people. Crazy! E. is presenting at a fancy conference in Tampa, so R. and I are accompanying her for a little mini-reunion.

In totally unrelated news, I strongly encourage all of you to go to this site and donate $8 (or more, if you've got it) to the National Slavery Museum. The fact that this museum is still not up and running -- the fact that we have no museum of slavery in this country (a point most powerfully made in this book some of us recall from 612) is appalling. It's not open yet solely because of lack of funding. This would not be a problem for many other museums, and I urge you to do what I did, which was to think about all the free or reduced-cost (re: subsidized by the rich people who have not chosen to subsidize this) museum visits I have taken in the last year and add up what I would've spent on admission fees for those. Not to be preachy, but seriously. I used to rail about this to my students in African American History, then I read that this museum was in the process of being built and I let it fall off the radar. That was over two years ago, and I only recently realized that not only is it not built yet, it is still in the same phase it had been two years ago because of the need for more funding. As a sidenote, I find the Phillip Morris donation of 250,000 kind of disgusting. Because I can't help but take it as an admission that "Hey! Tobacco never could've taken off without slave labor, so thanks for our centuries of huge profits!" Of course I think Phillip Morris should be contributing to this, it's not that, it's that the contribution itself acknowledges the historical exploitation and therefore 250,000 seems like a meaningless slap in the face.

Anyway...off to Florida I go, increasing my carbon footprint for the year by an undoubtedly awful amount! Boy, I'm cheery today. It might be that this was "rape week" in the early US women's history class I'm grading for -- doesn't lend itself to a lot of hopeful thoughts about the world. The students had to stop doing the reading at nighttime entirely. Definitely not the American Revolution they teach about in high school, or even college, for that matter.