The Kudzu Files

Words Worth Reading

The great thing about blogging is that it becomes what the blogger wants it to become. The political ranting and division that dominates so many can make us think that's all there is. Until you come across something like this.

Now What?

Edgar Ray Killen has been found guilty of manslaughter for the killings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Many Mississippians, many southerners, many Americans are relieved that justice was finally done. So what now? There was considerable argument that the Killen trial was a show trial, that after 41 years it was senseless to go through this against an 80-year-old man in failing health. Others argued it was a show trial because it was a symbol of a changed Mississippi. It was neither. It was a murder trial, one that should have been held long, long ago. But the failure of the State of Mississippi to do the right thing does not in any way lessen the guilt of Edgar Ray Killen. He has lived to be an old man, to enjoy the company of his family and friends, because he was never tried for denying those very things to the three men he helped kill. There should be no sympathy for him. So now what? In a narrow, local sense, the killings were done by a group. Some of those are still alive. It should now be their turn. Where evidence can be found, any one implicated should be investigated and tried. There are more never-investigated, never-prosecuted crimes dating from the civil rights era. Where those can still be investigated, they should be. If this isn't done, then indeed the Killen trial will have been just a show trial, Mississippi trotting out it's legal system to show the nation and the world how much we want to say we've changed.

It's perhaps not a coincidence that while this trial was beginning, the Senate was voting to apologize for never enacting anti-lynching legislation. 85 Senators co-sponsored the resolution making the apology. Mississippi's two senators, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, refused to join. Cochran, who had earlier in his career co-sponsored similar resolutions apologizing for treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and of Native Americans for the way they were treated, said he felt he could not apologize "for something I did not do." Are we left, then, to assume he had some direct involvement in the internment of Japanese-Americans, or the breaking of treaties with Native Americans? I've mentioned before how much of a disappointment Thad Cochran has become to me. This, however, is shocking. And Trent Lott, who had told Ed Gordon of NPR, "“The important thing is to recognize the hurt that I caused and ask for forgiveness and find a way to turn this into a positive thing, and try to make amends for what I’ve said and for what others have said and done over the years. I’m looking forward to this to be an opportunity for redemption, but to do something about it", doesn't seem to think that apologizing for the Senate's failure to act qualifies. Both should hang their heads in shame today. They have embarrassed their home state. They have dishonored their home state. Was the apology a symbolic act? Hell yes! And that's all the more reason both Cochran and Lott should have been among the earliest co-sponors of the resolution. And their refusal to do so sickens me. We've come a long way. We still have a long way to go. And with attitudes like those of Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, we'll still be dragging lots of baggage around with us on the journey.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

But Things Have Changed

While I was writing the previous entry, the news came:

"Killen guilty of manslaughter in slaying of civil rights trio"

It's been a long time coming, but Mississippi can hold her head a little higher today.

Mississippi Smoldering

The Edgar Ray Killen trial jury is now in it's second day of deliberations. I think I expected a longer time spent introducing evidence and building the case. I know I didn't expect hearing that the jury, at the end of the first day of deliberations, after only two hoursa of deliberating, would tell the judge they were deadlocked 6-6. I expected a conviction. I think most Mississippians have long assumed that Edgar Ray Killen was guilty of, at the least, significant involvement in the deaths of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. 41 years ago today, those three young men were brutally murdered by a group of criminals. Mississippi tried for many years to ignore that. Now, many believe that too much time has passed, that you shouldn't dig it back up. I wonder, however, if it had been three young white Mississippi girls killed by a mob on that day, would those same people be so willing to let the past slide. We in the South, who seem to so desparately cling to our "heritage", don't seem to be so interested in the parts of our history that don't involve plantations, Southern Belles, and the peculiar sense of "honor" that allowed wealthy southern men to spend their time being honorable while slaves created and maintained their wealth. But that's beside the point here, I've engaged in that other Southern habit of rambling. The one thing, as I said, that I didn't expect was another hung jury. So far, the national reaction to this trial has been mostly positive. But last night, as I listened to the news of the deadlocked jury, I had a sense of foreboding, of the image of Mississippi crashing back four decades as the nation says "see, we knew nothing had changed".

What's blooming

A couple of pictures from my yard today...

The front annual bed, with marigolds, gladiolus, dahlias, blue salvia, begonias, zinnias, and behind it the not-quite-finished deck and swing/arbor.

Magilla Perilla, a type of coleus, with pink Wave petunias and Terracotta Million Bells (Calibrachoa).

Linux: "It's terrible"

So says Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD in Forbes Magazine. He takes on the success of Linux, saying:

His take is that OpenBSd's code is tighter and more secure, and that OpenBSD developers are purer in their motivation:

de Raadt obviously has the credentials to make these kinds of charges, but you have to wonder if there's not some ulterior motive hidden in there somewhere.

More at Slashdot.

Oracle Backups

Jeff Hunter's Backup Top 11 rules are worth reading if you're responsible for Oracle databases. As is this from one of the comments:

"The responsibility of the dba is not to backup the database, but to restore it."

Paranoia is a useful trait for an Oracle DBA. Very useful.

Frozen In Time

Ten days ago, a teenage girl here was killed in a horrible boating accident. There was no alcohol involved, no drugs. Just a freak accident. The kids on the boat were all good kids. The kind parents want to have. And now her parents are staring into that black abyss that comes with the loss of a child. I saw what it did to my parents when my younger brother died at 31. I feel for her family, her parents, her sister, her little brothers. They're walking a path that has to be walked alone, for a while at least.

It seems like nobody bad ever dies young. No one speaks ill of the departed. But in this case, the words are very true, without embellishment. This was a girl who touched all those around her. I didn't know her directly, but she played soccer with my youngest daughter several years ago, and my wife taught her last year in Biology. She acted in community theatre, was part of the dance team at her school, deeply involved in her church. She was truly a bright spirit. In one of those supreme ironies, she and the other girl on the boat had talked about their funerals shortly before the accident. She had said she wanted bright colors, and happy people, celebrating her life lived as a Christian. Lots of yellow. "Let It Be" was to be the featured music. And that's what she had.

She, like so many her age, had a weblog. Reading it almost seems like a violation, but it, and another site set up by her friends, have become memorials of sorts. And the lasting impression from reading her blog is that this was a girl who was alive, vibrant, living in the moment. All the phrases you want to use. Yes, it's the blog of a 15-, then 16-year-old girl. But what we too often forget is that, at that age, they're beginning to look seriously at the world and make some sense of it. Sometimes serious, sometimes funny, sometimes so lighthearted it makes you ache for what was lost. But what you take from it mostly is a 16-year-old girl, frozen in time in the late spring of 2005. We probably don't think much about how weblogs are part of us, but apart from us, and could, in an instant, become part of a disassociated netherworld, waiting for a next entry that will never come, but continuing to be a last remainder of us until some webhost does the final internment.

Lanie Kealhofer, 1988-2005. Missed by her family, a large circle of friends, and a small Mississippi town.

Really Baffling FTP Problem, Part 4

The replication job ran last night in 2 hours. The problem was a router that I had been told to used for my servers. I noticed using traceroute that my desktop didn't use ut, nor did the Linux boxes I had been playing with, and they all had very fast transfer speeds. So I tested yesterday afternoon with another Solaris box, and the speed jump was astounding. Now the network folks are trying to figure out why that router was such a bottleneck.