Hey you remember when the North decided to be way too nice to the South and the result was that generations of kids down here grew up being taught that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery,that slaves were better off for being slaves, that Robert E Lee didn’t want slaves / chose to set them free / was a big ole softy? But that the truth was he inherited some from his father-in-law, delayed setting them free, and ordered that their wounds from being whipped be bathed in brine?
So yeah. The losers got to write the history, in that case.
In 2014 and 2015, I had a major disagreement on tactics with AURA about how we should engage with the people on the pro side of Project Connect, especially those who engaged in dishonesty during said campaign. I obviously was in the minority. Overwhelmingly. This recent storify explains how I think we should handle it now, and basically, how we should have handled it back then. AURA’s position, though, was kumbaya. (Note: I have emails saved about all of this).
Fast-forward to January and February 2016. Two of the last three days, posts like the one pictured below have shown up on pages of people I sort-of follow, who are semi-respected and big parts of the ecosystem locally. Anybody see any parallels? Hint: “The FTA wouldn’t fund rail on Guadalupe/Lamar1” is the equivalent to “IT WAS ABOUT STATES’ RIGHTS!!!!1”
The ‘winners’ once again let the losers write the history. And when that happens, we all lose.
For extra credit, also see this storify for another angle on Why We Shouldn’t Have Been So Nice, which repeats the Big Lie that we were only against Project Connect because our preferred route wasn’t FIRST.
AURA vanished the post I made to #atxurbanists on facebook about this, so here we are, kids. The split widens.
By the way, if you’re wondering – could the failure to hold bad people accountable for the bad things they did in Project Connect be resulting in us failing to make progress more quickly on the next rail plan / study – the one that Capital Metro insists can’t even be studied in a way that completes in time for an election before 2020?
The original facebook post tagged Roger Cauvin and gave him credit for doing a bunch of legwork to get public statements from the FTA that directly contradict the claims made in 2014 by many people associated with the project. Suffice to say, the claim about the Feds in the picture is as best dishonest, and at worst a bald-faced lie ↩
