Dum-di-dum

Right before the war New York "had gone slightly insane on the subject of dancing." Women with time on their hands wanted to spend their afternoons at fashionable thés dansants, or "tea dances," their evenings at exciting cabarets. They wanted to shine on the dance floor and were eager to learn the latest steps: turkey trots and bunny hugs, hesitation waltzes, and Argentine tangos. "Women of all ages began thronging to the places were music was hot and the right dancing partners were available. The men were slower than they in falling victims to the craze," and often a wife or sweetheart yearning to dance could not do so, because the man she was with had not mastered the steps. Rodolfo Guglielmi became one such dancer-for-hire, or "taxi dancer." [...] "an exceptionally good-looking chap, tall and well-built, dark and romantic in appearance."

The women who attended the afternoon teas and nighttime dances tended to be from the white middle class or upper crust: it wasn't poor or "alien" women whose virtue the guardians of propriety wanted to defend. The oppurtunity for mingling social classes set off alarms, as did the potential mixing of skin tones and ethic groups. That the dancers tended to have dark hair and dark complexions, that they usually had Italian or Jewish names and were very often foreign born, invited suspicion among those inclined to distrust immigrants in the first place. The whole idea of allowing women to go unescorted (often during the afternoon, when husbands or sweethearts would be at work) to places where, for a price, they could drink alcohol, and be held in the arms of attractive strangers, made moral watchdogs gag. Cabarets themselves, according to an article in Harper's Weekly, smacked as much of evil influence as the afternoon tango places. "The very air of those places is heavy with unleashed passions."

"Okay, I got you."

*Removes the B from the BREAD sign*

isäpuoli: mut tiiäks miten giljotiinin saa pois päältä?

mä: ???

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.