Thanksgiving for all blessings ... especially freedoms, including freedom of speech ... Free Birds ... college memories of LSU Free Speech Alley tied in to Twitter ....
Pics: Public Domain
Free Bird Lynyrd Skynyrd YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0W1v0kOELA
It's the fall of 1977 in the mid-morning and I'm a freshman at LSU walking with my roommate, Scott Vincent, from our Power Dorm to classes and we stopped by the LSU Union to see if we got any mail – maybe a check from Mom & Dad – lol!
BTW: Scott walked all dat semester barefooting it – even in the cold of November and December!
And we were sometimes called by passerby's as the “Umbrella Brothers,” as we would don those rain protectors on out belts during our promenades when the forecast was party cloudy.
Here we were transplants from Uptown New Orleans … both the Most Holy Name of Jesus Grammar School grads but Scott went to Jesuit and I to De La Salle!
As we got closer to the LSU Union, we saw someone standing at the top of the steps and heard him speaking loud about some issue near and dear to his heart.
Yes, there were jeers and cheers echoing off and on from the onlookers – and even from both Scott and me, since “DLS Cavaliers” & “Jesuit Blue Jays” had differences of opinion at times, but we found a way to still live together!
Just at that moment, I happened to spy an eagle flying overhead – what a thrill that was as it reminded me then of the origins for our great country and that cherished 1st Amendment to the Constitution!
This “Free Speech Alley,” as we found out it was called . LSU, provided a great forum for diversity of thoughts to be shared with respectful tolerance – however heated it may have gotten at times and without any violence.
Fast Forward to the here and now … with social media platforms and spectrums galore that were not even imagined to be able to be available to us back in 1977!
Thank God a wealthy “Free Bird” is helping to restore Free Speech.
And as I'm enjoying this Thanksgiving week, I especially enjoy sitting in our backyard and hearing cardinals, blue jays, sparrows and other birds tweeting away in a marvelous melody of sweet harmony and peace.
Happy Thanksgiving to all free birds ….
Keith John Paul Horcasitas, LCSW, MHA, Prayer Care, LLC, November 24, 2022.
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In 1979, when I met for the first time a graduate student, Danny Lewis from then,, Bombay, he told me that he and his wife, Bina, loved going to the disco, Taj Mahal, and listening to the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd. I believe that was the hotel that was attacked brutally by separatists sometime later. The only major gun tragedy and mass shooting in India that I recall from the news.
I never used an umbrella. And after I was paralyzed my hands and arms were too weak to hold an umbrella up, so I often got wet. But as one professor at Atlanta University passing me in a light rain said, "A little rain on the noggin doesn't hurt me, I'm not a Baptist." ;-) I do recall heading to my first day of class in 1975 at Marshall University when I got drenched in a downpour. I looked like a drowned rat when I got on the stage of an auditorium with that overflow management class. Thankfully, the department head looking dapper and untouched by water, stepped up on the stage and saved me by giving the students a rousing welcome and introducing me so that I felt more comfortable my first day of teaching there.
In 1966, while taking engineering courses at Stanford, I often passed the White Plaza at noon while getting my lunch where the student body president, David Harris, was railing against the Vietnam War. He later went to prison for draft evasion and married Joan Baez. Those were heady times. Barefoot was the rule.
We have a lot to be thankful for in this great country.
Ron