There's a Strom coming...

Firstly, I wish that your Christmas and New Year surpassed your expectations. Now though attentions turns to the year ahead and for other 15 and 16 year olds, the next 6 months in particular.

In the next 6 months, millions of 15-16 year olds will sit the majority, if not all of their GCSEs. I'm writing this on the eve of returning to school. And rather sadly, as much as we would like to postpone and procrastinate, time will ever come closer until it becomes too close. And this procrastination reminds me of someone who, when we are taking our GCSEs, would have been 115.

This is Strom Thurmond.  He is/was mainly known for firstly serving in the US Senate (an Upper House of a bicameral legislature - see previous post) for almost 50 years until the age of 100, and secondly running as a candidate in the 1948 Presidential Election. The platform he stood on was Dixiecrat, a splinter from the Democrats who supported racial segregation. Hopefully this should be enough for you to form an early opinion of him. 

However, the thing which stands out to me is an event in 1957. The most notable Civil Rights legislation came during the Presidencies of JFK and LBJ, yet the first Civil Rights law of the movement was passed was in 1957. Not that Thurmond didn't make every effort to stop it. So he conducted the longest lone filibuster in history. This essentially means waffling about anything in an attempt to block or delay the bill. Procrastination at its finest.

And Thurmond waffled for 24 hours and 18 minutes. During that time, another Senator was sworn in and Thurmond urinated into a bucket. In his monologue he read out the voting laws of all 48 states, the entire Declaration of Independence and even drifted into mumbling about his grandmother's biscuit recipe. Thurmond may have been a tough cookie but other senators slept in the hall as he spoke, keen to ensure they didn't miss the vote.

Yet this great effort counted for nothing. Throughout the speech, President Eisenhower and Senate leader Johnson carried on their errands and Italian dignitaries were greeted. With Thurmond not changing a single vote, the bill was passed, paving the way for future Civil Rights movements. Strom's storm had become nothing more than a cloud.

 Thurmond was defeated and in many corners humiliated.

Yet as time progressed into a more tolerant era where prejudice declined at a rate too slow for comfort, as the 1970s gradually crept away, Strom began to open himself to a more open diverse world his elderly body was now living in. Yet he never said his original opinions were wrong.  Perhaps this was Strom attempting to present himself as an open-minded voice of experience who wore his colours on his sleeve. Or maybe Strom began to acknowledge the ever-changing modern world and couldn't care less about his previous 'errors of judgement'. 

In fact the mostly likely reason was because a myth was created around him by his colleagues that he did apologise and that it was a Christian story of sin and redemption. This resulted in him never publicly denouncing himself.

Regardless, the message was clear that procrastination was ultimately fruitless.

And this is applicable to our exams. For if we embrace them and prepare rather than attempting to ignore them and not acknowledge them, it will all go Pete Tong. And nobody wants that.

So this metaphor, while rather extended,  does have its meaning. And if nothing else, hopefully reading this article also acts as good revision to History students. 

FACT of the IPOT: After Thurmond's death in 2003, it was revealed that he had a 78 year old mixed-race daughter. Food for thought as she was conceived two decades before Strom became a Dixiecrat.