Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Missing The Parishes

How do I know that the Democratic operative who sent me this email is ignorant about Lafourche Parish, and, indeed, about all of Louisiana?

We need your help.

Tens of thousands of Democrats are already members of PartyBuilder, a group of tools on Democrats.org that puts control of the Democratic Party in the hands of people like you in all fifty states.
....

Can you sign on and join a group with other Lafourche County Democrats? We talk about a Democratic presence in every county -- now this is your chance to make that happen with PartyBuilder.
....

And if there's not already a group in Lafourche County, you can create one right here in less than a minute:


Louisiana is the only state in the US which calls its counties "parishes", because the early political divisions were originally based on the Roman Catholic Church parish divisions.

Note the names: St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Mary, St. Helena, St. Martin, St. Tammany (who I'm asssured is a real person), St. Landry (never heard of him), and St. Bernard.

You'd think the DNC could make the necessary adjustment to the mass emailing to reflect that they have a clue. Come on, folks; you can do better than this.

8 comments:

  1. You think you have it bad, just live in Canada, America's suburb.

    We get instructions that give figures in miles, feet, inches, ounces, pounds etc., when most Canadians under the age of 40 have no idea what these measurements are and tools, signs, measuring cups, etc. manufactured here are all in metric. About once a week I get a flier addressed to me in the State of Quebec. Sometimes they cut off our postal codes because they have 6-7 characters (J1Y 2B4) rather than 5.

    And there are 32 million people here and we're the US' biggest trading partner! I feel your pain. Everything is so standardized. All the things that make places like Louisiana or New England or Quebec unique are disappearing.

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  2. Dan, Canada and Louisiana and other unique places are expected to fall in line and scuttle the uniqueness. Uniformity is all.

    I sympathize with you about the measurements, because I'm fairly clueless about the metric system - which we really should join the rest of the world in adopting.

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  3. Grandmère and Dan (doubtful since it was on NPR) did either of you hear the discussion last week by the dear souls living in New Mexico who were advised they had to have Passports to fly within the U.S., or whose relatives were charged extra foreign postage rates for mail sent to them because so many people (including it would seem employees of our own Postal Service) didn't realize New Mexico was a state in the union and not part of Mexico. There were many more examples of inconveniences given that were heaped upon them and they all wanted the rest of America to get a clue!
    Also, during the original OPEC oil embargo (remember way back in the 1970s) a friend told me that crude was still being delivered to Hawaii, because many OPEC nations didn't realize that Hawaii was part of the U.S.

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  4. wow on all these discussions. It's sad when we don't care enough to learn about others' uniqueness. I think it goes for the church as well. Just as the Democratic party isn't curious enough to learn about Louisiana, Christians aren't always curious enough to learn about the people who surround their communities.

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  5. Boocat, I'm always tuned to NPR in my car, unless I'm playing music. I didn't catch that show. Who would have thought that federal employees did not know that New Mexico is included in the 50 states? Ignorance abounds, astoundingly so.

    I can understand a little the other countries not knowing that Hawaii is part of the US.

    The oil from various places is so mixed together and swapped around that oil embargoes don't make much sense any longer.

    Diane, so very true.

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  6. G'mere,
    Clearly you are not sufficiently committed to the idol of unity. The days when we tolerated any kind of difference in this country or this church are long gone. Now, get on into line and let's all bow down, come on now... Chant it along with me, Unity... Unity... all hail Unity.

    Sad, isn't it?

    Lindy

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  7. Lindy, I believe we'll stick with our parishes, thank you very much.

    That information was in my geography textbook in grade school, and it was a world geography textbook, not a local.

    It is sad.

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  8. Not unity -- uniformity. That's what people want (including some in the Anglican Communion). I am all for unity but not uniformity... so says the Vermonter.

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