FunTo keep in style with christmas I visit the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. Here in 1930 the Coca-Cola company invented the current Santa Claus image for their advertisements and it became the leading image from then on.
Having worked in a startup company in Silicon Valley it’s almost beyond believe to understand how much success this company has. Its the best know product in the world, making their marketing department probably the most efficient department in the world. 
There is lots of talk about the famous (not patented) secret recipe and why all over the world Coca-Cola taste the same and why it is so popular. It all makes sense when you think about how this company is set up. The syrup is made in the USA and shipped to local licensed bottle factories. These factories dilute the syrup 6.5 times, fill the bottles and distribute it, making it available in every corner of the planet. 
I always understood that the first recipe of Coca-Cola had cocaine as an ingredient and that’s why it became such a success. In a coca leave museum in Bolivia I also learned that up to today, the Coca-Cola company still imports about 100.000 kg of coca leaves (after the cocaine is extracted) each year, but nothing is mentioned about that in the whole museum. The real trues, why Coca-Cola is such a big success, its because we the people have incorporated it into our daily diet. 
I didn’t know that and besides Inca cola (the only taste I like) I stay with my own caffeine fix, without the sugar: coffee.Serious matters
Although the Civil War was won by the North and the slave was told to be free in 1863, segregation was still in full effect in 1955 when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white man. As leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, minister Martin Luther King Jr, became the voice of her defend, the voice of the almost 1 year lasting bus boycott (plunging the bus company in financial ruins), and the voice in many parts of the USA and all around the world against segregation.
Influenced by the teaching of Gandhi during a trip to India, a non-violence approached for racial justice was taken. King moved back to his birthplace Atlanta to serve as co-pastor besides his father in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and to become the president of the civil right organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 
The years following were filled wit boycotts, speeches and advocating (and practicing) civil disobedience to “immoral laws”. Accumulating for the March on Washington, were 250.000 people gathered to hear Kings electrifying speech: “I have a dream”.
In 1965 on what was later called; “Bloody Sunday” blacks and sympathized whites, leaded by King were marching 2 by 2 to the state capitol in Montgomery to demonstrate for black voting rights. The peaceful march was beaten down on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and broadcasted all over the world, finally convincing President Johnson to sign the Voting Right Act. It put King even more in the spot lights but in 1968 his fight came to a sudden stop, assassinated in Memphis while he was fighting for better living conditions for the black.
Today there is a black president in the USA, but if the entire struggle is over. I doubt it and I will keep my eyes and ears open here down in the South to see how far the world still has to come. Dag,
Iris (Atlanta, 27934 miles)
