Skip to main content

America is on fire!

Plenty of virtual ink has been spilled about the horrendous treatment of African Americans at the hands of the American police.  Those who are supposed to protect and serve will easily kill anyone with non-white skin.  This also applies to immigrants, those with accents and those with mental health issues. But African Americans were brought to this country illegally, forced to work, and have never been freed of the social idea that they can never have respect, especially from "authorities".

This has been an issue for the past 400 years, but after 2 months of being locked up, America is bursting at the seams in trying to get the attention of the non-leaders, calling for justice for a man who was choked to death on video over a long period of 8 minutes. Earlier in the week was a black man who was birding in Central Park who videotaped a white woman who called 911 on him.  She knew to call out race, to say that an African American man was threatening her life-even though she was the one who had her dog off leash in one of the few areas in the Park that requires a leash at all times.  She was committing a crime, and knew that if she called the cops-he would be the one to face consequences.  Her name was Amy Cooper, his name was Christian Cooper-at some distant point in the past it is likely that her family OWNED his family.  She lost her job and her dog and her reputation.  NYC was proud that it turned into a non-issue. But in Minnesota, everything else went wrong.

So the peaceful protests started.  And the out-of-state white supremacists began to incite violence.  Agent Provocateurs set fires, egged everyone on.  It is again an excuse for white expression during continued black oppression. NYC is being destroyed, the police are being supported by the military and very soon we will be living in a police state. All to create chaos in a country, in a world that is beset by a pandemic.  To keep the idiot in chief in power. And who knows what else?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Henry David Thoreau is Alive and Well, Despite All the Murderers

Despite his famous grave at Sleepy Hollow, HDT is alive and well. There are countless books, events, plays being read, written, performed and published about him every year. The "interpretations" take on various permutations.  Live-action humans who lead educational programs, or people who write books for children.  Or, theater which extends the documented & literary materials into personal immediacy (not that I am biased, but this is what I do). Lately, there has also been a video game created about Walden. And a young graphic designer who wants to "update" Thoreau's words for the modern age.  Something about "how dated the language is" and the "inaccessibility" of its ideas.  (I can't bear to include a link, or even the designer's name for fear of adding to publicity, and thereby adding "support") The last example is the slippery slope.  At what point does he need to be repackaged, yet again? Instead of taki...
Post a Comment
Read more

Easy Moments

There are moments in everyday life when you want to tell someone something. I was on a shuttle bus and wanted to apologize to someone sitting in front of me. It would have been easy to tell him when I first got on, but I was distracted finding a seat. It would have been easy to get up at the first traffic light, when the bus was stopped. Or at the second.  Things were quiet enough for conversation too. We were about to head into the countryside, so I knew there were not many more moments. When I approached him, it was not the person I thought it was. I did feel better that I had tried. And that there was one more traffic light than I had expected.
Post a Comment
Read more

Mark Twain in the Azores

I've been doing some research on Twain's visit to the Azores. He stopped in Horta on his way to Palestine-a series of correspondences that would become his book,  Innocents Abroad. Most of what he wrote about the Azores in that book was not kind, he was trying to create jokes-and also created a cynical sense of the superiority of the American traveler. He made himself the joke of an ugly American-especially viewed from the perspective of today. In the Book about the Dabneys, there is evidence that he was in their house. Below is a quote from one of the female residents. “At 10 the parlor was quite full….One young man had his note-book out all the time and remarked as I gave him some verbena,’I am taking notes as I am a correspondent of a paper’.  ‘Horrors;, writes CPD, “how we may appear in print,’
Post a Comment
Read more