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| Los Angeles, CA May 31, 2020 |
It is bigger than everything and anything, what is going on. No question mark. On this beautiful Monday morning I sit in my dining room, my view an expanse of green and sunlight pouring in from the east. A spiderweb glistens, its threads loose, wavy, the air so clear I see gnats eluding it. We have so many hummingbirds this year, and I think they are the air's dolphins darting friendly so much that is good to sip. I'm thinking about atonement and whether this country our country will have the strength to work together as a collective to atone for the brutality upon which we were founded and continued through centuries all the way up to now with children in cages, the disabled having to beg for help, the elderly left to die alone, the dead bodies of children piling up, the dead bodies of black people piling up, the healers in dirty masks. Yet so much bounty. This country taken from those that lived here for thousands of years and then built on the backs of the enslaved. The delusion that is the American dream. The vast inequality. Age-old. The center cannot hold. There is something beyond intense watching hordes of young people break through glass only to grab boxes of shoes and luxury bags. The backs of their heads, their heads in hoodies. I can't get the white girl with the skinny legs and pink hair out of my head. Skateboards used to smash windows. The tank rolling down the street of pristine houses, men in riot gear hanging off, headed to where? I saw a man with a box on his shoulders, clothes wrapped in plastic dropping out of it as he ran while others watched. So much heaviness and anger and wildness in the scrawls of letters across buildings. So much desperation. How paltry in comparison to the plights of other countries, other peoples. Or is it?
The beauty of those who swept the glass and scrubbed away the ugliness. The Korean councilman, the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, the teenaged girl, the black man.
I want to write something funny. Something absurd. Something to tell the truth. Something to evade the truth.
The plights of any Human suffering is never paltry, no matter it's location. You wrote something Heart felt, it is almost impossible right now to find even the Gallow's Humor I typically resort to when enduring what is unbearable. The Truth right now is so grotesque, isn't it? Too many of us have known it all along, alas, far too many others have been deluded into assuming it wasn't even there... certainly not in 2020... their complacent comfort now having been rocked and it finally touching their Lives, the Pearls are clutched and they claim to wonder Why?! Really, like they couldn't figure it out, I find that very hard to Believe even tho' it's the Truth, they have been Clueless and that's in part, a great Deal of the Problem.
ReplyDeleteI never stop thinking about the bones and blood this country is built on. Quite literally. And instead of even trying to pay back a debt which of course cannot be paid, we continue to enslave the ancestors of those whose blood and bones we demanded as our entitled right. We enslave them with our laws, our attitudes, our treatment, our cruelty, our indifference to their suffering. And we wonder why they may want to break glass and steal a pair of shoes.
ReplyDeleteThere can never be reparations but my god, couldn't we at least try?
"It never was America to me." Dear Mr. Hughes. What if this country really manifested the dream of equality, dignity, and prosperity for all its citizens? What a great land we could truly be. You'd have to be willfully blind not to see the injustices in this country, and I guess many are. Our times are the latest manifestation of all that is wrong in the U.S. So many tragedies coming together at once. Michelle Obama put out a statement that truly moved me. We have work to do, if we have the courage to do it.
ReplyDeleteDid you see the video where a young black guy, little more than a teen, jumped over a protest barricade in Washington DC, and as the cops in riot gear began running toward him, batons raised, a young white girl, little more than a teen, jumped over the barricade too and placed her body between the cops and the young black man, stood against him like a shield, arms raised outward, and made the young man walk back to the barricade, not letting to cops get to him, and it was breathtaking and brave and i loved that white girl for her humanity and her courage, her standing in the breach like that for some mother's son.
ReplyDeleteThank you, 37paddington, for sharing this vision of what can be done by one person with courage.
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