PSA For All My Lurkers and Anonymous Folkx

"Here all is strange"

I was feeling beside myself  over the weekend. I got in my car and headed north on the PCH toward Malibu and turned around just about where Pepperdine sits so I could make my way back home to my regular, blessed and somewhere between a Monty Python comedy skit and a Samuel Beckett absurdist drama life.  Silly Walks. The Office of Arguments. Happy Days. Waiting for Godot. The ocean was on my right as I headed south and it led, as always, out to forever. I pulled over to the side of the road and slithered out of the car as other ones whizzed by me. I stood then, on the side of the road, on some rocks and looked out to sea (that phrase looked out to sea) and contemplated the strange world and my own insignificant place in it and the outsized emotions that I've been feeling about everything, knowing nothing. Knowing nothing and knowing more of nothing by the day, it seems. I looked down at my feet and saw this mermaid etched into the rock. Really. Beside myself.

That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by....hardly a day, without some addition to one's knowledge however trifling, the addition I mean, provided one takes the pains. 
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

St. Louis lawyers,  Patricia and Mark McCloskey,  defending their folly/home/castle/domain/wayoflife 

In today's Reign of Terror-wear, we have striped boat necks, clam diggers, pink polos and belted khakis. I know these people. We (we) know these people.







Back to my PSA for all my lurkers and anonymous folkx:

Black Lives Matter is not a terrorist organization. I imagine you have never really explored what the organization's mission is, so I urge you to do so. Here is their website: Black Lives Matter. Here are some of the statements on their website about their founding, their mission and their intent that jump out at me, a 56 year old white mother of three, pastry cook, English teacher and disability advocate:

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

Again, my Lurkers and Anonymous Folkx.

Again, #BlackLivesMatter is not a terrorist organization. I have contributed money and am committed to their purpose. I am not a terrorist, and no one I know supporting the movement is one. We are not brainwashed. We are marching or protesting peacefully with our whole bodies. The work of these women and men is profound and awe-inspiring. I am grateful to be listening and learning about the movement and to bring my own passions and experience standing up for the vulnerable to the table. I am blessed to be on what I believe is the right side of history, as they say. 

To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was. 

Samuel Beckett, Happy Days