A blog category about finding “art” in unexpected places and situations.
So I was walking down the hall, mindfully minding my own business, when I looked over and saw Boopers perched in what seemed to be a deep transcendental meditative trance.
I looked closer, behind the meditating cat, and saw … this.
Her? Him? They? A … being, with two eyes, both upper and lower noses, a tongue-y mouth, not to mention hair that could use a shampoo.
I waited impatiently until Boopers finished with a Downward Dog and an ardent “Namaste!” and asked if he knew who that was behind him.
“All I can tell you,” Boopers coyly purred in Zen-like calmness, “is that her name is Cordy and I find her smile electrifying.”
I walked away, satisfied with his answer, then turned around to see Boopers standing intimately close to Cordy, staring into her eyes.
1. Realizing that some broken things CAN be fixed.
My special wooden “N” (for Neal) that I somehow dropped and splintered.
But now it’s back on the top of my Desires Board, next to Mr. Happy and down just a bit from my Yes Stick. (Okay, I can see your furrowed brow. During the pandemic, HR and I traveled to a bunch of Georgia State parks, where we went on many a hike. I would often see a Y-shaped stick or tree branch on the trail and tell Robert it was a Yes Stick, to pause and think of something to say “Yes!” to. On one marvel-ous hike at Tugaloo State Park, HR saw this Y Stick, brought it home and shellacked it for us. Yes! TMI?)
2. The incredible ability to walk (which I usually just take for granted). To be able to put one foot in front of the other … and go forward! Try it!
3. Finally finishing with Robert this week the eye-, mind- and heart-opening A New Origin Story: The 1619 Project.
A difficult but so important read about the role that slavery and racism played in our nation’s founding—and continues to play in the U.S. today.
I wish its meticulously documented truths could be taught in every high school.
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
A major contributor to the prosperity of the United States …
“The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans, just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s indigenous people.
Though our high school history books seldom make this plain, slavery and the hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known ad Jim Crow were, above all else, systems of economic exploitation. To borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father.” p. 458
For some reason, I have always appreciated “the view from behind.” As a child, on the first day of each school year, I was a nervous wreck waiting for the teacher to announce our seating arrangement. Front of the class? 😢 Too much exposure! Far too much responsibility to “be.” A nice, comfy seat toward the back? 😁 Perfect. I get to observe, to “see.” To breathecalmly.
In this blog category, “The View from Behind,” I invite you to join me, somewhere in the back.
I have not always been proud. As a matter of fact, it took most of a lifetime to come to terms with being gay. That designation, that reality, somehow took a hidden back seat.
But in my … EARLY senior years, I am attempting to embrace the gay joy of being gay.
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening TRUTH found in The 1619 Project. (I encourage you to read the book!)
Let’s take a closer look at the historical, racist and almost always overlooked hypocrisy of the 2nd Amendment.
“ A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The scholar Carl T. Bogus writes in a law review article, “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment”:
“As a Virginian, Madison knew that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the South, was slave control. His use of the word ‘security’ in the Second Amendment is consistent with his writing the amendment, for the specific purpose of assuring the southern states, and particularly his constituents in Virginia, that the federal government would not undermine their security against slave insurrection by disarming the militia.” (p. 257, The 1619 Project)
”The second amendment, ratified in 1791, codified for white citizens the right to bear arms and to protect themselves. If there were any doubts about who these rights pertained to, they were put to rest in 1800, when Virginia governor James Monroe called out several regiments of the state’s militia to thwart, before it could begin, a widespread revolt planned by an enslaved man named Gabriel, and then to hunt him and the other participants down.”
“As the historian Herbert Aptheker wrote in ‘American Negro Slave Revolts,’ as word of Gabriel’s revolt spread, the ‘nation from Massachusetts to Mississippi was terror-stricken.’ The response was to double down and make more explicit through legislation the prohibitions on Black people owning guns.”
“One Virginian wrote in the local newspaper that ‘we must reenact all those rigorous laws which experience has proved necessary to keep slavery within bounds. In a word, if we will keep a ferocious monster in our country, we must keep him in chains.’” (p. 257. Full documentation available in the Notes section of the book.)
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The 2nd Amendment continues to be misinterpreted and misconstrued today by far-right extremists, the NRA (and the politicians they own), as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just up the road from Robert and me … Daniel Defense — the Gun Death and Murder Company which supplied the assault weapon used in the Texas Uvalde massacre.
Can’t afford two grand? No problem. Three months interest free financing!
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Is there any answer to all this centuries-long deadly injustice?
If so, I surmise it will be found in voting out those politicians who continue to sustain laws (and introduce new ones) which enable potential domestic mass terrorists. Who continue to revel in the glory of guns. Who place the value of the dollar above (far above) the value of human life. Who refuse to even entertain the idea of common sense gun laws.
NealEnJoy 