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 breathe calmly.
In this blog category, “The View from Behind,” I invite you to join me, somewhere in the back.
Robert and I walked into one of our area libraries today to get a book I just HAD to read.
At the entrance, we saw these very cool children-made posters.
May our children’s Right to Read be preserved.
May the far-right extremist voices be silenced, so democracy can prevail.
Tomorrow’s midterm elections may provide the answer
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
There are similarities between the Post-Civil War Reconstruction atrocities and the Post-2020 Election Insurrection.
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“The number of voters supporting Trump, a white nationalist President, increased when he ran for a second term. And when Trump lost, some of his supporters led an insurrection in the nation’s Capitol, seeking, just as white mobs had done repeatedly during Reconstruction, to overturn and delegitimize an election won by a multiracial coalition of voters.
Then, in response to well-organized Black, Latino and Indigenous voters helping turn heavily Republican states such as Georgia and Arizona blue, Republicans began a coordinated effort to introduce and pass hundreds of bills that would make it harder for millions of Americans to vote.
Some have called these efforts—which came not even a year after the death of civil rights icon John Lewis, who in the 1960’s nearly lost his life to secure voting rights for Black Americans—the worst attack on voting in more than fifty years.” p. 455-456
And did you see the anti-democracy, white nationalist ex-President’s comments about all this in a speech the other day?
“On Thursday, former President Donald Trump told conservative radio host Wendy Bell that if he were to return to the Oval Office he would grant pardons and also apologize to participants in the January 6 insurrection. Trump promised that if ‘I decide to run, and if I win, I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons…with an apology to many.’” Slate
This blog category is the journaling and journey-ing of my quest to say (with cautious sincerity) “Hello, Anxiety” and to take a look at the condition from my “me-andering” views.
I recently came across this definition for anxiety, which rang so true for me.
“Anxiety — a condition in which the brain’s alarm bells keep on ringing, ringing, and ringing … Long after they have served any useful function.”
(from Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation)
P.S. Just between us, I really don’t like some definitions, truthful though they may be.
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
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
“In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and the victim is black than the other way around. In fact, the report notes that when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a ‘justifiable homicide’ than a white-on-white killing.” (Full documentation on page 266)
TOILET TALES
May he be flushed. Flushed. Flushed. Flushed. Flushed. Flushed. Flushed … … … …
A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening truth found in The 1619 Project.
“Donald Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud in the wake of the 2020 presidential election were an expression of the idea that only certain majorities are real majorities, that only some Americans deserve to hold power.”
“And while Trump lost and left office, the idea persists.”
“Rather than mobilize new voters or persuade existing ones, Republicans throughout the country have set about restricting access to the forms of voting that helped Democrats win in traditionally Republican states like Georgia and Arizona.”
“In Michigan, likewise, Republican lawmakers want to change the way the state distributes its Electoral College votes to nullify the influence of Detroit [overwhelmingly Black] on the final result.” p. 208
May our democracy survive this extremist far-right onslaught of truth, integrity and American values.
A blog category examining the difficult truth found in The 1619 Project.
In late August, 1619, 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship (Treasurer) arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies. hampton.gov
Antebellum Plantations. Such Southern beauty!
But we need Truth in Terminology, Truth in Naming …
PLANTATIONS = FORCED LABOR CAMPS
NealEnJoy 