Just One Month Ago: Rep Hakeem Jeffries Went All In and I Forgot It Was Saturday Night

 Andra Day as Billie Holiday

 

It feels like this is (yet another, if people didn’t have time yet to read the piece on recurring White election violence by Michael Harriot for the Root that might’ve been put up here two or three times) a time when there’s a lot of whiplash on how we’re all going to try to learn how to get along and move forward in the re-imagining of these United States as a multiracial democracy.

 

Because of some reactionary people who just can’t seem to get with the program (helped along no doubt by the forerunner of “I love the uneducated”, the man Nixon whose minions produced a raft of studies showing the less educated people were the more likely they were to vote Republican, at which point he promptly gutted funding for public education and we’ve been living with the aftermath of that decision in the population ever since), we have A LOT OF WHIPLASH – like how Sherrilyn Ifill is named Attorney of the Year by the National Lawyers Association for her tireless work advancing rights for marginalized peoples while at the literal very same time the NYPD shows its entire *ss by wearing TRUMP PATCHES while attacking protesters in the street (both of which things are completely against current rules and NYPD Comms insists the offending officers have been “disciplined” as a result but we haven’t heard anything yet about their being fired).

 

What I hope is that going forward, the vigorous pushback continues against what I heard an anti-school-shooting activist call “pain denial” … the kind of trash any person who  has been

 

That’s a fascist tactic – the attempt to drum compassion out of people so that otherwise criminal levels of dehumanization by any method or means continue to go unremarked because people have been numbed to the abuse because it’s been normalized *by people of influence, visibility, and power*.

 

We’re not here for that.  We’re not here for the Grand Failure of Imagination and the seemingly never-ending excuses that attach to it.

 

Make art.  Make more art.  Imagine that which has not yet been envisioned.

Let’s continue to do better.