Two pieces of unvarnished good news: Coco Gauff won the single-double in Parma and CNN has fired Rick Santorum (even though it took a month).
I’m
celebrating that President Biden signed the first anti-hate crime legislation
into law in 12 years at the same time I am painfully aware that a Congress
half-full of Republicans has NEVER managed to pass a federal anti-lynching law at
the same time state legislatures and state university boards of trustees
controlled by those same Republicans does not want K-12 or university or
graduate or professional school students to learn the truth about, as MacArthur
Genius Grant winner TaNehisi Coates put it today, “the American experiment’s
origins in the laboratory of slavery”.
If
we had a federal anti-lynching law, the Louisiana “officers” who’re the
spiritual descendants of the KKKers who dragged the Mississippi Freedom
Fighters out of cars and beat and burned them for trying to help Black people
register to vote in the FIRST Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, who gave
conflicting commands to Ronald Greene and beat and tased him and pepper-sprayed
him while he was handcuffed and begging for his life … and then lied to his
family about how he died? For two years?
They’d
be in jail right now.
The
last time Senators Booker & Harris brought an anti-lynching bill to the
Senate floor, Rand Paul voted against it for the exact same reason literal
state powers have been used to silence a Peabody-, Pulitzer, and
MacArthur-award winning journalist and historian because mythkeepers who stole
their power (2000 “stop the count” order from SCOTUS, anyone?) and who’re
propped up by a near-half-country full of literal KnowNothings didn’t want to
hear what she had to say.
If
it couldn’t be more clear – these people are corrupt and do not deserve to be
in power.
And
if you think it’s as simple as “vote them out” understand that the utter
stupidity that just LOOKS ridiculous that’s going on right now in AZ TX MI GA
PA was DESIGNED by these KnowNothings to stay in power but to do nothing for
you – by sowing doubt in the results of free and fair elections till their
followers agitate and refuse to accept the results of ANY election they do not
win – in short, to destroy democracy.
“It
should not surprise us that a horde,
addicted to the national myth that pitched white men as the unvarnished savior
of all civilization, is NOT PRIMED to share the country that they’ve been
TAUGHT they own.
It
is MYTH that sanctifies their actions.
They attack our vote to prevent us from
creating a better future. They attack our history to prevent us from even
imagining one."
~ TaNahesi Coates,
MacArthur Grant Winner and Howard University alumna
When
I do notes on the weekend I sometimes sense that for some folks they feel like
a jarring interruption to “their” weekends.
What I also know for sure, to paraphrase Oprah (whose brave production
partner Prince Harry, who gets it and is not letting another similar Empire
silence *him* in telling his truth) is that for some of the rest of us it is
and has been the rolling background drumbeat to our literal lives. Sometimes before we were even born.
I
know who the people are who are living in the red part of the Baldwin quote.
I
hope the rest of us who are living in the black of it (yes) are no longer
wondering how we got to “we might as well be living in the last days of the Weimar
Republic” and are actively organizing with our fellow citizens to organize the collective
escape route where nobody else gets murdered.
To
quote Charles Grodin as Murray Blum in one of my Washington favorites ‘Dave’:
“Get
out of here as fast as you can.”
#SilenceIsViolence
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