In A Week Where Nolan Xavier Wells' Memory Was Rushed Past/Silenced I Want To Hear Bryan Stevenson's Voice - Saturday Night OT

 

The World Is Bigger Than America So Let’s Imagine the World We Want on Parlez Vous Monday

 

13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, & 19th - and Art - On Parlez Vous Monday

 

Debí Tirar Más Fotos A Day into the Blackest Black History Month on Parlez Vous Monday

 

The Ongoing Sets of Our Favorites – Saturday Night OT & RIP

 

Staying Warm - Saturday Night OT

 

How Many Movies Are We Living In Exactly on Parlez Vous Monday

 

Dr. Stacey Gave Us Our Reading List for Back to School Month - Saturday Night OT

 

Artists to the Front - Saturday Night OT

 

We Got Baroness Haden-Guest and Other Excellent People and Excellent Things – Saturday Night OT

 

Treasure Hunt (Scavenger Hunt?) for the Nice Things - Saturday Nght OT

 

Art Season on Parlez Vous Monday

 

Starting the Week with Art Because Fascists Don’t Want Us To Do It - Parlez Vous Monday

 

Not Yet Where Prof Morrison & Mr. Rickman Would Like Us To Be - Saturday Night OT & RIP Tony Todd

 

L’Histoire Se Répète Ou Répète Non Plus – Appreciating Our Art on This Saturday Night OT

 

VISIBILITY - Sore Arm Privilege & Saturday Night OT

 

H.E.R. is halfway to an EGOT if she gets that Oscar she was nominated for, for her contribution to the Fred Hampton movie, and I don't think she's any older than 23 in earth years.

At the same time, what I'm hoping is that those of us who are a little further along but possibly not quite so outwardly accomplished continue to make active notes of what we're NOT seeing … that nonetheless needs to be there if we're all going to move along towards the path toward a functional democracy instead of letting the recalcitrant drag us back toward autocracy (we'll get to that, because I was truly tweaked at something I saw on social media today – are racist white cops abusing their power extra hard because the breaking of the blue line at the Chauvin trial is giving them hints they might not be able to do that anymore??).

I'm personally relieved because I was privileged to get my second shot today, because I wasn't forgotten, because I didn't have to wait in line for three hours and get turned away because I “didn't have the right documentation”, as happened to a friend not in Florida (Death Santis, UGH) but in Philly – but I stay frustrated hearing SO MUCH about the export of U.S. Vaccine “surplus” overseas when I know for a fact that there are marginalized Americans who've had yet to be able to get their FIRST shots, even as states like Minnesota open up eligibility to every state occupant over 16 years old.

Those people – not the ones who refuse the vaccine when plenty is offered (we'll get to them) – but the ones who want it and are unable to get it – will remain invisible and inaudible unless we, regular citizens and policymakers, see them and give them voice.

In the last two days, I've heard talks about global healthcare (more specifically, the history of colonization in global health and pandemic responses) and DC Statehood (which is not only long overdue, but may be the only way past the two “Democratic” Senators holding up progress on voting rights and infrastructure and instead propping up white supremacy under cover of “bipartisanship” they won't define even as citizens of ALL political affiliations approve of, even appreciate, President Biden's policies and proposals).

What those two otherwise disparate topics have in common is that masses of American citizens will remain purposely disenfranchised – and our so-called “civilization” remains at risk of collapsing thereby – unless we make deliberate purposeful changes in the country's underlying infrastructure.

We can be better than the angry people howling about vaccine passports as
“unfair” that they can't freely travel to countries with their own rules in place to protect their own citizens and do whatever they want including putting those people at risk. We can look out for collective and self at the same time.

That dearth of car dealerships that Republican was ranting about at the last Congressional committee hearing on statehood (I don't even remember which one it was doing the howling, they all sound the same) is hardly a qualifier for statehood -- but even if it were, they're still lying (THEY'RE ALWAYS LYING) -- there's a TESLA dealership at 9th and H NW.

#51In21

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.