It is NOT Saturday
Posted By Kathleen David on May 29, 2020
Day 3 of the Reopening Epic or Friday May 29, 2020.
I have to keep telling myself that it is NOT SATURDAY because my mind is stuck on it being Saturday.
I rarely talk about anything close to political here. But what has been happening this week has been going round and round in my brain. I am putting it under a cut so if you don’t want to read it, you can skip to tomorrow where I will be back to my usual fare.
Peter knows and worked with Christopher Cooper at Marvel when Mr. Cooper was there. He was an avid birdwatcher back then. So that one was a bit more personal to us.
The death of George Floyd is a tragedy. As we are learning about the officers involved, I am baffled why the officer on his neck had not been drummed out of the force.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg
A CNN reporter was arrested, not mirandized, and not charged while covering the riots. This was on a live feed so they have a record of what happened. And the person of color was arrested as the white reporter was not touched.
A friend of mine works for the ACLU and lives in Minneapolis. He went down to observe what was going on and record things. He is shell shocked at what he saw.
I have been thinking about this a lot after the video of Ahmaud Arbery surfaced. That it took that long to get a response on this was criminal. How he was killed was criminal and racist.
I had a friend J J who was a camera man in the south. J J was a good man who I spent a lot of time with at conventions. He told me about driving while black especially when his work took him into white neighborhoods. About stop and frisk and officers addressing him as boy when he was a grown ášš man. About how carefully he had to act to make himself look harmless to the white folk. Those conversations had a profound effect on me, and I have carried what he told me close to my heart.
This is what I wrote on my facebook page today
The sad thing is that racism is not on the increase. It has been around the US. What is happening is the recording of the acts that use to be easy to cover up. Good peoples’ words did not hold the weight they should. Video showing the actions and that they cannot get away from. The Internet lets these heinous moments to be shown to the world and not hidden or ‘lost’.
Being able to show people what is really going on is a powerful tool. There are a number of hate crimes that would have been swept under the rug with the usual excuses and changing the narrative to the victim being the criminal.
What I hope comes out of this is true change rather than the usual words to placate people and the promise of a small change.
As a whole our police force is honorable and want to help the communities they are assigning. But like all large organizations, there are bad apples that besmirch the honor of the whole.
Also, it does seem that property is more important than people in all this.
Which brings us back to the virus and the mask debate that should not be a debate at all. Masks give us a fighting chance to get our social lives started again.
I am grateful for what JJ told me so long ago.
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