The struggle continues

I’d like to believe, as MLK said, that the arc of the universe, though long, bends towards justice.

I’m currently reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States’ and it makes me feel like the bad guys win more than the good guys. I am white. I benefit from it. I live on land that was stolen. Blood land. But I don’t see that struggle or any others before or since as white vs people of color. We each choose our side. We decide whether we will fight for, quite simply, good or evil. Those are the teams.

I hope it bends towards justice, all I know is that history repeats itself. But as Vince Lombardi would have said, as long as time hasn’t run out, then our side hasn’t lost.

An old friend of the family, a political activist her whole life, but in NYC asked me about Stacey Abrams chances, here where I live, in Georgia.

I told her that if there weren’t voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would have won the last time. More recently, we elected two democratic senators, but since then the new voter suppression law has passed and this sort of thing has been going on not just in the south but in every swing state, north or south, for decades, and not enough people have taken notice until now. I hope its not too late. So, Stacey’s chances would be good, if the election isn’t stolen which it might be. But she leads that fight, and at the very least she will shine a light on it.

I’ve thought for years that eventually we would overwhelm the suppression with enough votes and by the time we were in charge, Democrats would have a super majority. But it’s now clear that Republicans see the writing on the wall and are willing to do almost anything to maintain power, including a coup. And if they have enough support among the merciless types that have darkened much of this country’s history, it could be violent and it won’t be easy to stop.

So, it is war, I told her. A war of ideas, and hopefully not a real war, but not so different from the challenges every generation faces. If the arc is to bend towards justice, this is one of those times that we have to fight to push it there.

And (I hope), we will.

I can do this

I can keep a journal and a blog of whatever is on my mind on any given day. I can do it. Maybe some days I’ll be exposed as a fraud, or a baby, or a woose (these are my biggest fears), but other days it will be good, looking back on it many years later. At the time, I might not be able to tell the difference.

Will I be honest? Why shouldn’t I be? What could I possibly admit that would make me seem so different from who I was before I admitted it? We are the same before and after our drivers license expires (though one time a friend of mine couldn’t use his license at an airport as identification because it had expired).

It is a new year.

We all know that people don’t keep resolutions. It’s become trendy to resist resolutions, because they don’t get kept, so why try?

Because. I’m going to see what happens. The point is not to keep them, the point is to try.

I don’t publicize mine, because I don’t want to be “held accountable.” I’ll fail, if I feel like it. I’ll change my resolutions, or do something other than what I said, and I’ll add more as I go.

Writing wasn’t one of the originals. But, what’s stopping me from writing again? It’s the perfect time, because I’m not watching TV (a resolution), so I have to find something else to do besides reading and yoga and playing the drums.

So, I read a book. It doesn’t matter which one, just that I read it. I pushed through. It was work. This book was well researched, thorough but really really detailed. At times I told my wife that I really didn’t like it and she would say, “why are you still reading that book you don’t like.”

“It has it’s moments,” I said once. And anyway, all books take effort, if I quit because it was hard to read, I wouldn’t read anything. It was, in fact, a very interesting story.