Let me tell you how much I like watermelon. It’s sweet! It’s juicy! I like watermelon doused in lime juice and sprinkled with mint. I like the cool crunch of it, especially as July shoulders into August and the heat gathers its dull fury.
But why so small a domestic rave?
Well, otherwise I might find myself complaining about the relentless, interfering noise in my neighborhood. When I went out to pick the mint, I leaned into the street to see what racket had just begun, thinking it might be the planned driveway installation next door. But no, it was tree work two doors down. That’s usually good for at least three hours. Not long after I clopped my headphones on, the excavator that has been working sporadically across the street for weeks fired up its engine.
And if I weren’t complaining about noise, I’d be feeling some responsibility to articulate my rage and despondency about racism and unwarranted death and policing and gridlock and… and… and… For a while now, I’ve believed that speaking out in clear anger was part of the solution, because, you know, ‘denying racism is a form of racism’. I’m not so sure right now. I’ve hit some sort of wall and silence feels like the better response, or maybe, the only one I’m capable of right now.
It occurs to me: America needs an etiquette for mass shootings. America needs an etiquette for racist murders. Think about that for a minute. “Dear Miss Manners, I can’t seem to wrap my head around the recent spate of race-driven murders — too old to march. Signed, Weary White Woman.”
I liked the woman on FB who said that she ought to be able to “call in black” to work, just to give herself a few hours to grieve or find her own humanity (if you’re on FB, search #callinginblack).
If you haven’t read the recent NY Times article by Charles Blow, I recommend it.
Otherwise, find your cool, crunchy sweets where you can?
I’m going to the basement. It’s cool down there. And quiet. I’ll enjoy my bowl of watermelon standing at the sewing table, with my laptop set up among the pins and scraps.
Then I’ll turn my attention back to mid-eighteenth century, South Carolina. It is strange to feel the permeability of history, which is another way of saying: it’s awful to acknowledge how the hate from those years lives on.
i for one enjoy reading your rants
Thank you. I’d post more of them because I kinda like them too, but they tend to be really personal. And once u start editing a rant, suddenly it loses its fire and spit. I won’t be silent long tho if that’s what you might be thinking!
this is a barely conceived thought, but right now i am totally curious about it. Have
just begun reading
The Body Keeps The Score
brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma
by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
at the suggestion of Maria Popova, Brainpickings
What if, What if we have reached a point in our society at least, maybe the Planet,
of the critical mas of PTSD???????????????????????????
What if that’s what’s going on, and we will have the choice to heal, to truly heal from the cycles of trauma and violence in our society that have been heretofore been held in denial???
We are never too old to march to help save our beautiful broken world, it’s our only home. At the protest marches here in Australia grandparents with walkers & wheelchairs, babies in prams with young parents, uni students & lecturers, workers, the homeless, all caring people who feel that it’s important to care about each other & be kind in the face of corporate greed, ignorance and fear mongering.
Beautiful said Mo and inspiring as always. It is strange to find myself at an age where so much of the rage I felt towards injustice has been tempered now wondering where and how to “walk the talk”. May I quote this message in a post later in the week?
of course you can it’s a conversation!
I have been reading a bit about the real PTSD effects that the atrocities in our news is having on people. Especially POC. How the videos which hold the potential to spark meaningful change are also traumatizing to watch. How people need to learn to set their devices to “optional viewing” of these videos so that they don’t just automatically start playing. Marianne Williamson said recently that America is having a nervous breakdown. And not only that we’re having a nervous breakdown but that we have to have it to get to the place of healing. I don’t know. The PTSD part seems a no brainer. But how to get from here to there runs muddy in my brain. I think of you, grandmother to black children how that shouldn’t change things but does.
I meant to reply reply but the comment ended up further down the thread. Thanks for offering this perspective. It is essentially a hopeful one. And yes; the denial stinks to high heaven.
i don’t know hopeful right now. I remember back in the beginning of this long
friendship with Mo, when she talked about the feather of hope and i responded
that i “don’t do hope”, something like that…i am not particularly hopeful. I feel
neutral at best.
what i’m thinking about, not even thinking, because there is a FLOOD of half thoughts
happening, and with the kids here, there is INTERRUPTION to everything, but but and
but
we have been a species of fighting of wars. From the beginning of us. All the History
of humankind has been about pitting one thing against the other.
in recent history, all the war against the First Peoples first, and the “white” people having come from the same history of war, of Against in their countries of origin. We view
almost everything as a battle, a war, a fight against…..sports teams, the war on drugs,
the fight against cancer, ….sO MUCH…. and maybe we as a species are burning
out from all the stress from the beginning, maybe because the Traumas still are so
alive, we never get to Post Traumatic anything. And maybe we cannot go on anymore
are tired and broken from it even though we don’t even see it that way???????
There’s just SO MUCH in my mind…..
and the book is about the biological things, how stress becomes eaten and digested
into the physiology…how there is so much interest recently in how there is generational
dna to Trauma, we not only have whatever variation we have in our own singlular
present lives, but carry on from our ancestors their experience….IN OUR BODIES.
IN OUR BODIES.
there is also much being looked at about CIVIL DISCOURSE……as you mention here.
which first would ask for a willingness to OPEN to Anything and Everything, to
LISTEN
My family is mongrel. My daughter had children with black men. Her children are
half her, so, 1/4 me. In that original Mix there is English, Scotch, Czechoslovakian,
Latvian Jew to name the ones i know and then on to her mixing in the black, which
i am sure was also not pure but white and then on to Puerto Rican and whatever
else and to Hawaiian and Hispanic
it was funny, because i had to pause and think, reading grandmother to black children and i smiled because i don’t really see them/feel them as that specifically identified….they
are brown, they are mixed. of all of us, my grandson is most “black” because he
chooses to identify that way culturally. The rest of us are just mongrel, we are we.
I remember when Alyssia was maybe 5 and there was something in her kindergarden
about colors of skin and she said she told her teacher that her grandma (me) was
some kind of brown. That only her mother was white.
I think the tendency to think in “us versus them” terms is instinctive. We want to belong in our group and rejecting others is one way we know who we are. It is part of being human. Another part of being human is the ability to transcend our instincts, which is what the present is asking us to do. I think we need to face and admit the satisfaction we feel in making war…the joy of righteousness and the energy of fear…while, or maybe before we can accept everyone (and the earth herself) into our family.