The top of this quilt ended too abruptly so I laid out some additional edging. I love that vintage pink floral silk! CapeCod Shibori is the source for the indigo sky, a polyester blouse from the 80’s (I’m guessing) for the grey foreground. Other garments appear as well. There’s batting and backing behind the central rectangle so I’m gonna have to figure out how to even up the layers.
Paris Collage Club prompt flowers with photo of quilt
The squirrel got back in. Two guys came back and found the entry point and you know what? It surprised me. I don’t know what it says about my state of mind but I fully expected them to be baffled and to shrug and walk away, problem unsolved.
The garden needs dirt. Everywhere. Probably because we got so much rain and so little snow last season.
I started PT for my hip today and have my fourth acupuncture appointment on Friday. Goals? To be able to squat and weed the garden and get in and out of the car without wincing. Ditto: up and off the couch.
Tomorrow, SCOTUS will hear the presidential immunity arguments. You know the case. The one they could have heard back in December when Jack Smith appealed directly. The one they could have scheduled a month or more ago. The frivolous argument by trump doesn’t need to have merit because he’s getting what he needs through delay. There simply is no good faith interpretation of the Court’s actions. There just isn’t. It’s sickening.
Today the Court heard discussions of how many organs a woman might have to lose before an ER doctor can provide her health care under Idaho law.
And I wonder why I’m depressed.
Paper collage from months backAnother older paper collagePCC promptOld paper collage
I’m in the bank’s anteroom with Finn while my husband gets a few documents notarized. The branches of the apple tree outside bobble in the wind. It’s a cold wind.
A Black woman comes in for the ATM. She takes out cash. I know this by the number of dings and the shuffling sound of bills. I want to turn to her and say something corny or sympathetic like, “Go Fani Willis, am I right?” But of course I don’t because part of the point is that Black women deserve a little privacy.
The probing, off-base, and ultimately offensive questions about cash at that ridiculous hearing show, commentators said, how little white people know about how Black people move through the world — having cash being a simple and effective way to afford safety in some situations.
Later, TV on. More hearing, more coverage.
How many times does Mika have to say, “She had a right to be angry” before I start to clench my jaw? She and Joe have two hours to fill, but still. And then this: ‘Fani Willis was angry’ — definitive — but ‘the questions seemed offensive’ — conditional.
I hope the Judge shuts this crap down soon. There simply is no there there.
***
P.S. Here’s the guy (below) that started this whole disqualification business. As DA Willis emphatically pointed out, HE’s the one on trial.
* Doing oppo research.
PPS Initially I wondered whether it might be prudent for DA Willis step down rather than jeopardize the entire RICO case. After seeing her, I didn’t think that, not even a little bit.
PPPS Now that Alvin Bragg’s criminal fraud trial has a date, I hyperventilate less about the Georgia case. If re-elected, Trump won’t be able to pardon himself of a conviction in that case either.
This post was gonna have two parts — some history and then personal impressions — but it took so long to put this together, I’ll send personal impressions separately.
Did you know that there were two cancelled marches from Selma prior to the completed, successful one to Montgomery?
Background— January, 1965
“Martin Luther King with SCLC joined SNCC,* the Dallas County Voters League, and other local …activists in a voting rights campaign in Selma where, in spite of repeated registration attempts by local blacks, only two percent were on the voting rolls. SCLC had chosen … Selma because they anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement …would attract national attention and pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to enact new national voting rights legislation.” King Institute at Stanford.
Spoiler alert: it worked.
February, 1965
Alabama state troopers broke up a protest in nearby Marion in February with vicious beatings. One cop shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young church deacon, as he tried to protect his mother from a billy club. He died eight days later (also from King Institute).
March, 1965
The first march attempt, on March 7, was organized in response to the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. However, it didn’t get past the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers advanced against the crowd and brutally beat and gassed them. Cameras were rolling. John Lewis was among the injured.
This violent melee became known as “Bloody Sunday” and was aired on national news.
Governor Wallace used the pretext of preserving safety to deny the protesters all manner of support and a local judge put out a restraining order to prevent the march for a few more days.
As Andrew Young described in the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, since no state or federal support was forthcoming, ‘we sent out the call to people of goodwill.’
That’s when 450 white pastors, nuns, and others committed to social justice arrived from the north.
Rather immediately thugs started harassing them too. On March 7, a group of locals beat the shit out of James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts. Reeb died two days later.
This was galvanizing which was a good thing but it was also controversial since it made people wonder why Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death hadn’t garnered a similar response.
The second march started in spite of the judicial ban and the lack of protection but, probably for both of those reasons, it ended before even crossing the bridge. This was quite a moment. Backed by more than 2,000 protestors, Reverend Martin Luther King stopped and then knelt down to pray. The crowd behind him followed suit. He then stood, turned around, and led people off the bridge and away.
At this point in the PBS Show Bridge to Freedom, I learned that MLK had never before violated a federal order and was reluctant to do so. Also around then, President Johnson was pressuring Governor Wallace to do the right thing. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard.
[Aside: in Ava DuVernay’s powerful telling in Selma, some of the most dramatic moments were the conversations between President Johnson and MLK and the president and Wallace].
March 15
President Johnson addressed Congress with an impassioned speech about the “crippling legacy of bigotry” and called on members to draft voting rights legislation (you know — that landmark law that the Roberts court has been systematically dismantling).
President Johnson’s use of the language of liberation (“we shall overcome”) at the speech’s end was heard loud and clear and cheered by Black citizens.
MLK had been asking and asking for this legislation and Johnson kept putting himoff. The time wasn’t right. He couldn’t do it so soon after the Civil Rights Act, etc. But the shared experience of watching the shameful and shocking violence on national news changed the equation.
[Aside: Think about today, where we don’t watch the same channel, making it hard for a single event to galvanize the nation. A recent exception: the nine minute video of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd].
The day after Johnson’s address to Congress, ‘demonstrators submitted a … march plan to Judge Johnson, who approved the demonstration and enjoined Governor Wallace and local law enforcement from harassing or threatening marchers.’ (the Stanford King Institute).
March 17
Johnson submitted voting rights legislation to Congress.
March 21
On this the third try, the march began and continued all the way to the state capitol, Montgomery. Fifty four miles. Four days. According to the King Institute, by the end there were 25,000 participants.
BTW — you know that iconic image of MLK linked arm in arm at the front of the march, with others wearing suits? That was by design. Credible death threats against King were circulating at the time and so, since ‘they can’t tell us apart’ (Andrew Young interview, Eyes on the Prize), it was decided to dress many of the men out front like the Reverend.
Sources:
The movie Selma by Ava DuVernay (Netflix)
Eyes on the Prize, Season One: The Bridge to Freedom. (you can watch on PBS. Or Prime, I think)
Get it out, the theory has long been. Get it out and you’ll feel better. Rage, sorrow, bitter resentment, or whatever other emotion burbles just below the surface — as if to articulate say, fiery anger, was to put it to rest. But that’s not how it works, is it? At least not every time. Sometimes to spell it out and spell it out out loud lends clarity (think: Audre Lorde saying that ‘anger is loaded with information’). But along with clarity might come a bend in the amplitude, one that offends family, neighbors (if it’s summer and the windows gape open) and sends the dog slinking away to a remote part of the house. How is that helping anyone, including the one with bulging eyes and spittle on her chin?
Some tyranny tiptoes in and robs you of breath just by being silent and unbudgeable. That’s what I married into. I try to think of it as a style, to lesson its defeating force. In the face of such brutal passivity, it’s tempting to view the expulsion of rage as somehow virtuous. But it’s not. Or it’s not necessarily.
Today anticipating more big wind, more torrential rain (one might say the weather is offering its own testimony of outrage), I prepare for fury. Have I ever done this before? Maybe. Maybe the summer the black-robed liars overturned Roe v. Wade and because of a leak, we knew it was coming. (Actually, we knew it was coming listening to feckless Susan Collins’ assessment of Kavanaugh, but skip that lest it sound like bragging, even though every sane consumer of the news knew it was coming).
Let me get right to the point. Why don’t the powers that be care about my outrage? Is it just that our side owns fewer guns?
I prepare a bed to kick and jump on when the Supreme Court of the United States hands down an opinion not worth the paper it’s written on — an expected ruling that, no, Colorado does not have the right to exclude an insurrectionist from the ballot. It’ll be some bullshit about the 14th Amendment, Section 3 not being self-executing or the president not being an “officer.” Or maybe they’ll straight up dish out policy and opine about the importance of uniformity, stability, or whatever, instead of doing their goddamned job which I don’t need to remind you is to interpret and UPHOLD the Constitution.
In not doing their job, the SCOTUS will be signaling that the rage of one set of people, all on the right, matters more than the sanity of the rest of us. The “pitchfork exemption” as Timothy Snyder calls it. To rule in fear of violence means violence wins. Talk about tyranny! No tiptoeing here.
What if I start breathing fire? Climb up a water tower and let loose? Or maybe travel to Maine where some extremist is buying up land and settling in for some siege or other. Who do you think you are?
Meanwhile Justices: Don’t you dare think that ruling there is no absolute presidential immunity (an absurd and ridiculous argument) will get you off the hook on reading the Fourteenth Amendment as it was intended and as it is plainly written.
Originalists and texturalists, my ass!
The rain is expected to fall hard and in volume. The last big wind took out the Internet for three days, offering a revealing lesson about routine and connectivity that might be worth looking at but I’m not willing to do so at the moment.
What is here today, on the page, out the window? Always a worthy question and sometimes all the remedy strong emotion requires. I’ll be hungry later. There will be dog hair to swipe off the floor with the side of my hand, cooked farro to add to soup and reheat. Bath bombs arrived and that means I’ll enjoy a fragrant bath, one with orange-tinted water.
Do I need to lose weight? Yes. Add cardio to my weekly routines? Yes? Eat less sugar, reach out to friends more, read more? Yes, yes, and yes.
Not going there at the moment! This year I’ve landed on two discrete areas of learning — so discrete that I’m confident I can follow through. Are you ready?
Countries in Africa. It’s time I knew them and where they were.
I’ll be printing out this blank map as an aid.
Dog breeds. I don’t know why, I just want to be more conversant in the many types of dogs out there. This week: Brussels Griffon.
What can you commit to in the new year?
Paris Collage Collective collage for this week
We are all, I imagine, spooked about what lies ahead in this pivotal year. When I woke this morning and heard “2024” in my head, I felt a distinct sense of dread. Ugh. Elections. So, in the realm of grounded optimism, I’ll be:
* continuing with my weekly “Seven Sisters” half-hour phone call;
* and with the same friends, continuing to show up for our monthly Healing Circle (with anti-racism focus);
* and writing POSTCARDS TO VOTERS. I topped 1,000 cards this past year (over several years, that is). I plan to write several hundred more in 2024 and to make it less tedious, to host a couple of parties. Sitting with two others at a table of pens and stamps and addresses is actually fun.
For the next little while, by way of annual review I’ll be scrolling through my photos and sharing some of 2023. Here are a couple of screenshots to start.
PS if you get the Boston Globe, be sure to read Dave Barry’s year-in-review in Sunday’s magazine section. He is so, so funny.
