A terse history of my life so far.
Ten Years Since Trayvon
NYT had a great article published this week, Ten Years Since Trayvon, and it’s wild to look at the past 10 years and see what really soured any progress that could have happened. The day George Zimmerman was acquitted was the end of a very brief moment in which I gave America the benefit of the doubt. Six days later, Barack Obama, the man responsible for that temporary suspension of disbelief, gave a speech that drove home for me how foolish I had been. The president acknowledged the pain many of us felt, but, ever the peddler of hope, he stressed that “as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better.” I didn’t believe it when he said it, and it sounds even sillier to me now so many years later. Michael Arceneaux on The Day I Quit Believing If there’s one thing I’m decidedly not full of for the future of our country or species, it’s hope. What… Continue reading Ten Years Since Trayvon
The Audacity
Twitter, after summarily destroying society as we know it by allowing their platform to be the bully pulpit of a Nazi-sympathizing, twice-impeached, racist, misogynistic idiot blowhard, is going to be rolling out a paid subscription to their service. I’d be more than okay with this if they separated their service into paid and unpaid and… Continue reading The Audacity
Intention
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. Douglas Adams
The Best and Worst of One Year of Quarantine
One year into a global health crisis, I sat down to think about the best and worst things about the past year in trying to continue living normally.
How it’s going…
It feels like the last thing that happened was the election, followed by the massive rejection of the election results, followed by Christmas, New Year’s, and an frenzied assault on the Capitol. Oh, and despite all our efforts to be safe when going out, we managed to catch COVID.
Walk It Back
We’ve all seen them, starting around the middle of 2016 and slowly growing, at least around here in the middle of rural Pennsylvania. Those red hats. The large hand-painted Trump signs on the side of the highway. And those jacked-up coal-rolling trucks with like 8 flags bolted to the tailgate. And you think to yourself, how is this a thing?
Vote
Everyone’s been saying the same thing. I’ve never seen a year like this. I’ve never seen the country so divided. This is so weird and stressful and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Final Command
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command… and if all others accepted the lie, which the party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. George Orwell, 1984
Blue
Zoom.
You know, I think people are clinging to the idea that they can simply continue to work and block out all the shit that’s swirling around us daily. I think they want to forget about the pandemic, the systematic racial violence, the people who can’t go to work because they had to close or their… Continue reading Zoom.