Day 165

If you mentioned Kenosha a month ago, I would have had to look it up on a map. I had never heard of it. If you asked me about it last week, I’d have said, “Oh yeah, that’s where we ate fried cheese curds for lunch and picked up some cheese bread to toast over a campfire.” Now I hear the name and rage runs through me. I detest double standards of all sorts. I hated the fact that my brother was allowed to go into Manhattan alone when he was in high school. I had to wait until college. He is a male. I am not. So different rules applied. And that was mild compared to what we are witnessing in our nation. A 29 year old black man admits to having a knife in his car and a cop shoots him in the back seven times. Seven times because he might have been reaching for the knife. Though the might seems a bit of a stretch. What parent would initiate a fight with cops — a fight they damn well know could result in the death of their kids? Fast forward a couple of nights and a white 17 year old kid walks down a city street armed with a AR-15, kills a few protesters for sport, and the cops let him go home. He was actually holding the weapon. With two dead, we know what his intention was. And no one stopped him. In fact, according to some reports, cops and other officials praised him.

It isn’t enough that 180,000 Americans died from Covid on Trumps’ watch, because he lied, because he undermined science. Now, Trump and his cronies are fanning the flames of civil unrest. They are demonize victims and protestors while encouraging armed white supremacists to take to the streets. I fear that 2021 will bring armed uprisings, or worse. If Trump loses, his supporters won’t sit back quickly. And they are the gun nuts, the men and woman who worship weapons. If Trump wins, he will continue to suppress facts, he will do nothing about police brutality, and race relations will reach a breaking point. 

Today, in between rain storms and helping Mom clean up the debris that littered her property several weeks back, I took my son to Veterans beach. In the car, he processed his own thoughts regarding the events in Kenosha. He started by musing, “America was born with a deformity. It was born hating black people.” Like I taught him, he backed his comment up with facts, discussing slavery and drawing parallels between slave owners whipping their slaves and cops shooting black people. He then commented, “It was all white people who started the nation. Many of them owned slaves. If they weren’t rich, they wouldn’t have had time to care about a new country. But if poor people or black people wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution [the documents] would be different. Sometimes I wonder what they would say if poor people or black people wrote them.” I asked him if he had any idea as to what poor people or black people might have written and he responded, “I don’t know, but if they had a say, I don’t think there would be protests now.”

Later, in the water, unable to let it go, unable to move beyond the information he’s heard on the news and at the dinner table, he said, “I think there should be a memorial for every black person shot or killed by cops. And the memorial should be where they died. Do you remember the memorial of the Boston Tea party. The thing on the ground. That’s what we need. That way no one would forget them. America needs to see how many people were killed.”

On the way home, he had a question, “I don’t understand, why did the white shooter kill white people?” The answer was easy, “Because they were standing up for equality, they were giving their voice to the Black Lives Movement. One even tried to stop him, that’s why he died.” His response to that, “So white people will kill white people if they like black people?” What could I say, but, “Not all white people, but some. This is the America we lived it.” He sighed, and slumped in the back seat. For a moment he was quiet, and then he added, “That wasn’t Martin Luther King’s dream. I think if black kids see white kids on the playground, they should all be able to play together. That’s what Martin Luther King wanted.”

And there you have it, a ten year old’s take on the country Trump and his base think is so great.

On another note, Covid Memorial is trying to raise money for a temporary memorial in Washington D.C. It would project the faces of Covid victims so that the world can see them as something more than a statistic. But in order for the memorial to become a reality, they need money. Here is what I wrote for the Memorial’s Go Fund Me page: 

All too often when discussing COVID, numbers and statistics get tossed around. But when speaking in mathematical terms, the humanity of the devastation is lost. My father, and the thousands of others who have died, were not a number. They were people we loved, our support systems, people we are struggling to live without. This COVID Memorial Project is important because it gives those numbers a face. For those of us mourning, the numbers are irrelevant. The world needs to see the people we have lost, and perhaps taste the void we are experiencing.

If you can afford to do so, please consider donating even a little bit of money. If you can’t, I totally understand. I too am unemployed because of the pandemic. But maybe you could share the link on your facebook page. Thank you! 

https://gf.me/u/ytmjr8

Now that I am home, I’ve had time to work on my Empty Bench Series. I took hundreds of pictures while on the road trip, but so far, the only ones I’ve opened in Photoshop are the benches. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with them. I wish I knew a place to submit the series. Maybe I’ll turn them into photo essays — Conversations with Dad I’ll Never Have — though I wonder if that would quickly become redundant and boring.