Moon Garden: 6/11/2015
It’s difficult not to talk about current events this week. I am so blessed to have sanctuary. I am so angry that is a blessing and not an assumed thing that all people have access to. It feels insincere to talk about anything else, so I’m going to post links to articles about recent events written by people who are far better writers than me.
In solidarity. ❤
Pink Volunteer…Name that flower?
But at some point, my son is going to have to understand, and I will have to explain these things to him, again and again and again. There’s a five year old, right now, who just had to play dead to survive on the instructions of her grandmother. Who is explaining this to her? How is she going to make sense of this.
http://fusion.net/story/152991/the-9-heartbreaks-of-the-charleston-shooting/
Hello, Sunflower!
All of these examples are not signs of individual mental illness. From South Africa to the United States, symbols celebrating segregation, assassinations of black community leaders, mass violence and the desecration of sacred spaces for black people are the historical tools of black suppression. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that this massacre occurred in a state that flies the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of white supremacy, at its state house. These symbols and tactics remain in our national conscience, passing on from generation to generation, like a sinister genetic code in America’s DNA.
As long as society refuses to confront this legacy of the ugly sin of racism today, we cannot depend on tomorrow’s generations to come to our rescue.
Wildflowers at Walnut Creek Park
In 1968, in my hometown of Orangeburg, SC, just down the road from Charleston, 3 black men were killed and at least 28 injured when state troopers gunned them down at a protest. A local leader I quoted in a book I wrote about the Orangeburg Massacre noted, “blacks in America have lived with terrorism…for centuries.”
The chicks! (l-r: Lion, Skunk, Bear, Panther, Chef Vordevask, and in the upper right corner, being her usual loner self, Plovatro a.k.a. Hawk)
I’m not saying that it is up to White Saviors to rescue black people. The #Blacklivesmatter movement has produced a number of powerful leaders — and not just famous ones like Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie. In Baltimore, where I now live, I watched as cousins and neighbors of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old who was killed by police, grew into leaders of an organic neighborhood movement, which is still struggling to improve the community. But it is up to white people to rescue white people from our own worst selves, from the distorted monsters we have allowed ourselves to become. It is time to stop making excuses. We have to stop hiding from the truth of race — that this country, and the state of South Carolina in particular, were created on the idea of white supremacy. We’ll never overcome that history unless we acknowledge it.
We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America.
Take down the flag. Take it down now.
Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.
Moon Garden: 6/19/15
White America: No more of your nonsense. This massacre occurred because of your maintenance of White supremacy and all of your hands are bloody.
UnrulyMom.Com 