Day 364…
Both Michael and I have spent a sizeable amount of time this past year searching for things that we’ve lost.
I’m not talking about anything on an existential level like our reasons for being, the spark that drives us forward or the actions that we used to think defined who we were, I’m talking about actual objects in our apartment.
This morning, Michael lost his mug.
He spent a solid minute searching for it. He had just poured himself some fresh coffee. It’s not as if he left it somewhere last night. He had just had it in his hand.
Last night I lost a glass of wine.
Once I finally found it on the sideboard in the front hall, I could then piece together how it got there. I had started cleaning up the coffee table and I went to put some used empty envelopes into our recycling bag by the front door. When I got there, two other bags of stuff had fallen over so I set down the wine and picked everything up. Once it had all been put back together, I put on a mask and took a lot of it down to the basement to get rid of it. When I got back, I went back to the couch, plopped down and reached for my glass of wine and it wasn’t there.
“Where is my glass of wine?”
“I didn’t take it. Where did you have it?”
“Right here.”
My phone has been irretrievably lost inside this one-bedroom apartment this past year more times than I can count. Its case is similar in color to both the couch and the cat. Once or twice, after searching high and low, I have found it under the sleeping cat, but out of the hundred times that I’ve lost it, that has only really ever happened twice. Regardless, if the cat is sleeping on the bed or the couch, he is always my first stop.
Before this year, losing my phone would immediately make me worry that I had left it backstage at a theatre or that maybe it had fallen out of my pocket while I was watching a show. I would immediately launch into the worst-case scenario involving buying a new phone and getting it operational in time to get to work the next day. These days, I KNOW it’s in the apartment and that makes losing it all the worse.
The trial of Derek Chauvin, the ex-Police officer from Minneapolis who is the person who was kneeling on George Floyd’s neck as he died, is underway. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
The fear is that though the possibility of justice being served is being dangled in front of us, that the system behind that justice is so corrupted by systemic racism that, somehow, he will get away with it.
For Derek Chauvin to be convicted, the jury, who is being selected now, is going to have to be convinced that he broke the law. We can look at the video of what happened and say that he’s obviously guilty of killing George Floyd. Why is this even a question? Given existing laws and police department practices, though, did he? Is he legally guilty of overreach?
The jurors being chosen this morning will be tasked with deciding Chauvin’s guilt or innocence based purely on the existing laws and not upon what is actually morally right or wrong. The pressure on this jury, however, is going to be the almost certain wave of protests that are going to erupt again if Chauvin is acquitted - no matter how “legal” that decision might be.
Republicans in Georgia are passing laws specifically designed to restrict voters of color from casting their ballots. After a much larger Democratic turnout in the Senate run-off election resulted in Republicans not only losing the two seats but also losing their majority in the Senate, Republicans are trying to ensure that it will not happen again.
They aren’t going to work to get elected based upon any push to pass new and better legislation that might help their constituents. Instead, they are going to try and get elected again by just doing everything that they can to keep those who voted against them from doing so in the future.
What they are doing is morally reprehensible, but under existing laws, is absolutely legal.
On Monday, they approved a bill that repeals no-excuse absentee voting. 1.3 million Georgia voters used that during this past election - including 450,000 Republicans - to vote by mail. Last week, they passed a bill that cuts weekend voting days. “Souls to the Polls” was a popular way for Black churches to get their parishioners out to vote following Sunday services. They are now going to restrict the use of drop boxes and no longer allow non-profits to donate to community centers that help to get voters to the polling sites. It will even no longer be legal in Georgia to hand out food and water to people waiting on long lines to vote.
None of this legislation is constructive. None of it helps anybody except for career Republicans, themselves, who want to stay in office. This kind of self-serving restrictive law-making is proof that our legal system is rotting from within.
Jim Crow was a well-known character in Minstrel shows whose name became synonymous with a whole series of vile legislation. Directly following the end of the Civil War, white legislators started passing laws to keep the newly emancipated enslaved population from ever gaining any power. African Americans were kept from voting, attending schools, or working in some jobs that Whites wanted to keep for themselves.
The most egregious and visible of these laws were overturned during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, but much of it was allowed to continue. As obvious as the new Georgia laws are in terms of them targeting voters of color, the laws surrounding the events that led to George Floyd’s death in Minnesota are just as clearly biased.
This so-called fair trial is already weighted heavily in the defendant’s favor. Centuries of racial discrimination will be standing there beside him throughout the entire trial.
It will likely take concentrated outrage at Chauvin being let off to galvanize people into changing laws. George Floyd’s death already occasioned some change. Let’s see if the justice that he’s due will do even more.
Stacey Plaskett, the Congressional Representative from the US Virgin Islands just ripped into a fellow Republican on the floor during the debate on the stimulus. The Republican had the gall to suggest that people of color do not create typical families.
Representative Plaskett who was so incredible during the impeachment trial was not having a word of it. Her eloquent and passionate response is exactly what we need to fight all of this.
When they go low, we go high does not mean rolling over and accepting anything. It means that we fight back with everything we’ve got using intelligence and trusting in the power of the people. There are more of us that there are of them.
Last week, Republicans in the Senate united against the stimulus bill despite the fact that 60% of all Republican voters want it to pass. These Republicans are not representing their people. What would happen if they did?
Our ex-President demonstrably has no moral compass whatsoever.
He geared everything that he did towards a specific group of followers and turned everybody else against him. Nothing he did was ever out of any moral conviction, so I’ve always wondered why he didn’t just do what the majority of Americans wanted him to do? For a man who so desperately wants to be approved of, he could have gained approval from the majority of Americans fairly easily.
He said from the beginning that if he ever ran for President that he would run as a Republican because they were too stupid to know any better. He could shoot somebody in the middle of the city, and nobody would care.
He was right, the people who voted for him didn’t care. But there are fewer of those people than there are of the rest of us. There are plenty of Republican voters who would have welcomed him doing the right thing. Especially because he really doesn’t seem to care one way or another, why not actually try and appeal to a majority of us and not just a truly deplorable minority. He could have been popular.
I’ll speak for myself, but one of the things that I think that I lost this year was my political innocence. I knew that things that were happening were bad, but my sense of those things was far more general than it is now.
Having the time to really take in what was being fought for during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and during the national elections last year filled in the details of a picture that before this year was really, for me, just different washes of color.
I would never sell myself as an expert, in fact one of the things I have discovered this year is how much more I really need to learn. Like any student, though, I know more now than I did then.
Once shown how complex, inter-woven and, yes, rotten much of what rules us really is, I find that I can’t unsee it. I cannot look at a news story without it bringing up all sorts of other questions.
The Meghan and Harry story is a corporate battle that is directly connected to George Floyd through its roots in systemic racism. At its heart we are watching how a company, in this case the monarchy, is forced to look at who it is and how it functions in what seems to be the dawning of a new era of awareness.
Business as usual cannot just continue. That’s as true in Buckingham Palace as it is here. The Republican lawmakers in Georgia are doing everything that they can to try to make sure that that business as usual continues. Derek Chauvin’s defenders want that too. The British Crown wants it.
Change is painful, and difficult and not everybody can do it. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do everything that we can to try and help to bring it about.
We can’t unsee what we have all seen this past year and nor should we be trying to. Instead, we should be doing everything that we can to take the lessons of this year and turn what we have into something better.
The power to do that lies within every single one of us.
And I’m going to get right on that as soon as I find my phone.
It was right here because I know I used it to look up how to spell Stacey Plaskett’s name.
Then… I got up to get some more coffee…
great thoughts, thank you! Will be checking in when I get Wifi in Ireland where I am going for an undetermined time to care for my 94 yr old mother now with dementia. Hope to find your posts there--it will give me connection to home!
❤️Eleanora Duse has a beautiful quote
something like “ We all have the power within us, Few of us choose to use it”...I get the exact wording...I agree, we can stand up for what is right. That is something I learned, this year especially/ when I had to listen to my instincts and not be made deaf and numb to myself by the barrage of lies & manipulations.
I can stand up now, I tapped into a real strength and truth. And the courage to follow through and support that truth around me. This year of an epidemic gave me a strength I never knew I had. Now I can help