The Killing Fields (Rosanne Cash)

A bit of justice, finally... 💙

From today's NYT newsletter:

"The murder conviction of a police officer is an exceedingly rare event.

There have been only seven murder convictions of officers for fatal police shootings since 2005, according to Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University. That suggests the chances of a killing by the police leading to a murder conviction are about one in 2,000.

Yet a jury in Minneapolis yesterday convicted Derek Chauvin of second-degree murder (as well as two other charges) for killing George Floyd last May. A typical sentence for that felony in Minneapolis is 12½ years in prison, although prosecutors have asked for more and the maximum is 40 years. A judge will sentence Chauvin in about eight weeks."

NR:  Priestdaddy:  A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood

SONG:  The Killing Fields by Rosanne Cash

BOOK:  Chokehold: Policing Black Men by Paul Butler

POEM:  Ode to the Cameraman by Alora Young

This is an ode to the cameraman

for the poet

and the pastor

and the speeches that redefine legacies.

It’s the lens that takes history and makes it art,

the art that makes wrong into revolution.

The gun the knee

we can never unsee       the bodies

of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

—To Emmett Till

to all the faces painted on every memory.

We were wrong.

This revolution is live in living color.

We are dying in HD.

I had a dream that our lives went viral

and that Twitter somehow set us free.

The last four years

have been etched into the flesh of progress

like

a

B u r n i n g

cross.

I can’t help but reminisce

about all the moments that Martin lost—

you see martyrs,

those who die for a cause,

we don’t often think about their families.

His legacy is infinite,

but I’m sure Bernice must just miss her daddy.

Every black man who dies in the street

lies on top of the last

four hundred years of combat.

Call me a hysteric

or a heretic,

but all I know is I want my God back. My God.

Not the one who stands

hand and hand with MAGA malice,

who they say wants us to stop counting ballots

to keep this new age toupeed Nero in an all white palace.

The only way out of the belly of this beast

Is       Through.

We keep marching towards a freedom, but freedom’s a concept

… I don’t get where we’re marching to.

This is an ode to the men who know how to win a war,

to the men who take martyrs and make movements human—

it’s funny how 2020 looks just like 1965.

I wonder what wisdom Martin would give me if he were still alive,

if peace is still the best option,

if we are headed towards his vision,

… are we going fast enough to stop them?

This war is televised.

These cameras have put the truth before our nation’s eyes.

My father taught me that God lies in the darkness as well.

The plans of a holy man are often impossible for even him to find.

We can never know the future God has woven

inside of Martin’s mind,

but as we wander blind

toward tomorrow

know that there is more in heaven than the roadmap.

This is not a poem, it’s a playbook.

It’s laid out in 24 frames—look:

the same stage has made the difference on every battlefield,

because the camera I swear is the weapon victors wield.

These men have made God a tool of their war—

I ask you to tell me was he not used as such before?

It’s more than shooting or violence—

progress moves in a silence—

that makes it so we can’t shake the feeling that change is made to come.

In this non-poem lies the markers on our map to freedom,

because I’ve shown you where we’ve come from.

Martin made change not because he was made changed,

but because the same stage holds the ghost

of all its past plays,

seeing the future is much the same as seeing the past,

because

my God

has made the answers,

long before we’ve asked.

The camera is the difference between

Armies of Radicals and Protests Sabbaticals

Whether X’s are Kisses

^ or Graves

Whether we were kings

^or slaves

Martin’s method of protest

made true progress because the script was just too hard to flip.

In God, he found the processes he made sure that we didn’t slip.

Peaceful seats at counter sides

do no wrong in cameras’ eyes

that’s why he changed so many minds:

he changed a narrative.

The first mission of Trump’s modern fascism

is to lose the “fake news”

he likes multi-takes with camera crews

making merch for propaganda crews

so the people will abandon who

actually has their best interest at heart.

I dare to say a narrative is what split this country apart.

When you want to change the world,

first, change a child’s mind.

Martin preached a life in words that had a joy like children find.

When you start on this next battle call a cameraman

because war is in

the people’s minds.

Kingdoms rise and fall, but the camera sees it all.

Memories live past the trials that decide the truth of abuses,

and the phantoms that live in the call.

The first time you see change

I promise

is never the beginning.

Because for eras before the prophets of yore

had minds that had long been spinning.

God gifts the words for the battle-winning narrative.

Prophets just sing along.

That’s why in the streets people scream

I have a dream

that’s Gods music—

we’re just singing along.

We have our actors and our cameramen,

we have God’s script and our stage

turn

on the lights

send the artists and wrights

and hope our revolution makes

the Front Page.

[Alora Young, 1/26/21: “With the combination of the Martin Luther King holiday and the inauguration, last week has been monumental for our country. We have survived a year of division, we have survived a year of revolution, and when I saw the photographs in this NPR article, I realized something. We aren’t fighting a war with fist anymore. We are fighting a war with cameras. We are fighting a war with art. And I feel that now we understand this we can win the struggle for a kinder world.”]

QUOTE:  “True justice requires that we come to terms with the fact that Black Americans are treated differently, every day...  And it requires us to do the sometimes thankless, often difficult, but always necessary work of making the America we know more like the America we believe in.” ~ Barack Obama

I Can't Breathe (H.E.R.)

The jurors have begun deliberating in the George Floyd trial.  In closing statements, the prosecution urged jurors: “Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw.”

From today's NYT newsletter:

"Since George Floyd’s death last May, dozens of states and local governments have changed their laws about police behavior. And yet police officers continue to kill about three Americans each day on average, nearly identical to the rate of police killings for as long as statistics exist.

Which raises the question: Are the latest efforts to change policing — to make it less violent, especially for Black and Latino Americans — destined to fail?

Not necessarily, many experts say. They believe the recent changes are meaningful. They will probably fall well short of solving the country’s problem with needlessly violent police behavior. But the changes still appear to be substantial, even if they will take some time to have a noticeable effect.

“You actually can get a lot of common ground between police critics and police themselves,” Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and former reserve police officer in Washington, told us. “There are plenty of places where those conversations seem to be occurring in a preliminary way.”

That common ground extends to public opinion. Most Americans disagree with sweeping criticisms of the police, like the calls to abolish police departments. (Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, wrote last week on Twitter: “No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”) Recent polls show that most Americans say they generally trust the police, and few if any mayors, governors, congressional leaders or top members of the Biden administration share Tlaib’s view.

But many politicians and most voters do favor changes to policing, like banning chokeholds and racial profiling or mandating police body cameras. “Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — want some sort of reform,” Alex Samuels of FiveThirtyEight wrote.

The recent policy changes fit into two main categories. The first is a set of limits on the use of force. Sixteen states have restricted the use of so-called neck restraints, like Derek Chauvin’s use of his knee on Floyd’s neck. And 21 additional cities now require officers to intervene when they think another officer is using excessive force.

The changes have mostly been in Democratic-leaning states, but not entirely: Kentucky has limited no-knock warrants, which played a role in Breonna Taylor’s death, while Indiana, Iowa and Utah have restricted neck restraints. (Republican legislators in some states are pushing bills that go in the other direction, by strengthening penalties for people who injure officers, for instance, or by preventing cities from cutting police budgets.)

The second category involves police accountability. Several states have mandated the use of body cameras. Colorado, New Mexico, Massachusetts and Connecticut have made it easier for citizens to sue police officers, as has New York City.

In Maryland, David Moon, a state legislator, said that the recent changes were “just light-years beyond” those enacted after Freddie Gray died in the custody of Baltimore police six years ago. The new laws “basically blew up the old system and tried to create a new structure for discipline,” Moon told The Washington Post.

One significant part of the policy changes: States are enacting them, forcing local police departments to abide by them. “States had given great leeway to local jurisdictions to decide how to police themselves,” The Times’s Michael Keller told us. “Now, states are starting to take more control.”

It’s too early to know whether all of the attention on policing after Floyd’s death will amount to widespread changes. “Police organizations have an amazing ability to resist change when there’s no real buy-in from the rank and file,” Brooks said. But there does seem to be a greater recognition of what policing has in common with virtually every other human endeavor: It works better when it includes clear standards and outside accountability.

“What we’ve seen since George Floyd’s death — and really since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 — is a widespread acknowledgment that law enforcement needs new rules and policies,” my colleague John Eligon, who has covered policing extensively, said. “But there is still a great frustration among many activists and community members I talk to who say that the changes do not go nearly far enough.”

He added: “They see tinkering around the edges that does not really change the culture of police departments or solve the big problem: that police in America are still killing people every day.”

SONG:  I Can't Breathe by H.E.R.

BOOK:  'I Can't Breathe' The Cities Cry Echoing George Floyd's Final Words by Kadesha Henry

POEM(S):  Why I don’t write about George Floyd by Toi Derricotte

Because there is too much to say

Because I have nothing to say

Because I don’t know what to say

Because everything has been said

Because it hurts too much to say

What can I say what can I say

Something is stuck in my throat

Something is stuck like an apple

Something is stuck like a knife

Something is stuffed like a foot

Something is stuffed like a body

Poem with an Ear Pressed to the Ground by Kindra McDonald

That it would come down

to the science of breathing

how the lungs receive oxygen

how a pulse becomes stilled

that it would come down

to the compression of an airway

somewhere between the diameter

of a quarter and a dime

shallow breaths the equivalent

of surgical removal of the left lung

trying to breathe with fingers and knuckles

under the force of 90 pounds of pressure

like sipping air through a drinking straw

that it would come down to 12 peers

in chairs palpating their own throats

to feel the pulse beneath their probing

fingers, the tender skin indent

the metric beat of pumping blood

an ear pressed to the ground

prone and pleading

all of us needing the one

who we all came from

who held her breath

spent and waiting

for a newborn to cry

to breathe with life.

[Kindra McDonald: “So much of this last year has been about breath and breathing. The transmission of an unseen virus, the breath of contagion, the respirators and intubations of packed ICU patients, but amidst all of that a reel of “I can’t breathe.” Three words that have for too long been linked to violent restraint. As the Chauvin murder trail in the death of George Floyd plays out, I’ve been struck by the breath we all share. The image of the jurors feeling their necks for the airway that was obstructed has haunted me and this poem is that ghost.”]

QUOTE:  "We need to statutize what is permissible and what is not permissible. If a law enforcement agent uses a clearly unapproved technique like the knee that was on the neck of George Floyd for over eight minutes, no law enforcement agent thinks that that's right and that officer should be held accountable." ~ Cal Cunningham

$20 Bill - for George Floyd (Tom Prasada-Rao)

As you may recall, I am not on Facebook anymore, so I am dependent on others to alert me to concerts and music-related items generating from that medium.  Yesterday a friend posted to our local sf_folk (South Florida) list that musician friends were covering a new song by *another* musician friend... and I hadn't even heard about the original yet!

Tom Prasada-Rao is a gifted songwriter, a spiritual guru, and a brave soul who experienced a tough battle with cancer last year, and continues treatment, even during this pandemic.  I am grateful to consider TPR a friend, and of course had to delve into this cool phenomenon.  Here is but an overview of those who have passed his powerful song along the pipeline:  Mary Gauthier, Ellis Paul, Margo Hennebach & Mark Saunders, Karl Werne, and so many more.  The lyrics are included in the song link, but I am reprinting them below because they deserve repeating... 💙

Some people die for honor
Some people die for love
Some people die while singing
To the heavens above 
Some people die believing
In the cross on Calvarys’ hill 
And some people die
In the blink of an eye
For a $20 bill

Some people go out in glory
(Yeah) with the wind at their back
Some get to tell their own story
Write their own epitaph
Sometimes you see it coming 
Sometimes you don’t know until
You run out of breath
With a knee on your neck
For a $20 bill

Brother, I never knew you 
And now I never will 
But I make this promise to you
I’ll remember you still

Take, eat - let this be our communion
It’s time to break the bread
Do this in remembrance 
Just like the good book said
Sometimes the wine is a sacrament 
Sometimes the blood is just spilled
Sometimes the law
Is the devils’ last straw
The future unfulfilled
Like the dream they killed
For a $20 bill

by Tom Prasada-Rao 5/28/20 Silver Spring MD

Also, referencing the history of my graphic above, this... yet one more example of this adminstration's racism.


SONG:  $20 Bill (for George Floyd) by Tom Prasada-Rao (Tom's voice is whisper-like while he's speaking, but when he begins singing, at about the one-minute mark, you can hear him clearly...  :-)

BOOK:  Hands Up, Don’t Shoot by Jennifer E. Cobbina

POEM:  truth by Gwendolyn Brooks

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

QUOTE:  "There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.  We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in." ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I'm On Your Side (Michael Franti & Spearhead)

[Finally!  June 3, 2020 update:  Attorney General Keith Ellison upgrade charges against officer who knelt on George Floyd's neck; charged other 3 involved:  The charges come just days after Gov. Tim Walz asked Ellison to take over the prosecution.]

8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody:
The Times has reconstructed the death of George Floyd on May 25. Security footage, witness videos and official documents show how a series of actions by officers turned fatal.


My sister Mari initiated a thoughtful conversation, via text, with me and my daughter Sarah a few days ago, which allowed me to state my feelings on the George Floyd situation in particular, and racism in general.  I disagree with the vandalism, arson, and looting but, to quote Leonard (below), "Enough!".  If this is what it takes to be heard, I understand.  It is crazy that we live in a world in which Jogging While Black and Driving While Black and even Breathing While Black are reasons for murder, by police or anyone else. I can't fathom why people are more outraged by the destruction of property than they are by the senseless killings of People of Color, for decades... centuries.

Why are blacks’ anguished cries of “Enough!” never enough to stop the brutality? | Opinion by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

My new favorite word, as used in Leonard's column:
quiescent [ kwee-es-uhnt, kwahy- ]
adjective
being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless:
a quiescent mind.


It is a matter of being aware of the injustice in the world, and how we, from our entitled place, can help but never truly empathize.  I felt helpless as well as enraged watching that video.  thankyoujesus for cell phones recording the truth.  At this point the officers have been charged, and we will wait to see if they are convicted (as many are not).


And, from Glennon Doyle's recently-published book Untamed, p. 206-210 (thanks to my daughter Sarah for reminding me of these passages):

"  “No, listen—this feels to me like we’ve hit rock bottom! Maybe that means we’re finally ready for the steps. Maybe we’ll admit that our country has become unmanageable. Maybe we’ll take a moral inventory and face our open family secret: that this nation—founded upon ‘liberty and justice for all’—was built while murdering, enslaving, raping, and subjugating millions. Maybe we’ll admit that liberty and justice for all has always meant liberty for white straight wealthy men. Then maybe we’ll gather the entire family at the table—the women and the gay and black and brown folks and those in power—so that we can begin the long, hard work of making amends. I’ve seen this process heal people and families. Maybe our nation can heal this way, too.”

   I was adamant and righteous. But I’d forgotten that sick systems are made up of sick people. People like me. In order to get healthy, everybody has to stay in the room and turn themselves inside out. No family recovers until each member recovers. 

       Soon after that conversation with my friend, I sat on my family room couch and patted a spot to my left and one to my right. I said to my daughters, “Come here, girls.” They sat down and looked up at me. I told them that while they were asleep, a man who was white had walked into a church and shot and killed nine people who were black.

   Then I told my daughters about a black boy their brother’s age, who was walking home and was chased down and murdered. I told them that the killer said he thought the boy had a gun, but what the boy really had was a bag of Skittles. Amma said, “Why did that man think Trayvon’s candy was a gun?” I said, “I don’t think he really did. I think he just needed an excuse to kill.”

   We sat with all of this for a while. They asked more questions. I did my best. Then I decided that we had talked about villains for long enough. We needed to talk about heroes.

   I went to my office to find a particular book. I pulled it down from the shelf, came back to the couch, and sat between them again. I opened the book, and we read about Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, and Daisy Bates. We looked at pictures of civil rights marches, and we talked about why people march. “Someone once said that marching is praying with your feet,” I told them.

   Amma pointed to a white woman holding a sign, marching in a sea of black and brown people. Her eyes popped and she said, “Mama, look! Would we have been marching with them? Like her?”

   I fixed my mouth to say, “Of course. Of course we would have, baby.”

   But before I could say it, Tish said, “No, Amma. We wouldn’t have been marching with them back then. I mean, we’re not marching now.”

       I stared at my girls as they looked up at me. I thought of my dad in that therapist’s office all those years ago. It was as if my girls had turned to me and asked, “Mama, how do you imagine we might be inadvertently contributing to our country’s sickness?”

   A week later, I was reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, famous essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and I came across this:

       "I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.”

   This was the first time I had encountered language that defined the kind of person I was in the world. I was a white person who imagined herself to be on the side of civil rights, because I was a good person who strongly believed in equality as the right idea. But the white woman Amma had pointed to in that photograph wasn’t staying home and believing. She was showing up. When I looked at her face, she didn’t look nice at all. She looked radical. Angry. Brave. Afraid. Tired. Passionate. Resolute. Regal. And a little bit scary.

   I imagined myself to be the kind of white person who would have stood with Dr. King because I respect him now. Close to 90 percent of white Americans approve of Dr. King today. Yet while he was alive and demanding change, only about 30 percent approved of him—the same rate of white Americans who approve of Colin Kaepernick today.

       So, if I want to know how I’d have felt about Dr. King back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about him now; instead I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Kaepernick now? If I want to know how I’d have felt about the Freedom Riders back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about them now; instead, I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Black Lives Matter now?

   If I want to know how I’d have shown up in the last civil rights era, I have to ask myself: How am I showing up today, in this civil rights era?

   I decided to read every book I could get my hands on about race in America. I filled my social media feeds with writers and activists of color. It became very clear very quickly how strongly my social media feeds shaped my worldview. With a feed filled with white voices, faces that looked like my own, and articles that reflected experiences like mine, it was easy to believe that, for the most part, things were fine. Once I committed myself to beginning each day by reading the perspectives of black and brown people, I learned that everything was, and always has been, quite far from fine. I learned about rampant police brutality, the preschool-to-prison pipeline, the subhuman conditions of immigrant detainment centers, the pillaging of native lands. I began to widen. I was unlearning the whitewashed version of American history I’d been indoctrinated into believing. I was discovering that I was not who I imagined myself to be. I was learning that my country was not what I had been taught it was.

   This experience of learning and unlearning reminded me of getting sober from addiction. When I started to really listen and think more deeply about the experiences of people of color and other marginalized people in our country, I felt like I did when I first quit drinking: increasingly uncomfortable as the truth agitated my comfortable numbness. I felt ashamed as I began to learn all the ways my ignorance and silence had hurt other people. I felt exhausted because there was so much more to unlearn, so many amends to be made, and so much work to do. Just like in my early days of sobriety from booze, in my early days of waking up to white supremacy, I felt shaky, jumpy, and agitated as I slowly surrendered the privilege of not knowing. It was a painful unbecoming.

       Eventually it became time to speak up. I started sharing the voices I was reading, and speaking out against the racism of America’s past and the bigotry and strategic divisiveness of the current administration. Every time I did this, people got pissed off. I felt okay about this because I seemed to be pissing off the right people. "


So, what can WE do to effect positive change?

RevAmy mentioned this in our "lovestreaming" UU church service yesterday: 26 Ways to Be in the Struggle

Now is definitely a time for growth opportunity for those whose hearts are in the right place.  I am a long-time peaceful protester (mostly feminist- and environmentally-related) but, much as I want to get out there, I will not risk my health by taking to the streets.  Because of my decimated social life, I have extra money, and have decided to donate to Together Rising, Glennon's organization. She speaks her truth, which also happens to be mine.  I trust her judgment as to where she allocates the money.


SONG:  I'm On Your Side by Michael Franti and Spearhead

BOOK:  Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century by Barbara Ransby

POEM:  Choke by Karim Eltawansy

A tattoo of birds
in the cage
of my throat.

I can’t breathe.

The world
is an eye
open to the

sun.

How many poems
do you have
by dreaming

of fire? of water

too late, too little
of breath
on the feathers

a naked cat

is sculpted into a
sphinx.

Tell me: the sculptor
was using his
fingers as

a ruler: his palm

a throne. I hold
all of life in
my throat. I hold

the 7th heaven

on my devil’s whisper. A genie says:
what a genie says:
I’m not available right now

get in the car.

The lamp holds
nothing to the candle
wish of tongue, holds

a shadow in the corner
of my eye: blink
thrice if a baton chops

because someone says, gravity. I’ve heard

a lot of songs about misery, but
never felt a bullet
slash through my body’s

grass limbs. Had I

to describe this membrane
what its body looked
like in breath

in its lover’s casket: I say,

brave, one syllable drops
at the speed of exhale: one
Marlboro tastes like

a carcass: if you ask
me about Africa I’ll
point my thumb down

the chamber, stick my
head in the camera
lens, fall into

black, black, black
everything—birds
included.

QUOTE:  “Breathe. Breathe deep and pure and smooth. Concentrate on it. Breathing is the pace you set your life at. It’s the rhythm of the song of you. It’s how to get back to the centre of things. The centre of yourself. When the world wants to take you in every other direction. It was the first thing you learned to do. The most essential and simple thing you do. To be aware of breath is to remember you are alive.” ~ Matt Haig