Friday Morning Ruminations

GEORGE Floyd's daughter Gigi, 6, has appeared in a heartbreaking video where she shouts "daddy changed the world" after her dad’s death sparked a global protest movement.

Protest against police brutality and its connection to racist city monuments continues for a second week after the murder of George Floyd.  George Floyd's daughter proclaims "My daddy has changed the world!"   Demonstrations have swept through the country and the world--even in Catskill NY, the tiny county seat in which I was born.  My niece-in-law Tina Martinez documented its "Enough is Enough" action on FB.  

Other posts from fellow high school alum were discouraging.  They are angry to be inconvenienced; they feel threatened and want above all to support Law Enforcement as it exists.  I'll have conversations with them as way opens.

I zoomed the entire Memorial Service. Here it is:

 

The Rev Sharpton gave the eulogy--a work of immense power as well as intimacy.  Get your knees off our necks.  I sobbed as the service made George Floyd a man to me again, a blood and flesh human being.  I cried standing silently through the 8.43 minutes it took for a police officer to kill Mr. Floyd.  How have I lived with comfort alongside such on-going injustice and inequality?  Open my eyes that I might see . . . is not only a women's power song.

As full as I am spiritually and emotionally, I have only written snatches of poetry since my post here last Friday.  I'm forcing myself to write now so I don't lose everything.  This week I read a manuscript for a friend, and helped plan a retreat.  I had a Journey to Wholeness session, a Spiritual nurture session, and a  qigong/meditation class.  I read a ton of news news and FB news, and responded to the useful/spiritual/longing comments I saw.

Sitting up here in my second floor apartment, I remind myself of my grandmother.  I wonder if I am channeling her?  No, she would do more.  Here's an old poem I wrote about her: 

Dream  

          (UC Berkeley Graduate School 1987, revised 4/25/12)

 

Product of the radical seventies and one decade late, I

Don my turtle hood to exit luxury, traveling light

And slow back to the proverbial road not taken

Halt the erosion of truth, the Grandmother called

from her White House upon the hill, where she sat

Typing out letters and letting them fall

Evergreen-trees lined the night as Australia

Became a no-nuke zone and an actor aligned

His springtime in America to re-organize the right

And Grandmother wrote “Dear Editor” from her remote site.

I, turtle, move slowly through acres of passivity

While fateful animals pile earth on my shell

And play out the original rite of creation

Grandmother calls out for my group to smite

The pharaoh and his henchmen—like Moses to fight.

The living image stays now though I close my eyes to sleep:

Old women awake in a tower, turtle inching straight,

Pharaoh underground spinning orders that make

Wrinkled hands type letters, clocks tick, bosses take

Money moves, truth dies, turtles walk, I sleep at night

My eyes focused upward to see her steady Light.

Do I have a steady Light?  

I spend much more time channeling a wider universe (nature/God) than I ever knew grandmother to do.   She didn't waste time with FB, but she had piles of junk mail and random pleas for funding all round.  I believe she gave a little to many places, as do I.  She had been an artist and art teacher, whereas I was a stage director and theater professor and English teacher.  

I knew grandmother as teacher, sculptor, mosaic maker, potter, landscape painter, and expressionistic.  She worked in charcoal, pencil, oil, pastel, acrylic,water color, clay, concrete, block printing, copper, and glass.  She also did graphic design and illustration in a manner reminiscent of her early training in Germany's Bauhaus.  She did some form of art and public exhibitions until she died.  She also wrote letters to the editor until a few months before she died.  Her issues were preservation of the Hudson Valley environment, prevention of the spread of nuclear technology, ecology, recycling, local labor.  The Athens NY Town Hall has a plaque thanking her, Mary Berner, for helping to create Citizens to Preserve the Hudson and for keeping nuclear power plants out of the Hudson Valley. She lived alone from the 1960s when her husband died, through the 1990s when she needed assistance and moved in with my parents.  Her dates are 1901-2003.  

There's magic in people who live a century and more, I believe.

Less of my writing is public than Grandmother's was.  She wrote persuasively for government and public consumption.  I write poetry, some of it political.  My issues are peace, anti-racism, community-centered law enforcement, alternative energy, democracy, LGBTQ rights, and women's power.  I phone banked for Obama (we won), Hillary Clinton (we lost), paper ballots and voting in the primaries.  I will phone bank for whomever the democratic candidate happens to be.  I'm involved locally through the town library, reading and writing in its groups. I'm involved in Delco adult literacy programs.  I grow deeper and deeper spiritually through the influence of Quaker faith and practice. 

Yet in the Covid-19 pandemic, I've been idle.  Since George Floyd's death, I've been idle.  Between bouts of grief, I've been listening to music and podcasts, watching irrelevant movies, and relevant documentaries.  I haven't been exercising enough.  

Grandmother never hid her light under a bushel.  Do I?  Where are my words?  I look for them, and end up reminiscing.

The Reverend Sharpton reminded everyone "There's a difference between those who call for peace and those who call for silence."  Sharpton's words start at 01:32 in the video of the memorial for George Floyd (above).  I did not appreciate the Reverend Al Sharpton until I heard this eulogy that spoke intimately to the family and yet reached out powerfully to African Americans and the entire United States citizenry.   

Do not use your Bible as a prop.  Do not use George as a prop. . . . let us stand for what is right. . . . People call me to blow up issues. . . . You get away too much with hiding things. . . . When I stood at that spot, the reason it got to me is that George Floyd's story has been the story of black folks.  Because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck. . . . What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country, in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It's time to stand up in George's name and say get your knee off our necks!

He moved me to tears.  Here are my words.

Wishing for a Time Machine, Acting without One.

How far back do we have to go to change 

the history of African Americans?  

How deep do we have to go to dig up and to destroy 

the European-American roots of racism?

Radical change is change from the roots.

Few European Americans know roots exist,

that they spread beliefs and practice underground 

as roots touch and overhead as rhetoric flows tree to tree.

Pretending room for growth is limited creates 

the competition in which fear and racism are strategy. 

Democracy doesn't need to run on scarcity, but 

capitalism--our form of it--relies on it.

Racism is a strategy for subjugating and bypassing others.

It's built into our systems until we guarantee wages 

and health care for all.  Racism and classism are again and again

winning in our Congress, they're built into everything we do.

Unawaress is no longer a good excuse. The roots

of racism spread in search for a certainty that our churches

and government could guarantee in other ways. Then the roots

of racism might be made to turn back and to strangle their trees.

Not very poetic, at all, my words.  Not personal and moving.

I need to overcome a numbness when it comes to the truths of my heart.  Here is the week I most need to speak, but I am silent.  I listen and react, but then submerge myself into light entertainment and distance from the muses that could help.  Who else has the privilege of turning away from the fight?

That's what I need to write about and overcome, the myth of powerlessness.  The way privilege neglects and perpetuates what it cannot face.  Why?  Because it can.  White Fragility.  There's a poem in that.

This writing took 4 hours.  Maybe later.  
The truth of my heart. 

"I'll think about that tomorrow," 

--Scarlet O'Hara

Gone With the Wind.

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Posted at earthweal open link weekend #23

 © 2020 Susan L. Chast