We’re not out of the woods.
Not when it comes to the pandemic. Not when it comes to the country’s drift toward authoritarianism. Not when it comes to social justice. Not when it comes to laugh-out-loud lunacy given oxygen by a media-driven society that needs shiny objects and things to ogle every hour of the day.
Think of me as your pep rally organizer.
I am not going to overburden you with facts, PDFs from scientific journals or too many graphs and statistics. I am not going to ruminate - generally - longer than about a thousand words. I am not going to wow you with my grasp of any particular subject.
I think of myself as one of the canaries in the coal mine with only one task: encourage you to remain vigilant and not become complacent and - hopefully - not make it too dull or dreary. That looks and writes like more than one task, but I see it as rolled into one.
I received an email from my district representative the other day and her missive included a graphic of the House of Representatives showing that it will only take the flipping of 5 Democratic seats to plunge us back into unmitigated chaos in Washington, D.C. in 2022. And that’s assuming we can hold our Senate seats as is.
I had not realized it was that tight.
Speaking of mitigation, it would also be an unmitigated disaster, an unmitigated travesty and an unmitigated thundercloud over our slowly building blue parade. This means we cannot afford to take our eyes off the prize. It means you need to continue to check in on what your representatives are voting on, what your reps ought to be voting on and topics you’d like for them to be addressing.
It’s still Black History Month. I mention it because voting rights for all Americans are one of the hottest topics our members of Congress need to address.
The last long New York Times article I read was about how America has only had a true democracy since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. America became something much closer to a democracy then because it bestowed voting rights to Black citizens. Congress is considering an amendment to the VRA because a Supreme Court ruling over the past year or so seriously weakened the original VRA and gave states a loophole to return to their more egregious tendencies to think of ways to prevent people from voting.
Return to those glorious days of yore when Jim Crow was all the rage.
The lesson learned by the opposing party this past election is that they need to think of even more methods of preventing people from exercising their rights to vote.
It seems like hardly a day goes by - now that I am paying attention - that I don’t learn something about Black history. For instance, in South Carolina in 1876 - post Civil War, Reconstruction about to end prematurely - there were over a hundred thousand Black citizens who could vote and only fifty some odd thousand white citizens who could vote. As you might imagine, this caused much consternation from god-fearing white folks who did not want so much democracy extended to people of color.
It was called the Hamburg Massacre - just one of many throughout our history - and some of it might sound eerily familiar:
The Hamburg massacre occurred on July 4, 1876, in South Carolina. The Republican (remember this was the time when they actually WERE the party of Lincoln) governor raised a state militia to stem the spreading violence in the state. An all-black regiment of the militia, led by Dock Adams, was stationed in Hamburg, angering white paramilitary groups, known as the Red Shirts, in nearby towns. Hundreds of Red Shirts surrounded and eventually attacked the 84-member black militia regiment, killing seven.
Militias, red garb, angry white vigilantes rampaging about taking the law into their own hands. Just like January 6th.
There were Senate hearings. Several militia members were tried and found guilty. But democracy - for Blacks in the South - was coming to an end.
In many ways, the resulting three volume 2500 page Senate report was a remarkable achievement, full of the verbatim transcripts of witnesses who must have hoped, again, that justice might yet be done. Without this report, the foregoing history of the massacre could not have been written. Without it, crimes might have been forgotten and crucial details lost.
But like many Senate reports, this one was destined to molder and in the so-called Compromise of 1876, the South was returned to Democratic control. Rivers knew better than anyone what had been lost. ‘Now it will be a hundred years,’ he told his son Joshua. With no other options, Rivers returned to driving a carriage. The entire arc of Rivers’s life—carriage driver, soldier, state legislator, and carriage driver again—captures the window of opportunity that had opened and closed for a remarkable generation of African Americans.
Prince Rivers was Hamburg, South Carolina’s trial justice. He was also the general of the state militia. His hundred years prediction to his son was off by eleven years, but it was accurate enough.
President Biden’s slogan is to ‘Build Back Better’. Not to Be Best. Not to Make America Great Again. In order to do so, we need to hold the reins of power for as long as the conservatives have done so. I’m thinking - at a minimum - forty to fifty years. In order to not be what we hate, we need to remain engaged by being active citizens as I have written numerous times before.
The country has a lot on its plate right now. As do we all.
Our democracy is more like faerie dust than igneous rock. It can be easily lost, so it needs protecting. It requires a certain amount of faith, so it needs to be discussed. It can have miraculous results, if its placed in caring hands.
The Equality Act (H.R. 5), the For the People Act (H.R. 1) and S.4263 - John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act are three good places to start sprinkling that faerie dust and making your voice heard.
Check out this 42 minute documentary called Verify Road Trip. One small step for mankind…
Many call climate change the defining crisis of our time. In Texas, where we live, climate change is making heatwaves hotter, hurricanes stronger and droughts last longer. And yet 35% of Texans don’t think it’s happening or are not sure. In this documentary, reporter David Schechter invited a skeptic to re-examine his understanding of climate change. Justin Fain is a 38-year-old roofer from Dallas who’s politically conservative. He participated in an epic reporting trip across Texas and Alaska. Over the course of 8-days Justin saw everything David saw, asked his own questions and reaches his own conclusions.
Also, Americans thought ‘cricket’ was odd. Check out all the advertising on the Finnish baseball uniforms. The second video - 53 seconds long - shows how the bases are laid out. It could not be quirkier!
I want to thank all of my loyal, avid and tolerant-of-typos readers. Your moral support has meant a lot to me over the past year. Your willingness to read what amounts to - at this point - my bi-daily journal gives me a good reason to get out of bed each day and check out what’s happening in the great wide world. I continue to look forward to your catching-up emails, direct messages, phone calls and texts, and your suggestions of which tangent I should go off on next.
I’d like to especially thank my benefactors who’ve bought me many delicious “grande Americanos (otherwise known as a 16 ounce in the land outside of Starbucks) with an extra shot of espresso AND with room” at my favorite coffee haunt - Argonaut Coffee. Also, those benefactors who must have misread the Call To Action button and sent along enough to purchase an Italian brand espresso machine itself.
Sometimes more than one.
I truly appreciate your support, beneficence and kindness. I will continue to do my best to “not go gentle into that good night.” - JLM