The Raging Grannies of Portland
Portland activists - and their moms - are showing us the way forward. Not only in the struggle for Black lives, but in the never ending struggle for all lives. Because, if you have failed to notice or it has somehow escaped your attention, not only is the world enveloped by an ongoing pandemic, but climate change has not gone anywhere either.
The struggle to recognize the injustices perpetrated on Black communities is linked to the decimation of the planet’s equilibrium. Inextricably linked.
If you are a dog lover like me, you learn that dogs do not like soiling their den. Humans - excluding your lazy sibling who never wanted to pick up their dirty laundry - are the same way.
No one wants to live next to the dump. No one wants to live beside the sewage plant. No one wants chemicals pumped into their water table. No one wants an oil pipeline coursing through their backyard. Or their sacred lands.
Yet this is what we do to cultures and indigenous peoples and people of color the world over.
Rich nations dump their crap onto poor nations.
Rich communities dump their waste onto poor communities.
We don’t care enough about these things because they don’t directly affect us and because those are not ‘our people’. If all lives mattered, we’d work harder to find a better way because we’d be alarmed that due to proximity to oil refineries, fracking fields, chemical waste ponds, industrial wastelands Black communities and poor communities have far higher rates of cancer.
They fall victim to far higher rates of all other types of diseases. Including coronavirus.
By protesting and showing up and keeping the Black Lives Matter movement prominent in the nightly news and peoples’ social media feeds, the Portland activists, and their moms, like the Hong Kong activists, are providing the blueprint of how we need to be involved. How committed we need to be.
They’ve been showing up for nearly two months straight.
Now that the American Dictator has unleashed his very own Brown Shirts onto the streets of Portland to engage in extrajudicial kidnappings and bludgeoning protesters including a former Navy veteran, shattering the bones in one of his hands, for no apparent good reason, the tactic has reinvigorated the action and gained far more traction in the wall-to-wall non-stop news cycle. The admirer of Kim Jong Il and the man who has yet to say nary a discouraging word about his overlord in Moscow plans on deploying these same thugs to other American cities.
But these are the front lines of the systemic change that need to be garrisoned.
Here is Portland from last night:
These - predominantly white - people are on the streets of Portland protesting and taking action because of the specific deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, but also because of the system-wide injustice against all people of color which has been going on for millennia. The mere fact we are beginning to recognize the havoc which has been wrought by our indifference and our willingness to look the other way as white people propping up white supremacy may be the seminal moment required to bend the arc of justice.
I’ve read articles recently about human supremacy (you know the Christian belief about humankind’s dominion over all the creatures of the world) and how that construct needs to crumble in order to save our species, as well as an article by Sierra Club’s Hop Hopkins about racism being the root cause of the poisoning of the planet. Then another article suggesting the pandemic may provide the impetus for societal change just as the Black Plague ushered in the Renaissance and will surely, regardless, alter the course of human events in some manner or other. These ideas are coalescing. Ascendant.
And all because our Dear Leader, a man who has never met a supremacist he couldn’t get behind, is uniting us in common cause.
Even so, our position is precarious. The felling of a tree is predictable. The felling of a political cult will be problematic.
As ever, I am going to suggest we keep our eyes on the prize, which is pulling the plug on the Beltway swamp and running as many of the money changers out of politics as is politically possible. The autocrat and his crime family are just the iceberg’s jagged apex.
To do that we need to heed Killer Mike’s words to “plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize in an effective way”. Also, register to vote, vote, bug everyone you know to vote, get out the vote, advocate for vote by mail (as has happened in Alabama.)
(Here is an article about where your state stands in regards to Vote By Mail.)
When we look back at this ignominious era, I think we might have the Wall of Moms and the Portland activists to thank.
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I don’t remember if I have recommended the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers, but it is a well-crafted tale that has something to say about just whether or not humans really are the tippy-top of the evolutionary ladder. My sister, Pam, gifted it to me and I consumed it in no time flat. It is in my Top Ten reads of all time.
Also, I’m not sure if it was today or yesterday, but one of these days was Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam’s birthday. Molly and I recently watched the cult classic, Harold and Maude, which features a memorable soundtrack made up entirely of his songs. I am suggesting you listen to that soundtrack or watch Harold and Maude, or both. They are just the pick-me-up we all could use.