“That’s just the trouble with me, I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.” ― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Like Portia, Alice, and (I bet) a whole lot of us, I don’t always listen to the advice I give myself or “follow mine own teaching,” BUT BUT BUT — here’s an instance in which I did:
I’m fortunate enough to live in Colorado, where voting is pretty easy. All voters who register on time get a ballot in the mail. We can register on line. We can register by mail. We can register in person — even on Election Day.
We can mail in our ballot. We can put it in a secure drop box. We can vote in person, early or on Election Day. If we make a mistake, we can go get a new ballot. We can even do it more than once if we, say, fill out our ballots when we’re so tired we don’t track the bubbles properly and need to go twice to trade in our ballots and then finally decide to vote in person so that if we make ANOTHER
mistake we can get a new ballot on the spot. Not that I know anybody who’s done that. (We do have to trade in the original ballot to get a new one. No voting twice.)
I wish all eligible voters had the options we have here in the Centennial State. To everyone who has waited or will wait in lines for hours or even for the whole damn day, who has to face down intimidating “watchers,” who has to travel for hours to get to a drop box, who has to contend with any of the myriad obstacles that are placed in your way because of your race, your politics, your address — YOU ARE HEROES. And all I can say is “Thank you.”
“I hate ingratitude more in a man than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or any taint of vice whose strong corruption inhabits our frail blood”.” ― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Vote to elect representatives who will end voter suppression and will support just redistricting. When we deny people their voice, their vote, then protesting becomes the only reasonable option.
Here in Colorado, we have new laws designed to eliminate, as much as possible, the partisan gerrymandering that has impeded fair elections. A panel of diverse members will take over the redistricting. We hope to set an example for other states struggling for more equitable elections.
We shouldn’t have to say it any longer, but we do. Black Lives Matter. And today the news has given us a new name to say:
Daniel Prude
Mr. Prude was killed back in March, but the circumstances of his death while wearing a spit hood the police put on him only recently came to light. I’ll let you read the details in the accounts below.
There are other groups whose lives we similarly devalue. Some are subsets of the Black community (Black trans folk, Black women) and some are not (BIPOC groups) or may not be (Jews, Muslims, other minority religions). I’m not sure how to talk about these groups without seeming to diminish the BLM discussion,* but for the moment, perhaps the ink offers an analogy. The ink looks black when left alone, but a little water shows it comprises other colors and shades. I will continue to find a more elegant and effective means to discuss the broad swathe of people whose rights we need to affirm and whose wrongs — the ones done to them in the past and the ones we continue to tolerate, propagate, and commit — we must work to assuage.
Vote.
* 4 September, 2020: I just read in the New York Times this excellent distinction made by Daria Allen, a sixteen-year-old who has been protesting in Portland, Oregon:
One of the few chants she consistently recites is “Black lives matter.” It annoys her that the phrase has become a subject of controversy, often met with the diminishing response “All lives matter.”
“When they have the breast cancer runs, you don’t see people out there yelling, ‘What about lung cancer?’” she said. “Just because I’m talking about what’s happening to me doesn’t mean I don’t care about what’s happening with you. Why do I have to constantly remind these people that I matter?”
When Ms. Allen
posted a link to the fund-raiser in a neighborhood Facebook group, a woman confronted her. Ms. Allen was destroying the city, she said. Ms. Allen fired back, arguing that the police were polluting the city with tear gas. The argument ended with the woman sending her a direct message, which Ms. Allen has saved in her inbox, just to remind herself of the mentality she is fighting against.
“If I see you on the street, you will be the next Black person hanging from a tree,” the woman wrote.
It makes me ill that anyone would throw the hateful and horrifying spectre of lynching at a Black teenager, one who is raising her voice and risking her health and life to call for justice and equality. Vote for Daria Allen because Daria Allen isn’t yet old enough to vote for herself.
It is Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, a day that marks not the moment when President Lincoln outlawed slavery, but the day two and a half years later when the last slaves in Texas were finally told that they were free. Today and all days I stand with the protestors demanding the equality and justice that should always have been theirs. I can’t do so literally, but here, in this virtual space, I stand with feet firmly planted and my written voice raised to say “Black Lives Matter.”
Maria Oswalt https://unsplash.com/@mcoswalt
To anyone who wants to jump in with “All lives matter” — don’t. If all lives mattered equally, no one would feel the need to say “Black Lives Matter.” Black Lives Matter reminds us that too often our country, our citizens, and —most notoriously right now — our police act as if Black lives and Brown lives and Indigenous lives are disposable, negligible. Black Lives Matter reminds us that these attitudes, ones that have infected the entire history of our country, must change.
Clay Banks https://unsplash.com/@claybanks
I am neither Black nor Brown and I’m not going to pretend that I understand what it is like to live as a person of color in the United States. I’m not sure what to write that won’t be appropriative or just wrong.
Mike Von https://unsplash.com/photos/2Qb6XP67KjA
But I know the brutality used against Black communities is wrong — more than wrong; it is wicked, inhuman, sickening, and the national convulsion of anger and grief is the only sane response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks, murders that are the latest in a long chain of killings. I think it is better to speak out in protest and take a chance of putting my foot in my pen than it is to stay silent.
Benjamin Moran https://unsplash.com/photos/m6LtoYt-tao
I’ve been reading around the Internet for education and inspiration:
The New York Time‘s 1619 Project has an extensive archive of articles on the history of slavery and its persistent effects on areas such as medicine, where Linda Villarosa explains that even
Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, which controls for the assumption that blacks have less lung capacity than whites.
and that the pain of Black patients is consistently underestimated and under-treated.
The fountain pen community has been weighing in:
The The Well-Appointed Desk has been regularly posting links to articles and resources related to Black Lives Matter. I am grateful for their persistence in finding and sharing new links every week, links like It’s Nice That with its list of resources for supporting BLM.
Joshua E. Danley (a doctor on those front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic) veered from his usual focus on Pelikan’s fountain pens to write an eloquent, careful, and passionate statement “to acknowledge the exceptional pain and anger that we see bubbling over in our communities. Silence is no longer a luxury that any of us can afford.” At the end, he writes that “Each of us must examine our conduct and values in order to ensure that we lift each other up until no one remains shackled by inequality.”
U.S. history without Black lives is mythology. The 13 colonies without Black lives is mythology. The Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, those hot, stuffy weeks in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 without Black lives is mythology. Abolitionism, the Civil War, and the Union victory in 1865 without Black lives is mythology. There is no U.S. history without Black history, just as there is no U.S. history without women, Indigenous People, immigrants, and the poor. Yet too often our curriculum treats these groups as inconvenient interruptions to an otherwise clear-cut story of forward political and economic progress.
There I found Shannon Ashley’s “20+ Ways White Writers Can Support the Black Community.” Her fourth suggestion is “Read more Black Authors.” A fateful coincidence had one of my friends, younger and wiser than I in so many ways, shortly before George Floyd’s death ignited the protests, recommend to me Jericho Brown’s poetry collection, The Tradition. The title poem, a complexity of gardening and the speaker’s relation to the earth and the danger of living Black (and more that I’m still working out), intersperses lists of the names of flowers with the efforts of Black men to get plants to grow,* and finishes
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we Planted for proof we existed before Too late, sped the video to see blossoms Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems Where the world ends, everything cut down. John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.
George Floyd
Rayshard Brooks
Breonna Taylor
Ahmaud Arbery
Sandra Bland
Eric Garner
Trayvon Martin
Tony McDade
Laquan McDonald
Freddie Gray
Aiyana Stanley-Jones (seven years old)
Botham Jean
Michael Jean
Yvette Smith
Alton Sterling
Say the names of the ones I have left out. Stand with the protestors. Be, as Shannon Ashley says, a better human. And urge our lawmakers to declare this day, June Nineteenth, a Federal holiday, so that we have a day to celebrate when a great evil was outlawed and to commemorate how far we still have to go to restore justice and equality to the communities to whom we have denied justice and equality for so long.
____________________
*I am oversimplifying terribly. Read the poem.
bubbles properly and need to go twice to trade in our ballots and then finally decide to vote in person so that if we make ANOTHER
We shouldn’t have to say it any longer, but we do. Black Lives Matter. And today the news has given us a new name to say:
many ways, shortly before George Floyd’s death ignited the protests, recommend to me Jericho Brown’s poetry collection, The Tradition. 