The day is impossibly beautiful and breezy. Dazzling.
Nekkid baby has returned to my strip of the sidewalk, on a tiny bicycle. Riding it like a scooter. One foot on a pedal, one accelerating heedlessly.
An hour ago, with his mommy, he had walked by wearing nothing but a pull-up diaper, holding a sippy cup, absorbed utterly by anything under his nekkid little feet. Leading with his lil' boy belly. Dappled in sunshine.
But now, on his bike, daddy along for the ride literally, he is dressed and helmeted and speeding. I hear no wailing; he must be good at not falling.
He fades down the road.
The passel o' boys across the street from me are outside playing some game, squealing with joy between yelling like angry badgers, all modulated by occasional, calm dad-voice.
It. Is. OSUM.
Oh man - another bloodcurdling scream! Kids at play so often sound so terrifying!!! It sounds exactly like my own neighborhood, circa 1978.
Between this, tweeting birds, and inviting breezes, I am hard put to finish part 2 of the month's reporting. Gah.
There is this very specific inflection to kids playing - an elastic up-and-down wave, nothing like so tidy as a sine - in which the sound of injustice resonates with purity. BUT WHYYYYY ... can't I go over here ... does he get to run to the next base ... am I not wiii-ii-iiiiiii-in-in-innniiiinnng?
The breeze in the maple outside the window, playing with the grass, scintillating in the treetops across the way. The beagle a couple houses away, Expressing Opinions.
It is ... beautiful.
***
Just a few miles away, filthy Confederate monuments I want to see for myself, updated for our age by people angry, and sad, and bereft for the several-millionth time in 400 years. The police chief here has been on the side of citizens. Just south of us, another chief stood with his people. It is not loaves and fishes The Beatitudes, and it IS optics and choices and amplification calculated - but it is good to see choices for those these polices forces are here to protect and serve.
One of my dearest friends, my best neighbor at work, a woman I love so much - I have heard the sirens, but she heard those and the sound of "no justice/no peace" and "I can't breathe" all this weekend. She is a living blessing.
The Daughters of the Confederacy could have done as others have - served history instead of themselves, as an institution. Why anyone would care to be institutionalized with a group of worshippers of the Lost Cause - people lionizing rebels, who broke away from and tried to destroy the United States - is beyond comprehension. Their existence is shameful, and their mission indefensible. They should relinquish their revolting relics to actual historians, donate their facilities, repent and make reparations. They are shameful. They burned - for a little while - this weekend. This is not looting, it is reprimand, and long past due.
Lee's tired horse, on an exalted platform of ridiculous loftiness - tail down and tired, while the old General still rides, ramrod straight and UNASHAMED, bronze and burnished, but shat on daily by local pigeons with more rectitude - is bedaubed with graffiti. Stuart's plinth, a little shorter, surrounded by a wrought iron bridge it could *not* have been easy to bring down - but brought down it has been, by living bodies who matter more than these rebels do.
Leave them desecrated, the echo of the desecration these insurgents brought to the United States, in dividing them. Remember them for the failures they were. Let the bronze and granite decay, the rot take them over. Leave them to rot, or take them away altogether.
Leave Kehinde Wiley's living horseman in their place - no traitor, but an AMERICAN man - pristine and strong and proud and standing for something. Let him tower over the others as they fall down.
***
It would take only minutes to see what has been done, and what has been undone, in my city. I will probably drive out - before the newly enacted curfew - to see what I need to know. To be a part of it.
To see the dazzling sun, perhaps, set ... on these newly-faced (hardly DEfaced - how do you "ruin" idolatrous monuments to traitors?) images.
To breathe the good air, and commit to using my privilege ... so that little nekkid kiddo can stay untouched a while longer.
2 comments:
I've never understood what "heritage" is being celebrated by the Confederate battle flag or the statues and all of that. Armed rebellion against the government? Defeat? Slavery? A feudal plantation system that exploited poor whites as much as enslaved blacks?
Perhaps there is some point I've missed, but it must be a secret too.
On Sunday, June 7, a KKK Grand Dragon named Skip Rogers ploughed his truck into a crowd of my neighbors - people walking for PEACE, who brought their CHILDREN - three blocks from my home. The good news is, he was so utterly inept that he failed to kill anyone.
I'm sure he could explain it all for us.
I never have any intention ever to listen.
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