If I could begin to express the level of despair I felt watching this video…I would… but I don’t think my heart could take it.
When you have connections…real connections, to all parts of the globe you die a little when you witness hurt blasted (or ignored) on TV…It’s impossible to watch people crying and distraught in the street after something like this when you know that could just as easily be your family or friends…but our world is cut off from theirs, isn’t it?
We are soft as an effect of our 1st world comforts and equally as hard as a result of the incessant onslaught of images like these… We think: “that’s so sad” and then promptly change to something uplifting to lighten the mood. It never crosses our mind that Rome fell. Things in our country are not perfect. We aren’t far behind.
Syria used to be a beautiful vacation spot,
home to a major seed bank, beautiful historical ruins, and a crucial part of the fertile crescent a.k.a the cradle of all known civilization;
now it (like so many others before it) doesn’t hold a candle to a shadow of it’s former self.
My adopted Uncle was born and raised near the Doctors Without Boarders hospital that was bombed this week. He used to go back frequently to visit family. He was well to do. He had a few homes there.
Nowadays, my Uncle is no longer well to do. He’s a lot grayer all of his homes there are destroyed and he can’t go back anymore or it’s likely he won’t return. I remember when he’d complain about Assad occasionally but the economy was stable then so I don’t recall it being a daily thing.
“It started with the drought” he’d say… (global warming seems to be a reoccurring precursor to a lot of these issues but, I digress) once food prices increased so did overall tensions and the kettle began to boil…
Our mixing pot here is boiling, but we’re too busy calling the kettle black to notice we’re on the tipping point too.
This election is about more than defeating Trump or a woman satisfying her insatiable ego by becoming president. This is it. This is a defining moment for us, our fork in the road where our choices are immediate destruction(Ted Cruz/Trump), cruise control at 65 on our current pathway to destruction (Hilary), or Bernie… who just wants us to spend with our true interests in mind, tax with our true interests in mind, and view the world with an emphatic heart.
I can’t compromise, because I see my future in the eyes of refugees dying on the streets of their own city. I can’t in good faith vote for Hilary knowing her track record of violence and disdain for black and brown people. She has and will continue to propagate the type violence I just witnessed and I can’t be party to that. Being poor not privileged is what propels my decision not to support Hillary because my vote is my voice and I can’t allow any outside pressure to silence me.
Hubris doesn’t allow us to see just how badly our tight rope is fraying as we walk it. We continue our jeering and crusading, nose turned up to those already fallen.
But
as oceans rise, water get scares and dirty, education becomes a privilege as opposed to right, and inflation devalues our already maxed out 50 hour work week; we’ll eventually have to come to grips with the fact that chickens really do come home to roost. Our insensitivity and deeds done aboard won’t be readily forgotten by those who we’ve wronged in the name of “Democracy”.
I’ll leave you with only final thought…
Imagine if you will the frothy head of a beer, toppling over the rim in excess with mad abandon as if the spout will never run dry, suppressing the bubbling brown body of the beverage which suffocates below the foam… Eventually the bartender cuts flow and either tips the glass or runs across it with a blade cutting the head off and settling the liquid. Who are you in this analogy, the liquid or the foam?
I finally tasted #Lemonade and it wasn’t anything like it was portrayed to me. It was a full bodied thirst quenching tall glass of amniotic bliss… It was a rich visual embodiment of the call and response like conversations that women of the diaspora play out internally on a daily basis. It is sheer and utter blaspheme to paint Beyoncé as an “Angry Black Woman” seeking to publicly air a lovers spat…The images… so carefully crafted are delicate representations of our strength as black women… don’t you see?
It’s a celebration of life and vibrancy in face of dull toned turned backs… It’s a chin held high in face of misplaced applause… It’s the acknowledgment of the side eyes we’ve dished out to those whose very image we were trained to covet over our own… It’s an ode to the colored girl… and an antidote to the colorist. If you watched an hour of sunshine and chose to see rain… I can only deduce that it either wasn’t made for you or you were not ready to receive it.
I was ready though…I been ready. I needed this more then I knew I did… a burst of brilliant blue-black ultra violet light. So many talented womenfolk pooled together in a single contiguous heart string… lined up in Formation… calling me with their eyes saluting me, emblazoned with the symbols of our pride.
I’m glad to be alive in these strange times…these fearful, exhausting, yet awe inspiring times. I finally tasted #Lemonade and all I could muster to say out loud was thank you … Thank you to the ancestors for laying the foundation for Formation by turning lemons into Lemonade under the watchful eyes of your little girls…because you never know who you are raising until they rise up.
Almost 20 years after Bernard Weinraub, of The New York Times insinuated that Michael Jackson’s HIStory album was “profane, obscure, angry and filled with rage” and “bigoted lyrics” here we are living the lyrics… Again.
It’s funny that Weinraub, the husband of now notorious Sony Pictures Chief Amy Pascal, penned the review that would doom the album and lead its single ,”They Don’t Care About Us”, to infrequent radio play and it’s accompanying short film to being banned from American TV.
I find it even funnier (and by funnier I mean terribly disturbing) that when Michael Jackson called Sony Music out for being “Racist”, the media chose to scrutinize his claims as if he were imagining things.
Yup… It only took 20 years, an insane security breach and leaked high level emails to confirm the King of Pops assertions.
Now, for some ungodly reason, Amy is able to feign an apologetic stance. Apparently after sitting down with Al Sharpton her (and her counterparts) comments are being brushed off as if they were just an off-color moment. Apparently, 20 years (at least, it hurts me to think that she was raised in a house hold where this type of thought was acceptable or funny) of egregious thoughts now can be equated to an accidental slip of the tongue…keystroke.
The fact that more people aren’t highlighting this absurdity is disheartening.
The fact that Amy hasn’t stepped down or been forced out is fucking ridiculous…
God dammit.
I just knew I could get through this without cursing but this is just too much bullshit to wade through without getting some stuck to your shoe…
Nope. Not for one second am I cool with this. You can try to distract us by focusing on the hackers themselves as opposed to what they uncovered but as an African-American Actress reading the remarks made about my people in these email exchanges, it only brings a realness to my gut notion that as far as Hollywood is concerned,”They Don’t Care About Us”.
Now, because this all just got too real, let’s jive it up again by watching the video that was banned in America…I promise you that your faith in people will be tested by how relevant the covered topics still are and by how nuts it is that they blocked an artists right to free speech because he chose to be the voice of Americans not represented by the power structure…
I guess free speech is only people who color in between the lines.
Understanding and talking about what is “unjust” is common. However, to stand up for yourself and others who are voiceless, by walking off the job with no guarantee that you will have one to return to is just pure heroism.
BY SETH FREED WESSLER
KANSAS CITY, Mo.— Fast food workers are expected to walk off the job in an estimated 150 cities on Thursday, with employees in many locations planning nonviolent civil disobedience.
Organizers say the strike—with potentially widespread arrests of workers—marks an intensification of a two-year campaign to raise hourly pay in the industry to $15 and to win workers’ right to form a union. On Thursday morning, organizers said dozens of workers had been arrested in Detroit and New York’s Times Square.
In Kansas City, Missouri, workers are expected to walk out of 60 restaurants. Latoya Caldwell, a Wendy’s worker, is one of dozens of fast food employees in Kansas City who plan to sit down in a city intersection, lock arms and get arrested.
“We’re a movement now,” Caldwell said on Wednesday before starting a shift at Wendy’s. She and several co-workers said that 25 of the more than 30 non-management employees in their restaurant have pledged to strike. “We know this is going to be a long fight, but we’re going to fight it till we win,” said Caldwell, 31, who is raising four children alone on $7.50 an hour and was living in a homeless shelter until earlier this year.
The strikers cite frustration about their continued struggle to survive at the bottom of the labor market even as the broader economic news seems positive. “They say the economy is getting better, but we’re still making $7.50,” said Caldwell. “Nobody should work 40 hours a week and find themselves homeless, without enough money to buy them and their kids food, needing public assistance.”
Lost Below The Fold 