Black Boys Celebrated at Book Festival

by Cynthia M. Pease

Book festival season is well upon us, and they are going online.

Somehow I’ve tapped into book festivals I didn’t even know about, such as the Decatur (GA) Book Festival. It runs through the month of September, and it didn’t take me long to sign up for three very different author interviews.

The first was Saturday morning and featured author Derrick D. Barnes (www.derrickdbarnes.com) and illustrator Gordon C. James (www.gordoncjames.com) and their latest collaboration, I Am Every Good Thing.

As the father of four sons, Mr. Barnes said he wrote I Am Every Good Thing to “tap into all Black boys’ experiences, from the Midwest to the inner city,” and let them know there is nowhere they don’t belong and no dreams they can’t pursue.  “I was thinking about how restricted people were. I wanted Black boys to have a feeling of freedom to go everywhere and be anything.”

Gordon C. James is an illustrator of children’s books as well as a fine arts painter.

Mr. James drew a picture of his son Gabriel for the cover illustration. He too has thought much about the need to let young Black boys be children and to let readers know that they are just like any other children. The book is dedicated to seven unarmed Black boys murdered by adults, in most cases the police, who saw them as threatening rather than as boys.

Among the significant pages and illustrations in the book is one showing a group of boys swimming. There are two factors here: One is the memory of segregated community pools where the pools would be completely drained and “cleansed” after the Black children were in them. The other is the trope that Black people can’t swim.

Of course, in a world where Black boys (and girls, I’m sure) have been restricted in their movements, there were many who couldn’t swim. So the delightful illustration of happy faces taking the plunge includes an older boy wearing floaties. Mr. James said his intention was to show that no one should be ashamed if they’re just learning to swim no matter what their age.

Derrick D. Barnes is the award-winning author of many books for children.

The pair’s earlier book Crown is a poetic sketch about “how great our sons look when they come from the barbershop,” said Mr. Barnes. It shows a very proud and confident young boy sporting his first haircut. He has a look on his face that you would love to see on every child, one of knowing he or she is every bright thing and that the world will give that child the right to prove it.

I can’t tell you exactly why the presentation made me so happy and put peace in my soul. Perhaps it was the generosity of the author and illustrator. Mr. Barnes read I Am Every Good Thing and showed the illustrations as Mr. James worked on a charcoal drawing of a boy. Maybe it was being one of 180 attendees including a diverse group of women (lots of grandmothers) who were sharing their delighted comments in the “chat.” Maybe it was that, even as they talked about uplifting their own precious Black boys, they spoke as if they wanted to uplift me and the rest of the audience somehow by showing us how society should and can be.

The pair is currently working on a novel with the tentative title Do It for the People, about Black athletes who have protested injustice. Mr. Barnes also has a book coming out next June about Tommy Smith, one of the two Olympians in the iconic photograph showing their firsts raised.

Both men have worked with other authors and other illustrators, so do check out their websites. If you live in Charlotte, NC, where they both live, you can probably find them presenting at a library there. Otherwise, go to the Boston Book Festival website (www.bostonbookfest.org) and check out when their appearance will be in October.

The National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress, is also coming up from September 25 to 27; go to the LoC for more information.

Father of the Underground Railroad

You don’t have to read far into William Still’s The Underground Railroad to see exploded the myth that white folks freed the slaves.

Yes, white abolitionists helped the cause enormously after escaped slaves had made the first harrowing step toward freedom. And who else but white abolitionists could have gotten the Empancipation passed.

BUT – and this is a very large BUT – Still’s meticulous narratives that he recorded as escaped slaves passed through his Philadelphia office are a testament to the urgency and agency of enslaved people themselves to gain their freedom and the risks they took to do so.

This man, this William Still, who coined the term Underground Railroad, started as a janitor for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia and eventually became its chief clerk and also chairman of the Vigilant Committee of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad.

I had no idea that The Underground Railroad Records ran to more than 1,000 pages, but it makes sense as 1,000 narratives and letters are represented in its pages. It can be difficult to read because so many of those escaped had to leave children, spouses, parents, and siblings behind.

William Still’s own birth family is a case in point. His parents were enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, out of which came also the sainted Harriet Tubman. His father, Levin Steel, was able to buy his freedom and make his way to New Jersey. His mother, Sidney, escaped with the four oldest children, but they were caught and returned to enslavement. She tried again, this time just bring two daughters and leaving her sons behind. Those sons were sold down to Mississippi and eventually to Alabama, where the younger son died in bondage.

William was born free in New Jersey when his father changed their surname to Still. Sidney changed her name to Charity. Years later, when William was working for the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, he interviewed an escaped slave named Peter. Peter was his oldest brother. It took numerous hazardous attempts to escape; he was caught and returned to slavery several times. Even after a successful escape, he returned to Alabama to try to free his wife. That too took several attempts and cost the life of a white man named Seth Concklin who had actually gotten Peter’s wife and children as far as Vincennes, Indiana, before they were all caught. Concklin’s body was found in a river chained and beaten.

The ways in which enslaved people managed to free themselves are as diverse and canny as the people themselves. Many were able to buy passage on a steamboat but were forced to hide in the engine area for days on end. People found themselves wedged into a small, hot, fetid, noisy area and just when they thought they couldn’t endure more, learned that a storm had caused the boat to go off-course and it would take longer than expected.

One of the most famous escapes, about which children’s books have been written, is that of Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself to Philadelphia. With the aid of a friend he was packed up in a crate and off he went. He didn’t think he’d survive it, but he did.

And of course there is that woman named Harriet, who returned to Maryland over and over again and brought 60 people out of their captivity. Anyone who went with her had to be unimaginably brave because she made it clear that if someone didn’t want to continue, they would die by her own gun. She couldn’t afford to have anyone caught and tortured into revealing information about her network.

William Still left a remarkable legacy, not only in his narratives, but also through his children with his wife Letitia. Caroline Matilda Still was one of the African-American women doctors I the country. William Wilberforce Still became a prominent lawyer. Robert George Still was a journalist, and Frances Ellen Still was an educator.

William Still lobbied for eight years to successfully desegregate Philadelphia’s public transportation. He organized a YMCA for Black children, participated in the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a founding member of a church, and helped establish a mission school.

When he died in 1902 at the age of 81, The New York Times hailed him as the Father of the Underground Railroad.

Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was hanged by the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, has been much on my mind since we learned in 2018 of concentration camps for Immigrants.

In the last six months, I have often whispered his name when learning of new depredations by the administration that have cost more than 150,000 American lives. Since the end of May, of course, Bonhoeffer has been on my mind daily.

Last night, I embarked on a four-month study of Christian Ethics and Racism offered by Bexley Seabury Theological Seminary and using as a main text Reggie Williams’s book, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. Though written in 2014, it has much to teach us today.

Dr. Williams’s thesis is that Bonhoeffer would never have been hanged at Flossburg Prison in April 1945 if not for his meeting Black Jesus in the culture of Harlem and particularly at the Abyssinian Baptist Temple under the tutelage of the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Harlem is a short walk up the street from Union Theological Seminary, where Bonhoeffer was a Sloane scholar in 1930-31.

I’ve read some of Bonhoeffer’s books over the years and waded through a very long biography by Eric Metaxas. If not for Dr. Williams, though, I would not know that before Bonhoeffer’s experiences in Harlem, he himself had begun to take on the nationalist fervor of post-World War I Germany.

For example, writes Dr. Williams, ”Bonhoeffer’s third lecture [to ex-pat Germans in Spain] , entitled ‘Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,’ emphasized German patriotic discipleship, with Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on loyalty to the superior German peoples, or Vὅlker:”

Then he quotes Bonhoeffer himself: “Should not a Volk experiencing God’s call on its own life in its own youth and in its own strength, should not such a people be allowed to follow that call, even if it disregards the lives of other people?” The emphasis is mine.

To say this was a shock to me is putting it mildly. How was it that years of book study groups and a 1,000+-page biography never mentioned this?

When I’d calmed down, I thought of the parallels of Germany in that era with the Confederate States post-Civil War. Germany was in a shambles after World War I. Instead of searching its national conscience to reflect on its own responsibility and what it had reaped from its own bellicosity, though, the country doubled down on its nationalism. Nationalism is based on looking out for number one and to hell with the “other.” With the rise of uber-nationalism in the form of Hitler and the Nazi Party, the majority of German citizens were easily persuaded that the others in their midst, the Jews, the Romas, the gays, the developmentally disabled, could be erased from the Fatherland.

Since the South had already decided that those they had enslaved were subhuman, it wasn’t difficult for people to be reconciled to the now freed slaves being lynched after the First Reconstruction failed. Even the “well-meaning whites” that Howard Thurman describes in The Luminous Darkness weren’t moved to go outside of the pattern of Jim Crow laws. Tragically, the Great Migration unveiled the hidden bigotry of the North and so up to this present day we see physical and cultural lynchings in all parts of the country.

Learning about Black Jesus transformed Bonhoeffer’s earlier theology from one that sees God as favoring certain groups of people to a God who, by the Cross and by the Incarnation, endows all people with the mystical body of the Christ. A suffering Black Jesus is the Cosmic Christ that calls out to suffering people of all faiths and traditions or no faith at all. The incarnational Jesus of the Gospels reaches out only to the oppressed and/or marginalized, really. He does not minister to the Pharisees or the other elites, but to the peasants held in thrall by Caesar’s yoke.

It was the Black Jesus that opened Bonhoeffer’s eyes to the pure evil of Hitler’s progression to the Final Solution. To say that what he had learned also brought him to a place where he would face the fires of Hell to rid the world of that pure evil may seem an anomaly, but we know that it did.

Harlem’s Black Jesus gave Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators the strength to draw a line in the sand.

Hmmmm.

Note: The featured image is a painting by Harlem Renaissance painter William H. Johnson

My John Lewis

Though I use the word “my,” this is not about me but about the extraordinary human being John Lewis was.

When I first went to the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, I was more than excited to see that Mr. Lewis would be one of the featured authors because March #1 came out that year.

My sister had been going for years when the Festival was held on the Mall. This was the first year it would be held in the Walter Washington Conference Center.

I posted on Facebook that I was determined to meet Mr. Lewis. Sally, my sister, laughed and said, “Do you know how many people there will be at this event? There’s no chance you’ll meet him.”

I didn’t exactly stalk him, but I made sure I would be scoping out the area around the ballroom where he would be speaking at least a half-hour before hand.

As I trotted up the final staircase, I just happened to look to my right and there was Mr. Lewis surrounded by young people from his district!

I joined them, trying to fit in despite my having at least 40 years on any of them and, in most cases, being much shorter than anyone else – except Mr. Lewis.

I finally made my move and threw my cellphone to one of the young people and asked them to take a picture of me and Mr. Lewis. By then I had no idea what to say to him, until I blurted out, “Mr. Lewis, I thank God for the day you were born!”

With a sort of sigh, he threw his arms around me and hugged me in the most beautiful embrace. I would say I had been touched by an angel, but in fact, according to Time Magazine, I was being hugged by a saint.

The magazine called Mr. Lewis a living saint in the 1960s. It was not a casual comment in an article, but a carefully thought-out homage to a very young man in his 20s. Can you imagine having to live up to that? And yet he did.

Recently, on my once-a-week return from the grocery store, I noticed a billboard with giant figures of meerkats. It was an advertisement for a pest control company. My very first reaction was to say aloud to myself, “They’re not the pests; we are.” How much destruction and violence and horror have we humans brought to this beautiful creation that the Bible says we are stewards of? Genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” hate crimes, out-of-control wars and human-caused famines, babies in cages, the crimes of humankind are so many.

And yet. And yet, there is John Lewis. There is Elijah Cummings. There is CT Vivian and MLK Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer and Oskar Schindler and Elie Wiesel and Abraham Heschel and Howard Thurman and more who spent their lives, and risked their lives, to show us that yes, there are better angels of our natures out there.

I heard historian Jon Meacham, who wrote a biography of Mr. Lewis, say twice over the weekend that, though he could not agree with him, Mr. Lewis truly believed that God’s kingdom could come on earth as it is in heaven. Since Jesus told us this was so, many Christians still don’t believe it. It’s only in recent years that I began to understand the profundity of what Jesus said and to believe it with my whole heart.

Mr. Lewis’s extraordinary life was a living out of the desire to bring the Kingdom of God to earth. As people contemplate who will carry the torch farther, I say it is up to each and every one of us to fight the good fight every day to bring God’s commonwealth of peace and freedom to our fragile island home, this blue marble that spins around the sun.

To repeat Mr. Lewis’s words, “If not now, when?”

Breath of Life or Death?

Three years ago, I preached on Pentecost Sunday at my church.

In the week preceding that Sunday, a terrorist attack in London wounded or killed some 35 people; at least 90 women and children died in a terrorist attack in Kabul and several more killed at a funeral; two men were stabbed to death by a white supremacist in Oregon for defending young Muslim women, and African-American college student Richard Collins III was fatally stabbed by a white supremacist on his college campus.

And once again, in the week before Pentecost, George Floyd’s breath was quite literally taken from him in a brazen murder committed by police.

Many commentators have noted the tragic relationship between those who are dying of COVID-19 who cannot breathe and Mr. Floyd’s death by asphyxiation. The vast majority of the nearly 110,000 citizens who have died would not have died if not for the criminally inept non-action of the so-called president. Mr. Floyd need not have died either, but for the criminally inept policing of the Minneapolis police.

For many priests and pastors, the other tragic irony is that Pentecost is a celebration of the giving of holy breath to the disciples, which turned them into apostles.

And even more ironic, tongues of flame appeared above their heads in the room in which they had been hiding. This emboldened Peter to address the crowd who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot, and as he did, everyone in the crowd, no matter what language they spoke, could HEAR and UNDERSTAND each other.

In the Greek, the Holy Spirit is called “pneuma,” which literally means breath. It came in the form of a great wind, which rushed through the dwelling, clearing away the disciples’ fear and anxiety about when the advocate that Jesus had promised was going to come.

In our 2020 case, wind created by military helicopters hovering over protestors brought down branches that hit some of them and drowned out their pleas for understanding that black lives matter.

It also deafened the cowardly General Mark Milley, who strutted around Washington, DC, in his fatigues checking on his “soldiers” when, in effect, martial law was imposed on the city this week. Of all people, he should have known best about Posse Comitatis Law, which forbids the US Army and Air Force from acts of war on US soil.

And here is yet another tragic irony in this most devastating week. The Law of Posse Comitatis was signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878, supposedly at the “end of Reconstruction.” In fact, Reconstruction was nipped in the bud because the law gave an easy out to secessionist states from having to be held accountable for slavery and the post-Civil War uprising of vigilante groups not just limited to the Ku Klux Klan. President US Grant had allowed a military presence in the South and had virtually destroyed the Klan and its ilk. Hayes was elected as Southerners who had signed the oath of allegiance to the Union were regaining political offices and influence.

So a law that helped to re-create the Ku Klux Klan and other “night riders” and ushered in the Jim Crow era, which still has not ended, is now being breached to quell the descendants of those newly freed people who were in effect re-enslaved when Reconstruction failed.

For Christians, Pentecost symbolizes a holding to account of those in the Jesus Movement to follow  Jesus’s words and actions to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth by raising up the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, binding the wounds of the soul-sick and the physically sick, and living in communion with one another by acknowledging all of us as brothers and sisters.

But on the day after Pentecost, the wannabe dictator in the White House declared war on all of us and then defaced a church by going into, taking a Bible and using it for a photo opportunity.

Lamentation for George Floyd

White men and women have thought of black bodies for centuries as something they can do what they will with.

Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the 13^th Amendment nor the Voting Rights Act nor the institution of a category of felonies called hate crimes has changed this.

Black bodies have only been good for making wealth off of or using as scapegoats for white rage.

How long, O Lord, how long?

The murder of George Floyd was committed in plain sight; the four cops knew exactly what they are were doing. They intended to kill him and they did, right out in public. How can we breathe when he couldn’t?

How long, O Lord, how long?

I fear the pandemic of white supremacy more, a great, great deal more, than I fear COVID-19, though for black bodies, both are methods of genocide.

How long, O Lord, how long?

I woke up today with such a weight of anger, grief, and despair that I could barely move. Prayer time didn’t help. All I wanted to do was post to white policeman, “Keep your fucking hands off black bodies.”

How long, O Lord, how long?

The list of names has gotten so long, we could fill a Vietnam Memorial with them. George, Amadou, Philando, Oscar, Jamal, John, Sandra, Ahmaud, Breona, Emmet, Jordan, Eric, Jimmie Lee, and hundreds of others whose names are recorded at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

This list doesn’t even include the thousands of black bodies who have been killed or neglected in prisons.

How long, O Lord, how long?

When Saul sent men to kill David, David wrote Psalm 59 in lament. When I read verses 1-7 now, I hear the voices of all the black bodies crying from their graves.

59 Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;
protect me from those who rise up against me;

²  deliver me from those who work evil,
and save me from bloodthirsty men.

³  For behold, they lie in wait for my life;
fierce men stir up strife against me.
For no transgression or sin of mine, O LORD, 

⁴  for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.
Awake, come to meet me, and see!

⁵  You,  LORD God of hosts, are God of Israel.
Rouse yourself to punish all the nations;
spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.

⁶  Each evening they come back,
howling like dogs
and prowling about the city.

Not Triage, But Lasting Change Needed

Americans love to think of themselves as charitable people. When disasters strike, news media carries many stories of neighbors helping neighbor and people going out of their way to provide help in times of crisis. It’s beautiful to see, and it brings tears to the eyes.

Yet when fundamental changes that could help make triage unnecessary, or “mutual aid” as it’s now being called, are proposed, society rejects them as unrealistic. Christian churches, even the progressive branches, are often among those who are the first to quote the so-often misinterpreted Scripture, “The poor will always be you.”

It sometimes seems to me that we worship our own good triage deeds more than the Christ who was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, the God in human form who led a non-violent revolution to bring the Good News that we can bring Heaven to Earth.

We can have permanent, safe housing for everyone in this country at truly affordable rents or mortgages, not just rents and mortgages that are deemed affordable by market standards.

We can have guaranteed educational opportunities for every child that doesn’t just teach to tests or make education an apprenticeship for a future job, but also teaches children how to be members of a just and humane society.

We can have safe elections that ensure that every single person eligible can vote without obstacles thrown up in their path.

We can have universal health care that follows citizens from cradle to grave that includes modalities to take care of the whole body and not just its parts.

We can have clean water and air so that none of us has to worry that toxins in our drinking supplies and being spewed into the air will turn our planet into a poisonous dump, killing the incredible variety of life on it including homo sapiens.

We can have a country that builds instruments of peace rather than instruments of war.

We can have a country that values the lives of every single person on these shores regardless of race, ethnic background, creed, and national origin.

So why aren’t more people working for this?

We talk about these matters every Sunday at 6 PM at Freedom Church of the Poor on the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice’s Facebook page. We look at Scripture that gives us a blueprint for how to do it, from the ancient texts of the Torah and the Prophets to the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. We sing together, we pray together, we mourn together, and yes, we laugh and rejoice together.

We are a community that acts in the best interests of our marginalized brothers and sisters because we know that when they are lifted up, we are all lifted up. Some of us are living in poverty or low wealth and have experienced homelessness, and yet we share our experience, strength and hope to lift others up as well. And we call out those who would keep any of our brothers and sisters down.

For many, many years the director of the Kairos Center, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, has lived with, organized with, inspired and ultimately helped change the narrative for marginalized people. She and the priests, pastors, rabbis, and imams associated with the Kairos Center are forming communities much like those formed by Moses and the apostles to share and to show other people how to model God’s dream for us. She is also co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call to Moral Revival.

The Divine doesn’t do triage. The Divine abides within us to guide us to permanent change in how we view ourselves and our brethren on Earth.

I’ve spent much of my life not wanting to be part of any group that would have me for a member. But I am proud, and also humbled, to be accepted into the community of the Freedom Church of the Poor and, by extension, the Poor People’s Campaign, A National Call to Moral Revival. I know I am right where I belong.

Maybe this is where you belong as well! Get a taste of Freedom Church of the Poor here: May 17, 2020

Kairos Center for Religions, RIghts and Social Justice

www.poorpeoplescampaign.org

www.june2020.org

Darkness for the People of the First Light

I’d like to tell you about when I first heard of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

I’d been on Cape Cod for about two months or so in the early 1980s, living aboard a schooner with a dysfunctional man, a German shepherd, and two cats. This will be relevant later.

Somehow, Malcolm had gotten to know a member of the finance board of Mashpee, and so we went to meet her and her husband for drinks one afternoon.

She kept referring to the “Monigs,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. I finally asked. She laughed; “Oh, that’s what we called the Wampanoags – More Nigger than Indian.”

Welcome to white Mashpee. And oh yes, the name Mashpee is derived from Algonquin meaning “great water.”

When I started working for The Enterprise newspaper in Falmouth, I got a lot more education about why so many white people ostensibly hated the Wampanoags, or People of the First Light. It went back to a land suit that the tribe had filed and it went on for years, tying up a lot of developers’ plans.

The next big story, which was the first of its kind I’d come across, involved the police shooting of a young Wampanoag man. The following is from a Maoist (!) website, the only place I could find to refresh my memory.

“On May 1, 1988, David H. Mace, a white police sergeant in the Cape Cod town of Mashpee, Massachusetts, shot and killed David C. Hendricks, a 27 year old Mashpee Wampanoag, following his pursuit of Hendricks’ car for a traffic violation. Sergeant Mace fired eleven shots from his semi-automatic 9-millimeter pistol. Seven struck David Hendricks. … The last five shots were fired at point-blank range through the driver’s side window after the car had stopped. … The Wampanoag and many of their supporters have suffered from police harassment and surveillance during memorial walks and demonstrations for justice concerning the Hendricks case.”

The longer I lived on the Upper Cape, the more familiar I became with members of the Mashpee Wampanoags. The term “tribe” is used loosely, because it was not until 2007 that the Mashpee group received this designation from the US government, despite the fact that they had lived as a tribe in the indigenous sense of the word from ancient days. One hundred fifty acres of the town that was surveyed and incorporated by white folks in 1847 were ancestral lands, yet the Wampanoags had no say or control over them.

Back to the boat, Chantey. Many people assumed Malcolm and I were wealthy because she was such a beautiful boat and kept up very well. She was built in the 1930s on Long Island using oak from a demolished brewery. Only two families had owned her before. The fact was, though, that I was spending almost every penny of my savings and my pay on her, and we did all the work on her ourselves. Every winter I helped schlepp hundreds of pounds worth of masts, gaffs, and spars on foot to a warehouse where they would be sanded down and varnished. I spent one summer just stripping caulk from the deck seams and heating up tar on a propane stove to replace it. I scraped barnacles from the hull and repainted it with red lead paint.

One day a very preppy looking young man stopped to admire Chantey and we got chatting. He invited us to his family’s compound, which was tucked away in Mashpee. I felt very ill at ease, but Malcolm came from a pedigreed family and could bullshit his way around anyone. However, it soon became apparent what our economic situation was, and the young man, actually called Buff day, soon lost interest in us.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s when a hotshot real estate developer, who had already bought up and developed prime seashore land in Mashpee, bought a mini-mall and decided to create a new Mashpee by building a huge complex called Mashpee Commons. His name was Buff. How many Buffs have I ever known? Just the one.

It seemed like a further slap in the face to the Wampanoags. Buff’s premise was that Mashpee didn’t have a center and therefore didn’t create community. “It will put Mashpee on the map,” he avowed, though the land suit and the killing of David Hendricks had already done that. Cape Cod Life Magazine called it the “heart” of Mashpee.

Capitalism as heart. Fancy stores that local people cannot afford to shop in. Condominiums that local people cannot afford. Never mind the heart of the Mashpee Wampanoags and their years-long fight for their lands and their status as a tribe. Never mind the hearts of the Hendricks family, who never received justice for David’s killing. The policeman was on full salary of $75,000 for five years while not working before he left the all-white force. All attempts to try David Mace for murder went for naught.

So when the Trump Administration’s Department of the Interior in February informed the tribe that it was disestablishing its lands when it was becoming increasingly clear that a world-wide pandemic was going to hit the US like a bludgeon, it got national attention and outrage. It represents yet another broken treaty, in essence, where treaties should not have had to be made in the first place. They are the legacy of “Manifest Destiny” and the white man’s push to own an entire continent rather than share it with the human beings who lived here already.

What I have not found through Googling stories about this situation are any expressions of sympathy from the white residents of Mashpee. Yes, I could have missed them, but my sense is that there would have been a lot of press if the town’s establishment had made its support unequivocal.

I do recommend a work that I found on line, MashpeeIndiansofCapeCod, the thesis of one Mark A. Nicholas presented in 2001 for his Master of History at Lehigh University.

 

CORVID-19 Treatment Must Be Free

Part of the money allotted by Congress to address the CORVID-19 pandemic should be for free screening and treatment.

And someone should be appointed, though not by the White House, to monitor the areas of the country where screening kits are being sent and ensure that the poorest areas get them in a timely and equitable manner.

In addition, CDC specialists should be allowed into all border concentration camps to screen people there throughout the length of this latest crisis. I do not trust the CBP or ICE at all not to introduce the virus on purpose. I hate to think that way, but that’s the country we’ve become.

Because the Poor People’s Campaign is on my mind daily, my first thought in the past week was whether people who live in poverty or low wealth would present themselves for screening if they have no insurance to cover the costs that hospitalization and quarantine could rise to.

Even for the so-called elderly, Medicare has high co-pays and uncovered costs if you can’t afford a supplemental plan.

I’m not a scientist, obviously, but I will hazard an educated guess that people living with the stress of staring into the jaws of poverty have compromised immune systems, which would make them easy pickings for any new disease going around.

Since self-reporting when one has symptoms is good citizenship, because it can contain the virus, then free medical care just makes sense and will ensure that no one is left behind.

As for where screening kits are sent, because of the slow and ignorant response to the virus shown by the White House, there is a shortage of such kits. Again, I hate thinking it, but I wouldn’t be surprised (especially after reading Dark Towers by David Enrich about Deutsche Bank) if corruption in the form of bribery for kits is not tried to attain them by wealthy enclaves.

The kits need to be acquired in ample numbers and distributed as soon as possible to rural areas where there are no hospitals and inner-city clinics as well as to more affluent areas. States need to be monitored as well, again by an independent agency, to make sure the states are distributing the kits equitably.

What about the homeless? How will they be screened and/or treated if they are not living in shelters? Will the prejudice against them borne by the immoral narrative that they are responsible for the systemic poverty that affects them hold sway? Or will trained medical teams be dispatched to areas under bridges and other homeless encampments to bring what could be life-saving help?

It is difficult to read and hear news about CORVID-19 without getting panicky. Panic can lead to the most selfish acts human beings can perpetrate. At this point, containing the panic could be as important as containing the virus. I don’t mean that agencies should soft-sell the news and pretend it’s not a big deal, but straight, practical information is important.

I haven’t even mentioned yet my fear of the stupid stock market plunges and how they will be used to raise prices on many common items whether legitimate or not.

In the end, any crisis of this kind will have a worse impact on the poor. Do not let them be forgotten. And think about joining the Poor People’s Campaign and helping us get our demands met. www.poorpeoplescampaign.org

 

I Will Not Pray for Evil

1. Cynical use of Black people for political ends
2. Sympathy for White Supremacists
3. More lies in SOTU than can be counted
4. Vindictive (and illegal) retaliation against people who testified in impeachment hearings
5. Arrangement with DOJ to open investigation on Bidens.
6. Arrangement with DOJ to have top prosecutor removed from Michael Flynn case and replace with hand-picked person who asked for indefinite delay of sentencing
7. Proposed budget that continues to cut safety nets and increase even further the DOD budget.
8. Plans to deport thousands of Hmong people from Wisconsin who settled here under a program that acknowledged that they cannot safely live in Laos.

These eight actions occurred between last Tuesday and today. I have not yet dared to look at today’s news.

We officially have a regime now, not an administration, which means we do not have a democracy.

We can no longer ensure that by November 3, elections will even exist in this country as we know them. We cannot have any faith that in January of 2021 the dictator in the White House will leave it, even if someone else is freely elected.

Watch out for people disappearing, because that is the next step in a dictatorship.

Nancy Pelosi, you are a better woman than I am.

I cannot, I will not, and I choose not to pray for the evil person who is at the heart of this.

I would not have prayed for Hitler, Stalin, Trujillo, Baby Doc Duvalier, Idi Amin, or any of the other evil dictators who have caused so much suffering on this earth, as I do not pray for Putin or Kim Jong Un or Bashar Al-Assad or Rodrigo Duterte or Mohammed Bin-Salman.

I can only pray for justice and the people who suffer from injustice under such regimes. I can only pray for the lifting up of leaders and the continued work of the prophets among us. I can only pray for an end to corruption and venality.

As much as anything that has scared me in the last week was the chilling speech given at the National Prayer Breakfast, which made a mockery of God and prayer, and the enthusiastic applause by many attendees. Trump Prayer Breakfast Speech

The voice even sounded satanic as it growled out its lies about its enemies. Its enemies are anyone who has any sense of compassion or justice or mercy. That is the voice of a person who believes he is above God. That is the voice of a person who has damned himself and wants to cause others to be damned along with him.

I will not pray for that voice or the person it belongs to or the people who enable it and support it through their own crimes.

I will not pray for Incarnate Evil. If that makes me any less in Jesus’s eyes, so be it. I accept that, but I will not budge.