The paragraph that read me:

In “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham,” a story by Saki (H.H. Munro), the eponymous politician in a debate on the Foreign Office in the House of Commons remarks that “the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.” The United States is experiencing the same excess. More outrage is being perpetrated and felt than can be contained within the existing frame of institutions and discourses. The image of things bubbling over, of energies and emotions that can no longer be enclosed, is physically manifest on the streets, as those who have been privately confined for so many weeks spill out into the public realm. But what there is too much of is not just present injustice. There is a superabundance of the unresolved past.

Fintan O’Toole

I have started several posts since the dawn of COVID 19 and finished none. I was flooded. Even during the best of times, my vicious internal editor only allows me to measure out my thoughts in coffee spoons. I have to thank O’Toole for naming the flood as a shared condition and freeing me somewhat. I can offer up bits of the the flotsam and jetsam the flood has dislodged for me .

To start, I grew up during the worst of the Civil Rights protests. I would watch African American children being spit upon in Alabama and then attend a school where most of my friends were African American. It was this experience that drove the first wedge into the complacent Republican edifice of my upbringing. I have been in and around the labor movement and distrusted capitalism my whole adult life. But so what? Where the f**k have I really been for the last 50 years? I was living my daily life (being a good consumer) in the comfortable cocoon of white privilege; intellectually dozing.

“White silence has been violence”. Yes. That is a weight I will consciously bear in the hopes that discomfort will keep me more alert to present injustice.