I do understand defunding the police,it’s the “thoughts and prayers” that I found amusing. Anyway, I didn’t make the meme, just shared it. My mistake.

illimae, I have just been trying to convince a bunch of Arkansas rednecks to wear a mask. Our number of cases has gone from 790 on April 1 to 18,062 less than 90 days later. I'm a bit twitchy.

Friends?

Illimae, your meme reminded me of the first time I voted after moving to Colorado. One of the candidates for Sheriff was running as a Libertarian. I could only imagine it:

“You say someone’s breaking into your house? Well as Libertarians, we’re following strict policies of non-interference. So.... You’ve got a gun, right?”

Yes, friends. I’ve got tough skin, lol. It’s a tough time for anyone these days, I think.

They made fireworks illegal within the city of Seattle. They didn't completely go away, but there are far fewer. Every dog and cat in the city was grateful.

Ananda, here’s one for your rednecks, lol

Hey There: I just want to say how appalled and saddened I am about what is happening in the US. It is said the the Roman Empire actually took centuries to collapse totally. If 45 gets in again the USA will fall off the cliff by the end of the eight years of his tyranny, bigotry, stupidity, cruelty . I have more adjectives but .......

I have a friend in Seattle who I love like a sister but I don't want our border to open until the USA gets a grip on itself. Yesterday BC had 170 active cases. Unfortunately there were three deaths at LTC facilities. We are in the position now to go to Phase III. I hope we don't screw it up.

I find myself absolutely gobsmacked by the Repugnicians in the Senate. Do they have no moral compass at all? How can they claim Christian values? And Pence lying through his teeth about flattening the curve! If I believed in God I would be praying fervently every night for an end to all of this. So I just fervently HOPE

It is a pity about Samaritan's Purse. I was not aware of the Evangelical leanings. I had hoped that they actually were Christian in the real sense of the word, doing good deeds because that is what good people do -- not tainted by a twisted religious philosophy.

Be kind. Stay safe. Stay calm (to quote Dr Bonnie Henry - our Chief Medical Health Officer for BC)

magiclight: Wow. That I did not know. So much for good works. What happened to "feed them first,then spread the Gospel" or something like that? You can't help looking after sick people if you are not a straight Christian? My vocabulary fails me at this time.

This is from the christian leaders in Arizona

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtzJhTfQiMA&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0j5rExukYiApVf019KW4fiTe3e0z8ziS0SdgdemQUqmgtiZtR2v1SiDd8

She actually touched on a much darker subject - the Earth will carry on just fine.

http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia

(Warning: a little strong language at the end)

This is a very slow thread. It always has been. I thought it might be a bit energyzing if we each posted an article, essay, book review, movie clip that interested us. I promise to read what ever is posted even if it seems strange or not something I would be interested in. I'll know you agree when you post something.

Here is an essay that moved me. It's titled, "How to Sell Your Rape" by Lacy Crawford. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/opinion/lacy-crawford-memoir-rape.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

If you can't access this for any reason, let me know and I will post the entire essay.

I belong to a living history club that focuses on the middle ages and renaissance. This video made me want to make vinegar so badly! I already make a drinking syrup (sekanjabin) that uses vinegar, so this played directly into my interests.

Anti-Brewing - Making vinegar at home

rc

Here's her op-ed. I find it such a powerful and moving story.

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

By Caroline Randall Williams

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of "airbrushing" history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn't understand. You cannot say it wasn't my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don't just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I've got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma's Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I'm called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, "Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach." It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here's the thing: Our ancestors don't deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person's reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body's story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of "Lucy Negro, Redux" and "Soul Food Love," and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

Divine I loved that piece too. Powerful. Embodying history.