i went to a store yesterday. The first time, in over one year. Into a store. 2 stores, actually. This pic is taken from the side parking lot of the Dollar Store. I went there first. got Dawn dishsoap and AAA batteries. In the middle of the pic is Lakeside Grocery. I've talked about it a lot in the past. not for a year. I had run out of coffee. it's not time for an online grocery pick up that Alyssia has been doing during this year, that we will continue with on going. i hadn't put coffee on my list. For the first time in over a year, i could go mySelf. I rehearsed over and over. The routine i would follow, like the spray alcohol bottle in my purse...the debit card. and so forth. so many so forths. I chose With My Eyes a Bell Pepper. Got wine. Cheeto Puffs, English Muffins and coffee. Not the kind i like, but a dark roast that's ok. It wasn't busy. it went well. Shopping's not all it's cracked up to be. Everyone kept a distance. and of course, the mask. The guy behind me in the cashier line with plexiglass, put his stuff on the belt and the young cashier said "when you put your mask on, i'll ring you up". He mumbled, she stood there. She repeated and he pulled up some kind of kerchief over one ear, hanging down, continued crabbing, she stood there, he pulled it up and she began ringing him up. All this time i'm figuring out how to spray my card, hands and the bag. no one else in the store paid any attention to us. We were a vignette. There's a sign on the door outside saying something about no mask no service.
this is where i live. In the first pic you can see on the far left a traffic light. Through that light and maybe about 2 blocks you turn onto Old Olive. Go down only so many tenths of a mile and turn onto Carefree Way...come up maybe 2 blocks to this gate. The Goats were waiting. It's all pretty simple. Where, How, i live. That morning, before everything else, i read a CNN news analysis by John Blake entitled The Look In Derek Chauvin's Eyes Was Something Worse Than Hate. if you google the key words it will come up for you to read. April 23. In it he quoted Holocaust Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel. "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference" He went on to say that to the indifferent person, "his or her neighbors are of no consequence....Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction." John Blake said..."perhaps no other feature of White attitudes....is as cumulatively responsible for the pain and privation experienced by our nation's Black Minority at this point in our own history as is indifference." He ends with..."Indifference...not hate...may be the biggest obstacle to police reform."
i thought about this all day and the flash of recognition that ROSE UP with that word...Indifference..... only grew. Why don't we talk about all this on our blogs? Why do i hesitate to put all this here? i have no answer to the first question, to the second question...because it might be uncomfortable for people. and i want to give people who read here some kind of love. Some kind of .......well....love. So...what's the deal, grace....??????
more than the biggest obstacle to police reform, it feels to me that Indifference might be the greatest obstacle to Human Justice. Elie Wiesel said it. Indifference. We were exhausted by the Trial. and then we were hit in the face by more killings. We wanted a break. Some of us will take a break. Some can't. They will live their lives same old same old...in Fear. For their children, their men. Everyday. i looked at a photograph, that iconic one, of Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy being led to jail in Birmingham. I never looked so closely before. He looks so small. The look on his face....resolute even if it meant his death, his suit jacket over his arm....and all this time has passed. and good old Rev. Al has to keep repeating that Daunte Wright came from a good family, came from a good American family, as if that would be in question....BECAUSE It AUtoMATICALLY IS because he is BLACK and pulled over and was afraid. If my grandson, Jeff, who is now a Journeyman Electrician, who goes on work calls all over Sacramento, to and into all kinds of homes, with his young for all practical purposes Blackness was mistakenly identified and detained and somehow didn't feel his innate confidence and became afraid, if he tried to get away and was killed....it could be my family that is said to be a good family.
and it's strange. Because i don't really worry about him. I think of him as Jeffrey. the little kid who has grown to be a man. Just Jeffrey. But i Should. and that's part of the Indifference i look at in my Self. That somehow i think because he is mine, he's outside all that. This startles me. Indifference is a strange thing. My heart is in the right place, right??????? Always has been, right??????
Indifference.
Every child is mine. Every man is mine. I am every mother. This part here, about my Jeffery, came only AS I AM WRITING THIS...in this instant....i'd not even really thought about it before. Which makes it all the more something i need to .....uhhh..... face. It's not Others. I am Others, Others are me. HOW CAN WE DO THIS?????????????????????????????????????
