racism

Truth or consequences?

/ njmyers / 2 Comments

According to my daughter-in-law’s amazing daily reports on Facebook we are some 123 days into limbo/hibernation, and that is what it still feels like to me because I’m staying pretty much hunkered down. Most days it doesn’t bother me but last night I felt dreadful, full of dread. The president and his minions seem increasingly deranged and so many people have invested their identities in following him. I could say they have drunk the Koolaid if that weren’t so macabre. That is a bit extreme but not much.

The effect of this going on so long and getting so bad is that it has given everyone time to get entrenched in their own views. Continue reading →

Racism and poison ivy

/ njmyers / 11 Comments

During the pandemic of Covid-19 I have had a lot of time to think and read. I have also had a lot of time to spend in my garden.

When I am tired of thinking and reading, I am happy to go out into my big landscape garden and pull weeds. Since it is newly planted it has a lot of weeds. I do this in the morning before it gets hot. This takes up any morning energy I might have for writing, so, as a result, I haven’t been blogging recently–which is just as well, because with all that is happening I feel like I have nothing to say, nothing at all to add.

I really felt I had nothing unique to say about that other pandemic of racism and police violence that has captured our national awareness in the last several weeks on top of, because of, along with Covid-19. Could this at last be a transformative moment? Can the biggest mass movement this nation has ever experienced be sustained? How will that happen?

It was just too much to contemplate. And then poison ivy showed up and became my teacher. Continue reading →

Violence, racism, and presidential politics

/ njmyers / 1 Comment

We South Bend, IN residents are getting a ground-level look at the big issues of the day. The fact that our mayor is running for president, and doing surprisingly well, has drawn national attention to what goes on here, good things but mostly bad things.

Like shootings. Like racism exacerbated by police misconduct.

Yesterday I attended a town hall meeting at a local high school, widely reported in the national media, about a shooting of a black man by a white police officer. Continue reading →

Traychon

/ njmyers / 4 Comments

So this happened a week ago Sunday night, at around 10 pm as we were watching a movie at home: a pop-pop-pop that might have been gunshots or firecrackers. Fifteen minutes later I looked out a kitchen window and saw police cars, lights flashing, crime-scene tape, cops with flashlights behind our long backyard, in the street and in a parking lot that belongs to a business at the back edge of our property. Definitely, it had been shots.

Continue reading →

#HimToo?

/ njmyers / 2 Comments

Today one of my favorite senators resigned in the face of charges of sexual harassment. Pinching, butt- and breast-squeezing, forced smooching–moves familiar to most women. Not rape, for sure. Not seduction of teenagers. Just opportunistic grabbing. “He was quick,” said one recipient of Al Franken’s unwanted attentions. “He knew what he was doing.”

Did he know what he was doing? Continue reading →