Too many things kicking around in the ol' noggin the past couple of days.
Ideas ranging from expansive essays on "American Corporate Welfare and The US Military" to just thinking about all the dead and dismembered humans - especially of our young men and women losing much more than their youth and innocence over there.
All eyes on reconstruction ...?
How do we know? How are we supposed to know?
We've all been at the Crime Scene or a Sporting Event and then read the local newspaper's rendering of "what happened that night." We've all cried BullSh*t when we knew the cars were white or the guy's toe REALLY was on the line - the Ref missed it.
Then there's the Return of The Central Park Jogger. I'm sure glad we all got that news story right. A nice gaggle of black and Hispanic youth ("Oh, I'm sure they were a bunch of criminals - anyway they confessed ") got their sentences overturned last December - no matter they got to serve all their time in prison for a crime they didn't commit.
The subtext and the Giant Other Shoe to Drop here is amazing. If you are of color and wealthy White America is wronged - we'll find some of you and beat and torture (litterally) confessions out of you. If it was the good ol' days and you happened to be in the passing circus at the time of the rape of a white woman, you would get lynched (if you know that somewhat obscure reference - you know your history better than I do).
If you're brown, you are criminals. All you N***ers and Sand N***ers and Mexican N***ers are all the same. If you didn't do it, you probably did it in the past or you'll do it in the future. So we're just doing our job and getting you off the street now, to save our communites some grief down the road. (Sound familiar?)
Fascinating the response when one of Wealthy White America's own (go ahead, you can include Oprah Winfrey in that rubric - it's OK) gets raped, sodomized and beaten into a coma. I DO NOT belittle what happened to this woman, God help (or not) the man who committed this attrocity.
I simply question why it is we find it the story so emotional, wrong and absolutely horrific when it happens to a pretty white investment banker, when the same horrific crap happened three times inside of a week (if memory serves) to women of color in their own homes within 10 blocks of "The Central Park Jogger Incident."
We don't hear about that stuff, though do we?
Now, a few days after the anniversary of the death of Dr. King and his unspoken speach to the group of striking union garbage workers, (and the University of Michigan with the possible "death" of affirmative action) "I have a dream ..." still sings with hope, but is shrouded in opined, borrowed and outright stolen darkness.
