The Fire Next Time

This issue:  'Deep thoughts' from an angry old white Suthin'a: man...

Early 1960, James Baldwin...a gay black man wrote and published this book...'that title'! The Fire Next Time (early 1960s) - Prescient? 2020?

"...People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.."

"...The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men..."

"....The videos of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks dying have combined with the vulnerability caused by COVID-19 and the feeling that the country is broken.. 'to bring us all to the brink of madness'.. and, apparently, to the precipice of significant change. 

     An odd admixture, but an understandable consequence of our troubled times. We now face a moral reckoning: Americans have to decide whether this country will truly be a multiracial democracy or whether to merely tinker around the edges of our problems once again and remain decidedly racist and unequal.We have been here before. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others risked everything to persuade the country to live up to its stated ideals and to rid itself of the insidious view that white people..."

)By Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Time Magazine, June 25, 2020 AM EDT.)

       The Brink of Madness - SILENCE IS.... BETRAYAL?......Hmmm?               No question here! It is uncomfortable isn't it:..'putting ourselves out there'. (Safer to stay home and rage at the television). Just remember - Just remember -silence is betrayal.

           Silence is approval, acquiescence - to evil.  'Let someone 'else' make our case? So -  We are 'letting Trump and 'his people win'..perhaps? Are we not?. 'They' are not silent are they? They are what Ken likes to call: "The Great Loud, Commanding MAJORITY of the US 'Racist Minority'. They're loud. They're racists to very core of their white black souls - but they sound like 'a majority'.                                                                                                                                                             .             America at the CROSSROADS

      Will anything we say or do..change one acist Republican's mind? NO. If anything, each and everyone of them is becoming more hardened in the angry beliefs towards Blacks, Hispanics, 'Muuuuzzlims' (down where I live the emphasis is on the Muuuuzzz..) generally, against all people of color and those 'who talk funny' - foreign accent.. ('They ain't one of us!")

  

     In the coming days, I fear these types of photos will become too commonplace each night in our news...The racial decide - 'appears'  to be greater than ever? ....Red Ants VS Black Ants. In nature, when the two cross paths? They kill each other. 

Are we seeing indication of that intense emotion-level.. 'some' of that now?..Will this 'discordant' atmosphere go away soon? I hope so. I feel otherwise.

Ernest Hemingway, a great writer, master of 'short-concise' black-white; a complex, flawed, man later in life troubled  man...as so many great writers were...Is one of my Icons:
"/Sometimes life breaks us, then - we come back stronger in the broken places"'

Putin paid large 'Bribes' to Afghan civilians, soldiers to assassinate, kill US soldiers in times of  lulled fighting. Quite a few collected...The CIA informed Trump TWICE..April, early May...in the Daily Intel briefing ..two times. ..Trump said nothing.

Every day...I think about it: "I know people who not only voted for this traitor and Troll...They still support him!