love what you do
doing what I love
Unless my mind goes out for recess, this could wander, a stroll in the dark, but which is better than standing alone far from home, beside a highway in the dark. Breakfast, yes, though on first arising, black & dark, one sqyare of TJ’s 73%, bitter but not too bitter, while perusing news from online sites, it’s not good, the news is never good, if news were good nobody would read it, we like to read bad news, we don’t like bad news, but we like to read bad news.
Unless my mind goes out for recess, this could wander, a stroll in the dark, but which is better than standing alone far from home, beside a highway in the dark. Breakfast, yes, though on first arising, black & dark, one sqyare of TJ’s 73%, bitter but not too bitter, while perusing news from online sites, it’s not good, the news is never good, if news were good nobody would read it, we like to read bad news, we don’t like bad news, but we like to read bad news.
May come back and read more about Germany, an emerging political issue, possibly crisis, that the PM can’t form a ruling majority, Germany and Germans showing their true colors, extreme right of hatred. Jiminy, what am I saying, we have it here too; as well as of human bigotry, it’s born of fear, every facet of fear, those who are different from us are a threat to all that we are and know, and we want them gone even though there are fewer of us earthlings on this earth than there are galaxies in this universe alone. We don't realize how fragile and insignificant we are in the greater scheme.
But breakfast. Three brown eggs, Linda pays extra for eggs from hens that are foot loose and peck up bugs, I used to watch chickens do that in the chicken pen that my grandmother Mom always had in the back yard. When I buy eggs, which is forbidden anymore, I buy jumbo white eggs at WalMart for like 69¢ a carton of 18. White or brown, I don’t care, except that the shells of brown eggs seem harder to crack, thicker and more like trying to crack porcelain. Three eggs cooked one at a time in olive oil, fiddled with underneath so they don’t stick to the cast iron skillet, flipped over, I like runny yolk so it soaks in my toast but cannot stand runny eggwhite.
Cast iron skillet because when we bought 7H we replaced the kitchen appliances (using some strangers' refrigerator is to me like using their toothbrush too), and the stove is one of those induction ranges that heats instantly and only takes iron, no stainless steel, no aluminum, no copper, only iron.
Cast iron skillet because when we bought 7H we replaced the kitchen appliances (using some strangers' refrigerator is to me like using their toothbrush too), and the stove is one of those induction ranges that heats instantly and only takes iron, no stainless steel, no aluminum, no copper, only iron.
Toast is thin wholewheat, 40 calories a slice, two slices spread with olive oil and toasted in the toaster-oven while I fry eggs. The olive oil I bought at TJs last week when we were in Tallahassee because Consumer Reports rated Trader Joe’s California Estate tops. It’s fine, fairly green tasting, bit peppery, but fine with me. I bought two bottles, and I’m not one of these characters who thinks you have to use up the other bottle before opening the new one. Jiminy again, life is too alphabet short.
In the news: tearing down the Bay Hi building? After what was done to our beautiful, artistic and magical bit of history, I couldn’t care less what they do to the obscenity that replaced it.
Ray and a friend arrived for the bed set yesterday, Simmons BR king with pillow top, box springs, bedframe. SleepCenter is to bring the replacement, sofa thing they call a futon (we lived in Japan for three years and know dee-well what a futon is and this ain’t it, but that’s what SC calls it). When Joe called me over the weekend I told him and he said he has one and it’s unsleepable, so yesterday Linda went out and bought a thick foam thing to go on top of the quote futon unqyote. I will now have a room, space of my own, to put a desk and pay my bills and sometimes write my rubbish.
During my predawn online browsing I used one of my monthly ten to open a NYT OpEd about protests, which I then did a copy&paste to put the article on this blogpost (below, scroll down). I’m a flag person, for one flag only and it's not the Confederate battleflag) but I’m not an ignorant stupid damn fool. The kneeling protest that has grown up and that likely will shortly die out because it's not incurring the sympathy that a well thought out protest would, is not disrespectful to the flag as the asinine ISDFs allege in their determination to not understand the plight of others. The kneeling is a legitimate, constitutionally protected protest of inhuman conditions here in the nation (that the flag represents). So the NYT OpEd struck a note, maybe a chord, with me. The night I was a black man. It was summer 1954, I was almost 19, a rising sophomore at the University of Florida, home on summer vacation. I rode the bus, Trailways or Greyhound IDK, a late night ride from PC to Birmingham, to see a cardiologist about a heart murmur that didn’t get the best of me until I was 75. I took a window seat on the left side in the middle of the bus. When we stopped in Marianna, lots of people got on, including mostly black people. They crowded toward the back of the bus, per law and custom, filled seats from back forward. I was sitting alone and motioned for a black mother holding her baby to sit. “Are you sure?” her husband asked. I said yes and she sat down next to me holding the infant, her husband standing. Some miles north of Marianna, just after the bus came out on US231, the driver looked in the mirror and the bus slammed to a halt. The driver, stereotypical burly filthy Southern white trash essobee, came charging to the middle of the bus, stopped and pointed at me (I’ve told this story once before on this blog). “You! Come sit up front.” “I’m fine,” I retorted. “You come up front.” “No, I’m fine,” sezz I. “You do what I say, come sit up front right now or I’ll put you off this bus.” If I had been Alessandro in Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, I surely would have allowed myself to be thrown off the bus as a matter of honor and protest, as Alessandro did in the story that lasted the rest of his life. But alone and a coward, instead of standing by myself maybe with my suitcase, alongside a highway GOK where, in the pitch black dark of night and wondering WTF now, I may have spent the rest of my life, I got up from my seat, every passengers' eye on my bright red face, and moved to the front of the bus. It was my best of all possible lessons in life, experiencing what life is like being confronted, embarrassed, humiliated because of my race. It was, in my heart and mind, the night I became a black man, submitting to whitey and hating his ignorant bigoted guts then, now, and forever. Not dramatic or melodramatic, part of who I became at 18 and still am at 82.
Other things about me at 18 are NOYB.
Cloudy this morning. totally overcast. A ship arrived in this morning’s darkness, tug waiting. Last evening a larger ship arrived in the sunset as I sat by 7H porch rail watching, nibbling cheese and crackers and sipping a glass of red, wearing my orange hat that says “Life is Good.” And on the inside, “Do what you love. Love what you do.”
Life was good. Life Is Good. May life be ever so good for all who come next.
DThos+ in +Time+ and counting
Colin Kaepernick and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Protest
By GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE NOV. 20, 2017
Credit
Matt Rota
LAST week, the editors of GQ named the quarterback Colin Kaepernick its Citizen of the Year for his work protesting racial injustice. Mr. Kaepernick has been heavily criticized by people like President Trump, who claims that an N.F.L. player who kneels during the playing of the national anthem “disrespects our flag” and should be fired; others argue that he is out of bounds as an activist who mixes sports with politics.
The problem is that Mr. Kaepernick’s critics, and most of America, don’t really understand how protests work. Our textbooks and national mythology celebrate moments when single acts of civil disobedience, untainted by political organizations, seemed to change the course of history. But the ideal of the “good” protest — one that materialized from an individual’s epiphany — is a fantasy. More often, effective protest is like Mr. Kaepernick’s: it’s collective and contingent and all about long and difficult struggles.
Consider what most Americans would agree were two “good” protests: Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and the student sit-ins at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. Parks, the story goes, was exhausted from a day’s work and took a seat in the “whites only” section. To the astonishment of onlookers, she refused to give up her seat when asked. In Greensboro, black college students decided to eat at the local five-and-dime and initiated the first sit-in at a segregated Southern restaurant. They were idealistic and perhaps naïve.
These stories follow a set narrative. They are “firsts”: the first time a black woman refused to give up her seat or the first time students staged a sit-in. They seemed to arise spontaneously when someone fed up with unfair treatment couldn’t take it anymore. Good protesters act as individual citizens, untainted by associations with suspect political organizations.
The trouble is that these stories are historically inaccurate and obscure just how protest in the 20th century forged a more democratic country. A narrative with greater accuracy would allow us to better evaluate protests against racial discrimination. Earlier protests, similar to the one that Mr. Kaepernick started, sprang from protesters’ associations with activist organizations, were deeply political rather than individual, and played out in unfamiliar venues in new forms.
Protests that change history have their own long histories. They are almost never the first of their kind. Successful protesters plan campaigns, rather than respond to oppression in a single, spontaneous act. Protesters often belong to organizations that lend theoretical, moral and logistical support. Protests don’t reveal previously hidden wrongs to an unaware public. Instead, they cast those wrongs in a new light. They fail, time and time again. When they succeed, they win only partial victories.
Rosa Parks, for example, was a trained civil rights activist. She built on efforts that started in the 19th century to desegregate transportation and gained speed in the 1930s. In 1940, for example, Pauli Murray, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Petersburg, Va.
Though most Americans today look back on the desegregation of public transportation with pride, most white Southerners opposed it vehemently, and many did so violently. During World War II, white passengers and bus drivers beat uniformed black soldiers who tried to integrate buses.
APhilip Randolph knew that the emergency of war meant that these instances of discrimination ran counter to the nation’s interests. Randolph drew on his long experience as a labor leader to found the March on Washington Movement in 1941. The movement threatened to bring millions of African-Americans to Washington to protest; when President Franklin Roosevelt promised reforms, Randolph called off the march.
Throughout the war, the movement continued to train people who became civil rights protesters in the 1950s, including Pauli Murray. This pressure influenced the Supreme Court in 1946, which ordered desegregation on interstate buses in Morgan v. Virginia. That case set a precedent that Parks strategically worked to extend to local and state laws in Montgomery.
Just as Parks had done, the students sitting-in at the Woolworth counter drew from a long history of struggle. African-Americans had been “stool sitting” since the early 1940s. Howard University students in Washington staged some of the first sit-ins, which involved movement-trained protesters led by Murray. Those sit-ins aimed at national chain stores that operated outside the South, just as the Greensboro sit-ins purposefully did later. The Greensboro students knew all of this, because they were advised by the legendary organizer Ella Baker.
White Americans’ deep investment in the myth that the civil rights movement quickly succeeded based on individual protests has left the impression that organizations such as Black Lives Matter are counterproductive, even sinister. The same things were said of the N.A.A.C.P.
Just as football players kneeling during the national anthem today must repeatedly insist that they are not protesting the flag, Parks and the Greensboro students had to fight against efforts to play down the stakes of their protests. Parks’s action was not about a seat in the front of the bus. It was about Jim Crow, a legal and social system of degradation. And as Baker argued in her speech “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” the Greensboro sit-ins marked the beginning of a fight for education, voting rights and economic opportunity.
Rosa Parks was a hero. So were the students who sat in at the Woolworth lunch counters. But they knew that their heroism was possible only because of decades of what Baker called “spade work.” They knew that organizations to which they belonged and that gave them strength were the most recent manifestations of decades of struggle.☐
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (@GilmoreGlenda) is a professor of history at Yale and a co-author of “These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 21, 2017, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Myth of the ‘Good’ Protest. Today's Paper|Subscribe