On the Election

I am saying to you, look up

When you are fifty years old and the discussion about the first female president comes up, what will you say about your role in changing history? Did you change history? Or did you equivocate. Your generation has the chance of doing something that no other generation in this country has done. Change the world.

The first Black president and the first woman president in the United States of America in your time, in your time, in your time, in your time and I see you walking around looking at electronic screens, never looking up.

It reminds me of the story (taken from Lawrence Kushner’s God Was in This Place and I, i Did Not Know--thank you Rocky Block) of the parting of the red sea and two young men, Reuven and Shimon, whose experience was different than those who understood the miracle:

Apparently the bottom of the sea, though safe to walk on, was not completely dry, but a little muddy, like a beach at low tide. Reuven stepped into it and curled his lip. “What is this muck?”

Shimon scowled, “There’s mud all over the place!”

“This is just like the slime pits of Egypt!” replied Reuven.

“What’s the difference?” complained Shimon. “Mud here, mud there; it’s all the same.”

And so it went for the two of them, grumbling all the way across the bottom of the sea. And, because they never once looked up, they never saw that the sea had parted. They never understood why on the distant shore, everyone else was singing songs of praise. For Reuven and Shimon, the miracle never happened.

For those of us over 60 years old, that a woman and a black person can be president of the United States in our lifetime is a miracle. I am saying to you, look up from your small screens and be conscious of this historic moment. This moment may never come again in your lifetime. Make history.

Which white person is trustworthy?

And for the Black folks who are wondering about voting. The country is under threat from a fascist, a racist, an Islamophobe, and you dither because Hillary Clinton does not hit the spot that gets you hot.

"Well I don't know she is not trustworthy." (The republican propaganda got into your head.)

"Her husband caused mass incarceration of black people." (No responsibility for all the Black people who wanted and supported this law to reduce crime in the hood and is a far more complex analysis.)

I guess she is not a separate person outside of Bill Clinton. Which white person is trustworthy? You have been voting for them all your lives. How are they more trustworthy than her?

There must be something wrong about her; she has been demonized for 30 years, there must be a reason. She is the most qualified person, the most experienced, colossally boring e mails, really a good and decent person as Bill Weld the Libertarian just said yesterday, and has been called by her opponent a “nasty woman, crooked, criminal, lacking in stamina, a liar,” and is seen negatively by a large percentage of those polled.

There must be something wrong about her, she is qualified, she is white, and she is running against the most sexist candidate to ever run for president. The only thing left for me to identify that makes her different from the other candidates is that she is FEMALE, A WOMAN, The FIRST WOMAN to be nominated by a major party. Yes, that is what is wrong with her. She is a woman running to be president of the United States of America. That this historic moment has been ignored by the media is a reflection of their own shallowness obsessed with the sins of race baiting and preposterousness.

They say that the Black voting turn out looks to be low and if they don't turn out Hillary might lose, and I say then Black people have to save America again!!! Save it from a Fascist and save it for all the white people who are voting for Trump.

The civil rights movement, spawned the feminist movement and the gay movement and gave America the blue print for protest and democracy, so did Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Rosa Parks and Shirley Chisholm. These movements pushed America to be more and gave it a face of inclusion and possibility. It was African Americans that made it possible to have a Black president and it is African Americans who must now once again be the moral force in this country and save it from itself. If we don’t then the knife which has been pulled from our chests a couple of inches will be plunged even deeper. Maybe this time we can save ourselves and get the knife extricated from our bodies.