Notes from the Transition

Last night in downtown Portland Oregon I used to be a poet. So I thought. I impressed the lead beat at the hilltop coffeeshop in Georgetown Who said he was an atheist, then looked around the room to see who was shocked by his admission I used to weave words around fingers around crowds around music, and in and out of wind gusts, and off of the dark edge of moonlight And into the deep moorings of judgement And back again Proud of my self And the looks on their faces when I breathlessly spoke the last word of my poem. I wasn’t a poet at Stanford. The poetry teacher, bemused, took wind of my words and took wind from my sails and…. I didn’t fit into the mold. And yet That’s what poets are supposed to do, right? Buck the system Break the mold Change the world. But we didn’t. It’s twenty years later and here we are. In the streets again chanting and hoping. We were fearless then, we poets. And now must be again. The martyrs of that movem

Across the country, governors and corporate leaders are hoping and pushing for a return to some semblance of normalcy, since COVID-19 disrupted all our lives and sent our economy spiraling. But is a return to ‘normalcy’ really what is needed at this time? I think part of the reason that myself and so many others are heading out to the streets, night after night – even knowing the risk of the pandemic – is that these months of ‘social distancing’ and ‘stay-at-home’ orders have gotten us all thinking about what’s really important. And what we’ve come to realize is that going back to what was ‘normal’ means accepting a society in which black men are shot dead, choked to death and brutalized by police on a regular basis. And we can no longer accept that. We can no longer accept a society that sweeps under the rug the hypocrisy and cruelty of our nation’s founders, that denies the genocide of Native Americans that paved the way for the enslavement of Africans that built the wea

I’ve never had an experience in which calling the police made things better. In every case where I’ve seen them show up, they roll in with bravado, hubris, anger and fear. And in every case I’ve seen and experienced, they make things worse. Been robbed? They don’t care. They’ll make a report, but it’s an annoyance to them, just the necessary paperwork for you to file an insurance claim for what was stolen, if you’re lucky enough to have insurance. Will they go after the robber? Help you deal with the trauma of how unsafe and violated you feel? Ha! Good luck. A car accident? Same thing. Better to just exchange insurance info and take care of it yourselves. If it’s worse than that, medics will arrive. The medics actually help! They calm down the people who’ve just experienced the trauma, they deal with injuries and help address the pain. Police only escalate. They only make things worse. I mean, imagine you’re a young woman who has been raped – would you call the

When the National Guard opened fire at a protest against the Vietnam War at Kent State University in 1970, killing four protesters, it was national news for weeks – and is still remembered fifty years later as a turning point in the anti-war movement. So why, when nearly twice that number of protesters have been killed in the month of daily marches and rallies that have rocked this country, have their murders not made the national media? Could it be for the same reason that the killing of four white students at Kent State received far more widespread news coverage than the two Black students killed at Jackson State by police just eleven days later? That reason, which is the same reason that protests have been taking place across the country in the first place, is that six of the seven people killed at the protests have been Black and Brown men. Their lives apparently do not matter much to the national media, which has ignored their stories and focused instead on sporadic riot

So….let me get this straight. We can’t deploy federal resources or the national guard to provide masks and protective equipment to doctors and nurses fighting a pandemic…. But can mobilize these forces to deploy around the country within 48 hours of the first window breaking at a protest. We can’t put together a coordinated response to actually address COVID19 through widespread testing and contact tracing of the immediate contacts of anyone hospitalized from it – or put in place a detailed plan for reopening that was written by Harvard scientists to allow the country to be open SAFELY by early July at a cost of approximately $70 billion…. But we can give away $4 trillion to the same corporations that robbed this country’s economy blind in the 2008 crisis, allowing the NASDAQ to soar to near its pre-pandemic high at the end of May. We can’t extend unemployment benefits for the over 30 million Americans who recently filed for unemployment, because Mitch McConnell and his pals

Emmett Till (on left), who was brutally murdered in 1955 in Mississippi by a group of white men based on false accusations by Carolyn Bryant (on right) that he whistled at her At the protest this evening for justice for George Floyd and an end to police violence against black people, so many speakers shared such raw, deep emotional stories of the trauma and the violence they have suffered at the hands of the police….black teachers talked about the racism they see exhibited by very young children – which is because they learned it at home…..and one man raised a really important point about privilege: he pointed out to all the white women in the crowd that much of the violence perpetrated by white men against black men in this country is and has been done in the name of protecting white women. That if something happens to a white woman, twenty white men from all around are gonna turn up to “protect” her. And that just struck me, as a white woman in this country, that this is one of those