CHRONICLES OF COVID, episode 1968
CHRONICLES OF COVID, episode 1968
It’s relatively quiet. The droning helicopters have taken a rest and all that’s left is the chirping of birds. Quiet lasting only a minute. The phone rings with calls from relatives having spats that are historic in nature but exacerbated by the tensions surrounding and within us all. I try to pacify them while at the same time adhering to my code of tell ‘no lies.’ The moral ambiguities about what truth is necessary and what is protective aside, I try my best, most often failing on a huge scale. These days we have to be friends, shrinks, pacifiers and if possible, joke tellers. I’m sharpening my skills but have far to go.
My pooch cost me a wallet full what with being told she needed a harness and not a leash. She’s 13 and never used a harness. I felt like it was putting her into a corset. But now that she’s had so much of me 24/7, that she rules the roost and takes more than a slight tug when walking the New York streets, I must do something. Her fascination with everything disgusting on the ground has grown to such proportions that I am left with only one alternative to just saying NO– a slight yank of her beaded leash. She has also started to do ‘old man’s cough’ throughout the day, and so after getting a clean bill of heart health from the vet, Joe at Whiskers, convinced me that her trachea would benefit from getting off leash/collar. So, too many dollars later she is sporting a harness that isn’t an exact fit…her circumference changes dependent on fur growth and now that she’s looking like a chia plant, there is plenty of fuzz to fill out the harness.
As taxing as everyday life issues are, it’s a relief to take the mind off, even temporarily, the State of the Nation. I thought my mind couldn’t be boggled any more than it has been, but this week really takes the cake. Who could write a screenplay more surreal and horrific than this week in America? Murder at the hands of police, peaceful demonstrators being hit with rubber bullets and a so-called leader taking photo op suggestions from the original clueless girl, his daughter. We are truly a nation at shame and yes, we must take the knee as well as realizing that we are brought to our knees by years of persecution and injustice of People of Color by government sanctions, privileged white men and perhaps, worse yet, our lesser human nature. The good thing is that all of this can change when we are willing to see it first, wake up second, and do something, third.
I started these thoughts with an image of the harness. It is time to take the emotional harness off of Black people who must have the right to speak of their pain, even if it makes others in this country uncomfortable. And it is time to put a harness on governmental unspoken and spoken strategies that continue to keep this country cruel, non-compassionate, unjust, imbalanced and not what we can be.
Here is a clip from the great Richie Havens.
notjustaboutsex 
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