“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
(a side note appears at the end of the regular Post) Payton Gendron’s murder of 10 human beings was a rational act, planned for months. He expected to die after killing as many black men and women as possible. He conducted surveillance, chose his target, prepared meticulously to strike and do as much damage as he could. He believed in the lie of the “Great Replacement”, that immigrants and black […]
read more
On Killers, Untroubled, Who Looked into the Camera at Lynching’s There are oceans we have never known except in stories or ones we read of in books from the safety of shore watching waves crest, wind ravaged. Here is an ocean glutted with bodies with names – with voices real as mine and yours, with mothers. Here is an ocean whose cries crying No vanished into smoke, an ocean of […]
read more
At The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, one looks up a rise to the open-air pavilion where row upon row upon row of rusting, steel boxes hang from the ceiling. One comes under the roof and walks among them at eye level. Each has etched upon it the name of a state and county and following, the names of those who were lynched there and the dates of their murders. One walks down […]
read more
Make a city into its composite parts – scraps of wood, slivered, riven, scattered; cement in serrated blocks, piles of blocks in chunks in acres. Iron in heaps — tank hulks stinking of flesh. Clay fountained from shell holes. A wreckage of streets no longer streets. Smoke and the stench of it, frozen blood thawing and the stench of it, cordite, shit, rot. Wind whistling in a dozen keys through […]
read more
