New York Tag

I'm grateful to the writer J.C. Hallman for the details below, from his excellent article in The Forum, a publication of the African American Policy Forum, founded by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

My country’s cities are burning again. Armed white men again in blue uniforms wouldn't again let an unarmed ununiformed again black man breathe again. Meanwhile, out in the Great Plains and Bread Basket other people are differently dying, the virus growing inside their lungs while meat packers sweaty with fever have to show up for work so their families won't starve, while farmers lie coughing and gasping for lack of equipment to keep them alive. Some of the people in small towns and on farms fell for the lie that all this was a hoax, the fault of dark people and people in cities; now they also can’t breathe. The blows come so fast and so heavy you can't stagger up from the last one before the new punch knocks you breathless again. Private enterprise launches itself into space, national economies collapse—hey, that’s the least of it. Heat waves melt South...

Suffering is not a competition. The pandemic bestows trauma and tragedy on everyone. Yet it's also true that catastrophic events expose societal fault lines. In the USA, the 2020 plague is crushing some far more cruelly than others. The poor. People of color. Old people. Disabled people. Female people.

I hope you had a good August, despite various miseries visited on us by Trump, Kim Jong-un, climate change, and American Nazis.