part of the human heart

First you'd have to understand just how WHITE it is here.  I mean, it is WHITE.  I'm not sure what percentages there are, but like 2 or 3 percent black?  Yep, I just checked.  95% white.  Now, I've lived some places that were not so white.  Where I grew up was more like 6% black.  That's still pretty white.  I've lived in a majority black population for a few years, although there was enough segregation there to mean that I lived in a pretty racially even population.

So anyway.  The anti-Christ is President (that or Hitler, someone really really bad) and it's been two years of trying to do something to ameliorate that horrid situation, and two years of blame and mud thrown around a little indiscriminately.  And mid-terms are now a month away.  The pace is incredible now, unrelenting.  But you don't really dare to hope, just to ameliorate.  Ameliorate.  Meanwhile there are people who don't really think anything is much wrong, and people who are fine with the Christofascist American Taliban (CAT).  You believe there are enough of us if we just vote.  It has been two years of introverts feeling like the fate of democracy rests on our shoulders, introvert-ness be damned.  Meetings, protests, meetings, talking to people, calling.

And that last part, talking to people, strangers, indiscriminately, whew.  Knocking doors, calling, leaving messages, even talking to folks randomly in the grocery store.

One of my grocery stores is more diverse than the rest.  It is, not surprisingly, called ghetto food city, although they just rebuilt it so it is bigger and quite nice, and truly it has *the best* crew working there.

And it is here that my story really begins.  I've been in there, with this burning to make sure people are registered, and to talk about voting, and there have been black people there that I really want to talk with . . . and I'm afraid.  I'm afraid to impose.  I'm afraid to be judged.  I'm afraid to offend.  I'm afraid I'm offensive.  And I don't end up saying anything.  I know quite well they could see me as enemy, that the privilege of my whiteness comes at their expense, that I shouldn't be looking at them to save me, but lawd knows I can't count on white women to help me out.

And then Kavanaugh gets confirmed.  And then, Bredesen, who was not my first choice to run but who the scion Democrats SWORE was a great candidate because he could bring in the MONEY, and so hey, he's within the margin of error and so I go out and canvas for him, and then he says that if he'd been in the Senate, he would have voted FOR the hysterical maniacal assaulter partisan perjurer missing documentation not actually investigated judge.  And you just want to give up.  Politicians who will pander to anything for a vote and who stand for little or nothing ARE the problem, and are what elected tRump.  That and that most Christians have never met Jesus and instead worship money or "the market" and thus tRump.  It's a gut punch.  It's a low blow.

But we can't give up.  We have to hope.  And what will come?  I don't know.  How unsafe for my daughters will it be?  I don't know.  How bad can it get?  I don't know.  And I feel like giving up.  I feel despair.  Hopelessness.  Fear.  Sorry for myself.  And then I think of the rest of the world.  Children in Syria.  Refugees crossing a sea.  Villages facing Ebola.  Children in cages and parents deported, facing separation and death.  And I thought of black people, every day.  Even we have had discussions with our kids about how to interact with the police, but not because we thought they might get shot by them.  No one is afraid of us, or suspicious of us, because of our color.  I'm not pulled over for driving while white, and last time I was pulled over, for a burned out headlight, it was a good interaction.

We must persevere.  We must hold to what is right and good and just and hold and hold and hold.  We might have to scream some.  Voter registration drives in the south in the 60s had folks killed.  We must hold anyway.  Wealthy old white men and the women who are dependent on them might scream back.  Change is not comfortable.  We have to make a more perfect union, with liberty and justice for all, not a few wealthy white psuedo-Christians exploiting everyone and everything else.  Women's rights are human rights, and bodily autonomy is a thing.  Black lives matter.  Cops may not shoot unarmed POC.  The environment matters to us all.  No one should be hungry.  Public education is important.  Healthcare is a human right.  We need to not bomb people all around the world.  We need to not consume the planet up.  We need to look for win-win not win-lose.  Cooperation needs to be valued over competition.  Frugality and cleverness needs to be valued over ostentatiousness.

We are part, part of the human heart.  Act like it, damn it.