It was a hot, dry, dusty day in the Central Valley of California. Late August or early September. I rode in the camper, while my dad drove, and my mom and younger brother rode up front, in the cab of the truck. I think I was sixteen. We’d spent a few days in the Sierra Nevada. Now we headed home to San Diego County. Dad usually drove south through the valley, but it was too hot today, so we aimed for the coast, hoping for cooler weather there. We looked forward to a bowl of clam chowder in Morro Bay. I think we were somewhere west of Fresno when it happened.
I sat on a sturdy metal cooler with my back against the oven door. From time to time I peered through the cab’s open back window at the road ahead, and talked to my parents and brother. It was a boring drive, with scenery that repeated beige and flat, in unrelenting heat. Irrigated farmland created the only break in the barrenness, with its artificial patchwork of green. (more…)
Once when I was seven years old, I wakened during the night for no apparent reason. I peered over the side of my bed, and I froze.
A hippopotamus loomed there in the dark, right between my bed and my sister’s. My heart nearly stopped, and I don’t think I breathed for a minute or so. I lay awake for a long time, afraid to move a muscle or make a sound, because surely if I made a noise the hippo would attack me or my sister. I was afraid to sleep, because then how could I warn anyone else, when they woke up or tried to enter our room, that the hippo was there? I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. (more…)
Rosa Parks represents what an awesome force for change even one person can be, if they have the courage. If one woman can inspire so much, imagine what we can do together. Her life might’ve been easier if she’d given up her seat, given in to the status quo, but she wouldn’t have been truly free. The easy way, the habitual way, “the way it’s always been done” sometimes must be broken through.
While thousands honor Rosa Parks today, in Detroit and elsewhere, BBC has posted reader tributes.
Hopefully not these two. I never thought the day would come when I’d prefer to see Britney Spears in the news. Newsweek has taken a little time out from reporting on the White House’s woes to remind us that racism is still around and in fact appears to be taking on yet another new generation, in Race: The White Album. Here’s the view from news.telegraph: Twin pop stars with angelic looks are new face of racism. Is this a sign of what’s to come? My question is, does neoconservatism fertlize the ground for this sort of blatant intolerance?
