Womencare

12 hours ago

Watching the Inauguration with my daughter.

#TheNextVPLooksLikeMe ... See MoreSee Less

Womencare

3 days ago

"... as we celebrated the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I wrote about how easily we tend to quote him. About how we white folx, especially, so often pride ourselves in the performative allyship of reciting his words: “I have a dream!” and “Hate cannot drive out hate!” About how we then bathe in the glow of the soft, blurred-edged portrait that we’ve concocted out of our collectively sanitized memory of the man, parsing only the words of his that coddle our fragile egos and using them to signal our virtue to the masses.

But what a grave disservice we do to Dr. King’s legacy when we exalt this man who never was - the false idol, preaching only of inclusion: of nothing but comfort and light and love. This watered-down, white-washed version of a man who we are so content to pretend wanted nothing more than peace, and who laid down his life in the name of equality.

Dr. King fought not only for peace, not only for equality, he fought for JUSTICE. Hold on to that, my friends, because we will be coming back to Justice.

In 1965, Dr. King said, “Our nonviolent direct-action program has as its objective not the creation of tensions, but the surfacing of tensions already present. We set out to precipitate a crisis situation that must open the door to negotiation.”

“I am not afraid of the words “crisis” and “tension,” he continued. “I deeply oppose violence, but constructive crisis and tension are necessary for growth. Innate in all life, and all growth, is tension. Only in death is there an absence of tension. To cure injustices, you must expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion, regardless of whatever tensions that exposure generates. Injustices to the Negro must be brought out into the open where they cannot be evaded.”

And let us be clear, the man who said those words did not ‘lay down his life.’ He was a reverend, not a soldier. He was brutally murdered by the white supremacy he was working to dismantle – by the same deeply-ingrained system of thought and action that today separates families into cages at our borders, that dehumanizes the disabled, that foments violence against our LGBTQ siblings and turns a blind eye to native women murdered in record numbers and allows us to stand by while sacred burial grounds are blown to smithereens. The same system that sends soldiers off to fight in wars of our own making, that demonizes Black Lives Matter, and that vilifies even the most benign forms of civic protest.

While those of us who do not inhabit marginalized bodies might be shocked at some of what we are seeing today, I would argue that we are living in a time at which tensions already present are being exposed. A time at which injustices long suffered are being brought before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion. A time at which we are being forced as a nation to reckon with our reflection in a mirror that has been too long shrouded in the pretense of inclusivity while our power structures have continued to deny access and agency to far, far too many of our own people."

- from a sermon I gave this time last year - a lifetime ago, and the blink of an eye. I've posted it here in its entirety ...

adiaryofamom.com/2021/01/18/the-divinity-of-love/

{image is one of many mugshots of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Overlaid are his words: "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."} ... See MoreSee Less

Womencare

3 days ago

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