March 23, 2022

Insecurity over my skin color has been tempered by progress over racism since my youth

...it always gets a jolt when I see regressions like this.

Eugene Scott @Eugene_Scott
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said Tuesday that he would be open to the Supreme Court overturning its 1967 ruling that legalized interracial marriage nationwide to allow states to independently decide the issue.
twitter.com/Eugene_Scott/status/1506395091363057668

How does it feel to not be a target for abuse and neglect? I've felt like a target most of my life. Not just paranoia, but a sense of deepening disenfranchisement which permeates my confidence in many endeavors with an almost certainty of unfairness.

It's definitely worsened in the past few years, and I'm now resigned to what might be my final chapter (a long one, I hope), fighting ghosts of the civil rights era which had always before presented themselves to me as past transgressions of this nation, now threatening to become a permanent fixture in the remainder of my life.

There's always been a very fine line drawn between me and full citizenship, even though I was born in Brooklyn. I felt that divide distinctly in the past, when Rodney King took that beating and prosecutors initially failed to hold the police responsible accountable. Felt it again when Mike Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson.

No explanation needed for what's stirring up the acrimony in me today. We can all see the diminution of comity and respect that had been conditionally extended by this nation to it's minority inhabitants over the decades since Reconstruction; since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts offered the protection of the federal government to ensure those rights afforded by the Constitution and in subsequent amendments.

Equal opportunity and equal protection are two important challenges we struggle with, but what about public accommodations like transportation, housing or medical care? All of these are diminished along with the degradation of decency and mutual respect.

Long route to this news report today, but it speaks to every fear I have about this nation including me (and now my white wife) in its promises. My mother was an African American with very light skin due to albinism.

She and my father went through a lifetime of animosity, banned from public amenities together in their young adulthood, like Sugarloaf Mountain (Md.) where I visited weekly in my own young adulthood with my white wife.

I'm quite used to statistics which predict an earlier demise for me than my white counterparts and compatriots. What's unsettling today is the weakening of protections I believed were sacrosanct. I feel pretty much like I've felt most of my adult life. Like a big target on my back.

March 3, 2022

Pres. Biden's inspirational closing SOTU remarks

...strong, compassionate, competent leadership.

March 3, 2022

I know the U.S. is operationally restricted in their military choices in defense of Ukraine

...but it's really gratifying for my own anti-war inclinations to see such robust efforts to confront Russian military aggression by closing the avenues of international economic participation to the dictatorship.

We've seen economic power take precedent over, or achieve parity with military conquest as an overarching goal of the Cold War superpowers. Despite the madness Putin is displaying in bombing residential targets and declaring 'control' over parts of Ukraine, the more determinate measure of that occupation of the ground his military stands on will be whether those territorial gains translate into something which adds to Russia's economic standing, or if that effort results in further weakening that economic power that sustains and enhances truly great nations.

He certainly doesn't get that by killing civilians and blowing up buildings. What he'll reap is a permanent resistance at his doorstep, not only to defend Ukraine, but to aligned to further Putin's demise.

In all of that, it's reassuring to see Pres. Biden using those economic levers, through diplomacy, which are the real measure of a nation's greatness, more than it would be watching the military machinations so destructive to everyone take precedence in our response, for whatever reason.