Sunday Easy Rider

Sunday mornings...the bike ride to the beach nearby my house in Boston. Welcome to the renewal of my Sunday commentary---SER(Sunday Easy Rider). The world may be in chaos, but the beach beckons all, the dog walkers, the elder Asian Tai Chi faithfuls, the lovers walking, the tan-seeking man who rides his bike to the beach collapsing into the diamond-glistening sand, the family dad helping his daughter build a sand castle. If you are a "water baby" you get the obsession-anything to be near the ocean. When I lived in land-locked Johannesburg for a year, I regularly rose at 4 or 5AM, hopped in the car, and drove the 7 hrs. to Durban just to smell the ocean, to see the sun transform the wave-capped ocean into day-twinkling stars, ebbing and flowing. If you had the misfortune of being in the car with me, you had only one potty-stop. Sorry. I needed to get their fast!
The reality is that genocide despots Charles Taylor (Liberia) and Ratko Miladic (Bosnia) are being tried at the Hague as the International Criminal Court confronts these  war criminals; several others are being lined up around the world and it seems we're finally getting the hang of making the bad guys pay for evil. Women and children have been some of the most vulnerable targets of war-related violence. This is one of many scenarios that reasserts the human struggle for social justice, punishment for immoral and illegal activities globally, and a war-weary species that desperately seeks a peace-loving future. One of the central shifts underway is the active repression of a level of masculine aggressiveness socialized into our national cultures and the even more active pursuit of feminine perspectives, voices, and activism arising from women and men everywhere from civil society agencies to the halls of government. Our globalizing identities seek a higher level of humane performance in all of our dealings, public and private. The long-term demand from traditional masculinity for sex trafficking, war as the ubiquitous problem-solver, and so many unexamined behaviors rooted in gender imbalances is asking us to re-examine 6000 of human evolution to remake our species, to think and do life differently. It's about time. Go to the beach and think about it.... I'll be back next Sunday. Meanwhile, speak your peace.....

So here we go again, unnecessary violence! I wear my hoodie in solidarity with Mr. and Mrs. Martin b/c were I them, I would be inconsolable as a parent. In these moments there is no 'hierarchy of oppression' whether in Baghdad or Florida. These are all our children and we are leaving them a dreadful legacy of discrimination-as-usual. We are in the midst of that "dangerous course", one marked by the cultures of violence of our age. And beyond race, the Trayvon murder is, to me, a horror story about a man and a boy and the war on our children in every nation in the world. We seem to give them up to violence much too easily. Either it's sending them off to war to kill other people's children, ensnare them in human trafficking, or watch them kill one another as if each human life were expendable. Where is our sense of shame?

From an unlikely source-Charlotte Bronte-these thoughts are offered: " “Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones.” Many Americans who are aware of the extent of racism in U.S. culture know that 'Trayvon Martin cases' recur on a daily basis in almost every state and throughout the world, to both young men and women. I remember my father having a strong aversion to the police b/c his was the era of the 1930's when lynching and Emmett Till's murder (1955) were fresh realities, even in Cambridge(MA), the city of his birth and where I was raised. Douglas Blackmon's conscience-crushing Pulitzer text Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to WWII(2009) described the illegal bondage of Black citizens about which my Dad knew from 'the grapevine'. Dad has passed away a few years before the Rodney King incident (1991) but it would have broken his peace-loving, boogie-woogie heart to have watched the infamous Holliday videotapes of excessive force by the LAPD.  And James Byrd's 'lynching-by-dragging' murder (Texas 1998) would have sent him over the edge. I am skipping over the bad parts-all of the other unknown, young men of color (and other ethnics) whose mortality arrived too soon for them to grow into men. The murders of Vincent Chin and Matthew Shepherd, however, would have equally tested his faith in American society. Indeed, I was more than lucky to be raised by such a lover of humanity, one who regularly brought home strangers of every race to our family table for a meal.

Our work to eliminate prejudice is oil-rigg deeper, requires that we're man and woman enough to go to darker places within ourselves to redeem our country's destiny and our children's futures. No joke. The 'mutual understanding, amity, and sustained cooperation' required to eradicate race hatred and the war on our children is a lifetime commitment, not a media frenzy that activates our momentary shame. 

What was absent from Zimmerman was this: freedom from fear...

"Fly Girls" /Season of Peace campaign, Boston

 Are we remembering that ending violence and creating peace is a 365-day job?
Boston's "Fly Girls" work towards ending the cycles of abuse among young girls and women.

http://www.bostontenpoint.org/programs.php