Summer Healing Moon
Wow. Housing discrimination. Still illegal. Same-sex marriage. OK. A weak but necessary version of national health care. Here to stay. The killing of 9 souls at Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston. Historic wildfires in Alaska. The apparent demise of a too long standing symbol of the noble cause, the confederate flag. This is a big country with so much diversity.
Enough news to fill a month, even a year. All the in the last two weeks. And today: Woman takes down Confederate flag in front of South Carolina statehouse.
In my lifetime I have seen a moon landing, a photograph of our home planet from space. I’ve seen the computer grow as a versatile tool for so many things I could never have imagined. An international space station orbits the planet. Cell phones (hand held computers) are common. I have participated in protests of the Vietnam War and in many political movements from the local to the international.
Never would I have imagined that same-sex marriage would be the law of the land. Never would I have imagined that there would be even the most basic of national health care policies. I could have imagined the continuing bang, bang, bang, bang of racist shooters, bringing lynching up to date with the time of the gun. Never could I have imagined southern political leaders, conservative ones, too, arguing for the elimination of the stars and bars as a public image of certain southerner’s pride. Never. Never though could I have imagined the picture posted here, of a young black woman’s pre-dawn decision to just take the damned thing down in South Carolina.
History is a river, a flooded river that washes over us all, at every moment, carrying us and those we love to the great ocean of memory. This was a week of historical flash flooding. Glad to be part of it.