June 11, 2020 - Sarah Cooper OMG

The Guardian interviews Sarah  Cooper, who lip-syncs verbatim-audioscripts of Drumpf's speech.  I can't unsee this, unhear it.

Sarah Cooper  --with links to the video-tweet  "How to Medical," wherein UV light in the body and disinfectant become Drumpf's treatments of choice against COVID-19.

Lordy, lordy  --- it's the only way I can listen to anything the Orange Headed Tweeter says.

"How To Medical" by Sarah Cooper

p.s. Check them all out.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/14/trump-lip-sync-video-memes-sarah-cooper-tiktoks-interview

June 10th, 2020 - What we might carry forward

What habits, what thoughts, what deeds will carry forward?

I'm curious about which of our many new 'Rona Habits we will take with us into whatever new future beckons. Will we avoid handshakes altogether  - or rush back to gladhanding again, so eager to press flesh, to acknowledge another's existence?  Will we become a country that casually dons masks when colds and allergies strike, doffing them when jogging at the beach?

Today I joined a friend for a long Socially Distanced walk. She told me that her brother-in-law, her sister's husband, had died two nights ago of a sudden heart attack, standing up from the tv chair, collapsing, gone.  My friend's impulse was to book a flight to Oregon to be with her sister, to be the strong aunt for her two nieces and their children, to cook and organize and help with the funeral.

But the thought of traveling, of public bathrooms, of the lines in airports, of sitting so close to others on the plane, of walking past others down the aisle, of contact with the family, whom she hadn't seen for three months, of having to quarantine for two weeks before getting to hug her sister.  Will these continue to be the thoughts and processes of our future?

Browsing the outdoor garden section at Ace resembled the past.  But not touching something unless I intended to purchase it, never putting something back on the shelf; that's new now and may become habit. Washing my hands the minute I return to the house, before I touch anything else.  Ordering takeout rather than sitting down in a restaurant.

Planning short trips - go to one store, one destination and return home, rather than the longer routes I used to design. In the Before Times, if I was going to the gym on the other side of town, I'd hit several places along the way: Acre Coffee, perhaps, or Trader Joe's and the Pet Store or Lombardi's for BBQ chicken for dinner. I'd go to the Farmers Market and drop in at Ace or the Dandy Market for spices. No longer.  Now I fit all my trip between bathroom visits, which must be taken at home. Even if public bathrooms are available, would I even use them? Not yet.

June 9 2020 "Birds of North America" by Jason Ward

Jason Ward's  "Birds of North America"  --- check out his work, published well before the Cooper video went viral. Christian Cooper makes a few appearances in this episode, but there are many informative episodes in the series. Love the bird-nerdy talk, the trees, the great videos of the spotted birds, which helps my own process of identifying birds. And the shared knowledge of birding. Most excellent! 

Jason Ward "Birding While Black"

Interview from WBUR

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/06/09/black-birder-racism-cooper

June 8 2020 2020 - Bacon Bits; Video Links, Black Lives Matter

Happening so fast

all I can do is take notes

fingers scrabbling over laptop keys

Here are some videos that say it like it is.

Kimberly Jones. "How Can We Win?"

Trevor Noah on The Daily Show - "The Social Contract is Broken."

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Renames Pennsylvania Ave  to Black Lives Matter Street. -- OMG!

New Yorker: Burning Cities 

by Jelani Cobb

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Direct Links in case the ones above are broken

Kimberly Jones

https://youtu.be/sb9_qGOa9Go

Trevor Noah

https://youtu.be/v4amCfVbA_c

Mayor Muriel Bowser

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/bowser-black-lives-matter-street/2020/06/05/eb44ff4a-a733-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html

Jelani Cobb

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/minneapolis-the-coronavirus-and-trumps-failure-to-see-a-crisis-coming

June 7 "Poem for Amercia" by Jane Hirshfield, read by Amanda Palmer

Posting here below an excerpt from Maria Popova's most excellent newsletter Brain Pickings which if you don't know it already, you must investigate.  This excerpt from early June hosts Amanda Palmer reading Jane Hirshfield's poem "Spell Against Hatred," as well as quotes from Annie Dillard. ~ Lakin Khan

Spell to Be Said against Hatred: Amanda Palmer Reads Poet Jane Hirshfield's Miniature Masterwork of Insistence, Persistence, and Compassionate Courage

FROM BRAINPICKINGS, JUNE 2020, by Maria Popova

It is especially in times of uncertainty, in tremulous times of fear and loss, that the curtain rises and the minstrel show resumes — a show of hate that can be as vicious and pointed as the murderous violence human beings are capable of directing at one another, or as ambient and slow-seething as the deadly disregard for the universe of non-human lives with which we share this fragile, irreplaceable planet. "We don't know where we belong," Annie Dillard wrote in her gorgeous meditation on our search for meaning, "but in times of sorrow it doesn't seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures — from whom and with whom we evolved — seems a mockery."

How to end the mockery and the minstrel show is what poet Jane Hirshfield — one of the most unboastfully courageous voices of our time, an ordained Buddhist, a more-than-humanitarian: a planetarian — explores in "Spell to Be Said against Hatred," a miniature masterwork of quiet, surefooted insistence and persistence. Included in the anthology Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (public library) alongside contributions by Jericho Brown, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, it is inhaled into life here by musician, activist, fellow more-than-humanitarian, and my darling friend Amanda Palmer.

https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/spell-to-be-said-against-hatred

SPELL TO BE SAID AGAINST HATRED
by Jane Hirshfield

Until each breath refuses they, those, them.
Until the Dramatis Personae of the book's first page says, "Each one is you."
Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another. Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly: I.
Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless table.
Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves bending. Until fear bows to its object as a bird's shadow bows to its bird. Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles. Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat. Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral.
Until what feels no one's weighing is no longer weightless.
Until what feels no one's earning is no longer taken.
Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing know themselves mirrors.
Until by we we mean I, them, you, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger.
Until by I we mean as a dog barks, sounding and vanishing and
sounding and vanishing completely.
Until by until we mean I, we, you, them, the muskrat, the tiger, the
hunger, the lonely barking of the dog before it is answered.

June 6 2020 Pondering the Protests

A sign of these times
Curfews, protests, coronavirus data,
parks re-opening.

Thinking about the long life of the BLM protests, how they are building rather than dissipating. Eight days of protests and it doesn't look like it will be stopping soon.

Lot of young people involved this time, yay! We need them to be engaged, we need them to vote.

People are pissed OFF about so much and this historic racial injustice has resonated with the injustice of the Administration's lack of response to the pandemic, their willingness to simply discard our lives.  This is nothing new to black or brown Americans, of course, but now everyone gets to feel some of the sting of such disregard. And we want the powers-that-be to know and care about these injustices. Hooray for all the shared materials and links on how to be an Anti-racist.

People are not working or working very little. Students aren't constrained within a school. Folks and families have time on their hands. They can get to a march, they can read literature and articles by black authors, they can watch movies and documentaries that explicate the dynamics.

As I remember it, one of the forces at play in the 60's riots were the high numbers of unemployed young folks, especially young men and particularly in the industrial east and mid-west cities. The steel mills were closing, releasing thousands of young men, many who were black, for whom this job secured their economic place in the social order. Perhaps the young white men from the steel mills were able to get other gainful employment, but I'm thinking that for young black men, this was much more of a challenge.  At any rate, there were a lot of young men of all persuasions in their late teens and twenties suddenly with a lot of "leisure" time. And now we have students who aren't in school, families who aren't working, jobs that can be done flexibly from home. Now people have the time and ability to protest - and they do so responsibly, too, with proper distancing, wearing masks, not whooping or hollering so much.

TimeLine of Events so far

June 5 2020 - Black Birders Week!

Pretty sure you have heard of the infamous Cooper Incident in Central Park, in which Christian Cooper, a black naturalist, asked Amy Cooper, a white woman (no relationship) to leash her dog, as required in that part of the park, so as to not disturb the birds he was observing. The white woman couldn't believe that he was just observing birds and threatened him and his personal safety by calling the cops. This is not an isolated risk for black scientists conducting field research.

And so, Carina Newsome and other black scientists  organized Black Birders Week. Running from May 31 - June 4, this is to educate the non-POC folks about the risks and dangers black birders and other field scientists encounter just trying to do their job or follow their interests; enjoy their love of the outdoor world, pursue a hobby: birding, jogging, geology.

Check out all the links to learn more --

BlackAFinStem - Instagram ....The Source 

Various Interviews and Articles

From the Short Wave Podcast (NPR's daily science podcast) - Black Birders Week https://www.npr.org/transcripts/869052336

Interview with Corina Newsome (co-founder of Black Birders Week)

BlackAFinSTEM ...Nature on PBS

Higher Ed Black Birders Week

Science Magazine: Organizer Shares Her Struggles as Black Scientist

Audubon.org - Black Birders Week

"Pelicanology" from the podcast Ologies by Alie Ward - with links to other Black Scientist groups.

June 4 2020 - Thursday Still Sheltering In Place. And Protesting.

Today, I had some postcards for pickup in Petaluma (some lively alliteration there, eh?)  -- and in the process, drove by a BLM demonstration at Walnut Park, smack dab in the middle of town.

By the time I got back around to it, the whole group, a few hundred or so, had already completed 8 1/2 minutes of kneeling and had moved on down Petaluma Boulevard toward Washington Street, which is where I caught up with them.  We demonstrators took over all four corners of this main intersection in town, eliciting much honking, waving and a quite a few Black Power salutes - you know, right fist in the air, with slight bend to the elbow, all action.  I was impressed by how people kept their social distances, how all were wearing masks, that most people were carrying signs to stand-in for shouting and chanting. And the number of young people. Teenagers, high schoolers, early college, parents with youngsters. This is when a movement gets strong, when it's no longer just us grey hairs waving signs and carrying on, looking like cranks to the general populace who have to get to and from work, who have to finish papers, study for exams, make meals, dress children. Today there were whole families in this demonstration and march, staying in small pods as the whole protest gathered up, and walked, in separated small groups of twos and threes, down to the police station.

It was over 90 degrees that day in a town more famous for the cooling effects of the marine layer. I was already feeling overheated and lightheaded and I knew the walk was not only  two miles down the main drag but another two miles back to retrieve my car. I walked until we left the shade of the park and sidewalk trees. I took some pictures, I  clapped my hands and then I reluctantly returned to my car. But I would be no good to anyone if I fainted from sun and heat and certainly didn't want to risk being shuttled to a hospital in the Time of Covid.

It was worth it to add my body to the protest, even that short bit. The murders of black citizens have me unnerved and restless; I want to be able to add my weight to the uprising, to the the rumbles of history. I want the world to acknowledge the horror of the actions of that callous cop; I want those in this country who defend his cold-blooded actions to be shamed. And shut down. 

This restlessness and unease and desire to make it known is rooted in the horror of this Administration's tacit and outright support of white supremacists.  It's wrong and we know it. This is one way to channel that unease, one way to yell at the Republicans and let them know we're not going to take it any more.