Personal manifesto

It comes to mind that there are people that are choosing to not receive the vaccine for Covid-19.  Some folks are suspicious of the speed at which it was developed or have religious beliefs indicating that God will care for them and its God's will and all that.  African Americans may feel that they have been lied to by the government for hundreds of years and  no point in trusting that their well being is first and foremost in the minds of our leaders.  I hope that everyone gets vaccinated, parents, kids, grandparents and disabled people. 

So there's no cute family photos today.  This entry is more of my manifesto on the state of our nation. I believe that racism is an issue that may never be resolved here.  I really thought that the generation of my grand children could do it but the real constraints of society and the power structures prevent a solution.  I causes me great pain in that I came from the peace and love generation of the sixties with Woodstock and all from that. We were supposed to create a new world based on those principles, but we didn't.

 Systemic racism  in my thinking is the root cause of most of the issues In America.  White Americans have never accepted their African-American brethren as part of our society and our equals.  There is a is a divide that exists between us that crosses generations.  It took me a long time to come to grips with this in my mind.  It has been troubling in that I thought I was not part of the problem, all the while kidding myself that I was a fair and caring person, but realizing that I harbor long buried ill feelings toward people of color that are ingrained in my personality based on prejudices that I learned in my youth.

Caucasian people should be requesting forgiveness for the historic harm caused to black people from slave ships to plantations to the Jim Crow laws.  I don't know what to do to move forward.  I think it has to start with conversations between us.  I don't know what people of color think, how they perceive the world we live in, or how they feel about this profound disconnect we deal with everyday.  

For the first time in my life, I live in a diverse community.  There are black and white residents in this large apartment complex.  We do have one thing in common....wait for it. We're old.  We have seen life, the beautiful and the ugly.  Some are close to the end of their days. Yet we only politely greet each other and smile under our masks, bitch about the Tigers and the Lion, and extoll the weather or complain about it.  This may be the last place for this painful maybe hopeful conversation.

These are deeply personal thoughts that I harbor and they may piss off readers of my blog. I am not sorry.

all for now

stay safe