Better Days?

“O, yes, I say it plain

America never was America to me

And yet I swear this oath

America will be!”

  Langston Hughes, from “Let America be America Again,” quoted by Martin Luther King and the epilogue to Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”

 

scene from "Da 5 Bloods"

Interviewed by Joy-Ann Reed for Time magazine, film director Spike Lee, he recalled sitting on his Brooklyn stoop at age 11 when he heard his mother screaming hysterically, “They killed Dr. King!  They killed Dr. King!” What followed were cities across the nation going up in flames. I was a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland and a day or so later stopped class when I heard a crowd headed to the chapel and joined them.  No words could soften the bitterness I felt.  Directed to hold hands with people near me and sing “We Shall Overcome,” when we came to the words “Black and white Together,” I could feel the anguish in my heart and imagined how empty those sentiments must have felt to people of color. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination not long afterwards seemed confirmation that America was no longer blessed, that King’s hopes of a multiracial society living in harmony was a pipe dream.

 

With most movie theaters still closed or shunned, first-run films are debuting on Netflix or some other streaming service.  So far, I’ve found enough free movies on premiums channels I get such as HBO or Showtime, and I got hooked on the TNT series “Snowpiercer,” set during a time in the future when scientists, hoping to counter the effects of global warming, caused a new Ice Age so severe that the only survivors were on a thousand-car train that must keep circling the globe in order to keep everyone alive.  On board is a class society, with the very rich segregated from others, including “tailies” in the last car who managed to get on board without a ticket.

 

The country has gone without major league sports since March, and the greed of baseball owners threatens to derail plan for an abbreviated season without fans.  Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David Murphy compared the deadlock to past labor wars, writing: “There are few things more American than the battle between capital and labor.  The national league was founded the same year as the Molly Maguire trials, the American league two years before Mother Jones led her march of Mill Children from Philadelphia to New York.”

 

In “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens, a wildlife scientist, Kya, the so-called Marsh Girl, came upon the term “Sneaky Fuckers” in a scientific digest, a term first coined by evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith to explain that subordinate males often take advantage of the opportunity to mate attracted to a dominant male that is already occupied. Owens provided this example: “Pint-sized male bullfrogs hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates.  When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others.  The imposter males were referred to a ‘sneaky fuckers.’”  Kya also learned about competition between males to inseminate females:

    Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other’s flesh.  Though very ritualized, the conflicts can end in mutilations.  To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods.  Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removed sperm by a previous opponent before he supplies his own.

Some male inseminators aren’t so fortunate.  A female praying mantis eats the head of the male while mating and then for nourishment devours the rest of his body.  Such sexual cannibalism led to several species of Latrodectus being nicknamed black widow spiders.

 

Union stalwart Bill Carey posted a poem by Imelda May, a singer/songwriter most famous for recording “Tainted Love.”  “You don’t get to be racist and Irish” recalls a time when Irish immigrants were discriminated against.  It begins:

You don’t get to be racist and Irish

You don’t get to be proud of your heritage,

plights and fights for freedom

while kneeling on the neck of another!

You’re not entitled to sing songs

of heroes and martyrs

mothers and fathers who cried

as they starved in a famine

 family of Heath Carter

Heath Carter’s second talk on the history of religion in America dealt with protests over the forced removal of Cherokee Indiana from Georgia in the age of Andrew Jackson. As Carter stated, history holds no easy answers and some Christian believers had deeply flawed beliefs; but the church-led opposition to Indian removal generated the largest national protest movement up to that time.  Many petitioners were assimilationists who urged Native Americans to adapt to white man’s ways.  Most Cherokees did just that, taking up farming, drawing up a constitution modeled after the U.S., and even converting to Christianity. Missionaries who championed their cause were incarcerated by Georgia authorities and put in chains.   Even though the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, the federal government forced them west along a “Trail of Tears” that saw 5,000 perish. Even though the anti-removalists failed to stop this atrocity, many who heretofore had favored resettling former slaves in Africa changed their position and joined the ranks of abolitionists demanding an immediate end to slavery.

 

Don Coffin wrote this haiku while peering out his back door:

Sunset approaches,

Clouds shifting in the wind and

I need only watch.

Photo by Don Coffin taken from his back door

When I’m down, lyrics to The Head and the Heart’s “Library Magic” give me a small measure of hope:

I can see the sunshine's rays gleaming through the clear waters
Telling me you gotta hop in for this chapter's ride
There will always be better days