Ma'at was the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, Justice and Order. Her headdress ostrich feather served as the ultimate arbiter of the goodness of a man's life, and was balanced against a newly deceased person's heart on the scales of justice as a precondition of being permitted to pass into the Afterlife. Those whose hearts were heavy with wicked deeds had their souls devoured immediately by the demigod Ammin. Only those whose were lighter than Ma'at's feather were permitted to pass through into immortality with the Gods.
Poll
Is Tomorrow "The Day" (And Ya'll Know What I Mean)
(against my better judgment perhaps, but--in the spirit of the German motto "wenn schon, denn schon....", comment cum full-blown post: and on the FP no less. Why? Because I can ;-))....
I haven't paid much mind to the feeding frenzy surrounding Barack Obama in the white liberal (or otherwise) world: I've seen this animal in action before, mostly in the context of white Americans who love, love, love Africans from Africa, but dread, dread, dread African Americans, in a phenomenon that has a lot in common with the way white liberal America boarded the "¡Sí, Se Puede!"--bandwagon with all the gusto of stampeding elephants on a safari in Kenya: Better to build a school for poor children in Africa than provide Black schools in America with basic supplies, like toilet paper. More "comfortable" in any case.
(This was written today as what was originally intended to be just a comment on DailyKOS in response to a quite honest diary which crystallized a lot of my mixed feelings as I watch what is happening -- particularly post-Iowa -- in America as it relates to the campaign of Barack Obama. I felt funny not cross-posting it to my own blog, so here it is. Ignore that it is written to a different audience!)
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There is a recommended diary right now, Coffee with Dad that I wrote a comment to.
Well, it started out as a comment. But it didn't stop there, because it couldn't. So I kept writing, since my need to try and help the author understand where I'm coming from kept getting in the way of succinctness and brevity. Suffice it to say that I could not accept the author's apologies -- of which there were several -- about her father's words. But my inability to do so is not because of her father's words.
Assuming that anyone even still occasionally visits this site, I felt that I needed to explain my month and a half long absence from writing.
It boils down to three things:
a) Trials. I have them in my immediate future. As those who know lawyers will understand, preparation for a trial is the temporal equivalent of preparing for a marathon. 12-15 hour work days are part of the process. Thus, I simply have no brain power left to write. I'm lucky I even get to read, right now. And when I read, the issues sometimes are of such magnitude that I become paralyzed in writing because I cannot give them the serious thought and energy and research necessary to do them justice.
b) Real Life. As we all know, it's a bitch sometimes. With a grandchild coming in 4-5 weeks, work unrelated to my trials, and my community work in which I now again sit on two boards -- one as a public official -- blogging seems comparatively unimportant when one also needs sleep and rest and to clean the house. I am one tired puppy.
c) Emotional State: Bluntly, I have been quite reflective about blogs and blogging as of late. Flamefests, ego-trips so large that all the air is being sucked out of the rarified atmosphere, and outright dysfunctional folks successfully commandeering all dialogue at what are otherwise sites and movements with great promise, has truthfully ennervated me to the point where it is difficult at times to even read any of my favorite blogs right now. I do so as best I can to keep informed, but (given my time constraints) but bluntly the nexus between "successful blogs" and the handiwork of disturbed personality types really fucks with me. It really does.
It does so because it is a pattern. Long before I engaged in political blogging, I was a participant in bulletin boards, most having nothing to do with politics. Yet sooner or later, despite having nothing to do with politics, they all nonetheless all evinced the same types of group psychosis over time, as they matured. Examples will have to wait for time I do not have right now. Suffice it to say that with the latest round, I now question greatly what real value collective internet blogs and communal spaces have left the world, other than lightning speed in information transfer and folks forgetting any semblance of decency in dialogue, when no matter what type of blog you visit, if it has any meaningful audience or back and forth, at some point it has been paralyzed and rended by high school drama.
Maybe it's just that I fucking hate drama.
Either way, I will be scarce for a while longer, as I ponder things including my cases, my blogs, and whether I am going to abandon blogging altogether or go back to what my original hope was - providing a space for my thoughts, for my writing, without regard to all the other stuff.
I'm not taking Maat's Feather down, however, because the purpose of this site was to be a place where Black folks could post essays about Black issues and I'm just one Black person. It becoming what I wanted it to be did not turn out as I'd hoped, obviously. I suspect there are several explanations for that, and that at least some of it indeed relates to the very drama and ego-tripping I abhor. But some of it may relate more to the fact that being a "successful blogger" and having a "successful blog" is inherently like being a successful drug dealer: you have to commit to getting your client hooked by your product (near daily missives/pondering/bloviating even if you have absolutely nothing new to say and even if you put no real research or thought into what you say) and have a bit of a narcissitic streak as well, where the impact you may, or may not, have on folks with your words and your work actually matters to you more and drives your output than the work itself. I have neither of those qualities within myself, not really. I'm just a person who reads, who writes, who thinks, who studies and who prays.
So maybe being a blogger is not for me. I don't know. But given some of the things I've witnessed and experienced personally, including at least two foul libels directed at me personally over the last 12 months, and the impact on my mindset and prediliction for being in the blogosphere at all if the condition for that is experiencing what I genuinely believe is destructive behavior, I need some time to figure it out.
I'm likely not gone forever. My keyboard mouth is not known to stop running for too long.
After reading about the following case, I know that it is going to elicit emotional responses from many different quarters with many different agendas. While I support the right of all citizens to protect their homes and their lives what occurred in this case does appear to support that doctrine. There were numerous forces at work that day in this neighborhood that all came to a head in the fatal shooting of two men. The case revolves around Joe Horn, a 61 year old retiree who happened to witness the burglary of a neighbor's house. Mr. Horn did the neighborly thing and contacted 911 to report the crime in progress. So far so good, neighborhood watch is working. However, it is at this point where the story takes a tragic and bizarre twist.
In what can surely be called unusual and frightening, it appears that black wealth cannot be transferred between generations. In a recent study done by the Economic Mobility Project, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a non-partisan think-tank; a staggering 45% of children whose parents were solidly middle-class have fallen completely to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. These were children who were raised middle-class; they went to the better schools and enjoyed the trappings of middle-America. So what happened?
In case there were any people left who were not sure about the racist and class objectives of the Republican Party, I think this should clear up any more doubt. The state of Mississippi and its Republican Governor Haley Barbour has decided to take money earmarked for rebuilding the Gulf Coast region which was damaged by Katrina and use it to provide relief and redevelopment money for the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Mississippi was the only state that requested and the only state granted the waiver to override the provision that atleast 50% of the Community Block Grants be spent on low income projects. In creating the program Congress wanted to insure that the low income population in the affected states would not be left out of the redevelopment funds.
The newest survival tip to young non-white male persons who encounter law enforcement (since even in these circumstances, they're disproportionately male and disproportionately Black or Latino) is to avoid carrying your hairbrush with you, especially if you are not 100% sane.
This appears to be the early lesson we're learning from the death of yet another non-white teenager, 18-year old Khiel Coppin, last night in my old neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. The early reports are that New York's finest believed he had a gatt when in fact he was carrying a Goody.
The news of young Mr. Coppin's death is still pretty hot off the presses less than 24 hours after the event. So, of course, as is always the case when a completely unarmed person gets shot and killed by the police, the stories about what happened are still all over the map. You have those witnesses who claim that that Mr. Coppin asserted that he had a gun, or that his mother said to police he had a gun, in person or on the phone -- take your pick. You have witnesses who say it was clear this teenager was unarmed, that the police knew it because he put up his hands, and even that one of the officers even confronted his colleague about why he shot Mr. Coppin. Right now there's not even agreement about whether he was killed by 13 shots or all 20 hit him (not that this detail really means all that much, except to reinforce that the NYPD still hasn't figured out despite Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell that Black men don't need to have multiple weapons emptied into them just to kill them; they die just as quick as white men do with one or two well-placed shots -- which to me begs the question of why multiple cops are wedded to the habit of emptying their weapons routinely when Black suspects are involved, rather than shoot to disable.)
As long as we are disrespecting ourselves and acting in a stupid, demeaning manner, this furthers the dynamic of racism/White supremacy and we need to give a lot of thought to that and decide that we are not going to participate in it.
When asked, as I frequently am, 'Why do you call yourself black?' I say, I am a black woman whose Jewish mother taught me about the Holocaust and about slavery. I am a black woman who grew up 'black' because that was how others saw me and because it was black people who embraced my mother when she married my father in 1945. I am a black woman who grew up celebrating both Passover and Easter, and who still occasionally sprinkles Yiddish words in my speech.
From the believe or not section, I submit the Viacom corporation, a pillar of the corporate culture and business principles. It seems that the Viacom Corporation has decided that it is now the defender of all that is culturally black and will be the decider of what that black culture will consist of. Despite the many pleas from activists and community leaders for Viacom to discontinue to promote negative black cultural images through its subsidiaries MTV and BET, Viacom has come to the conclusion that they know better than blacks what the black cultural experience consists of. By their refusal to comply with the demands of parents and concerned citizens they are in effect saying that those black folks are out of step with their own culture, that these white businessmen are more attuned to the black experience than blacks are. We know what the black people want and we are going to deliver it to them even if it kills them.
Yes. Do I find many Southerners aggressively ignorant about slavery? Yes. Do I find the Confederate flag an obnoxious symbol of slavery? Yes. But I find the Third World poverty of poor American children a more obnoxious symbol of today's slavery.
Culture is a chrysalis--it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor--all of that--without doing vast damage to those people. People need their history like they need air and food.
