Get In Where You Fit In When You Stand Up For Your Rights

“Most people think that Great God will come from the sky

and take away everything and make everybody feel high.

But if you know what your life is worth,

you would look for yours on Earth.

Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.” ~ Bob Marley

When all else fails, YouTube comes to the rescue for me. I don’t know what I did without it before some saint or entrepreneur or whatever devised it for the rest of us. But this morning, I was struggling my way through my 14th week of hardcore self-quarantine alone, alternately depressed and agitated, when I went to YouTube to find a few meditation videos before I punched somebody in the throat or killed myself.

I found a couple of beautiful videos, posted one to Facebook, and then, as I got ready to post the one above on there, as well, I realized that I miss blogging. Blogging takes more time, more crafting, more thought, more reflection, more passion, more commitment, more of myself. So slowly but surely, as I worked what amounted to two full-time jobs for the past fifteen months, I blogged less and less, throwing up someone else’s work or an occasional video and once in a blue moon, I actually wrote something.

But I’m going to change that. Beginning today.

Putting Out the Gaslight

[NOTE: Last spring, I jumped momentarily down the rabbit hole to comment in a way that wasn't the kind of post I typically write. This post is the second in that "series."]

The other day, I had a conversation with someone who is recognized as being at the top of his game in terms of political analysis. Maybe he is. I wouldn’t know because we’ve been up to our asses in alligators in the U.S. for a long time and I had to quit staying up all night talking theory decades ago. Instead, I spent thirty years paying bills, raising kids (and more than a little hell), going to school, living through a ton of trauma -- including the murder of my son and the suicides of my father and a man who had threatened to kill me, as well -- and then spent twelve years teaching college full-time which allowed me to spend literally thousands of hours focusing on what’s to be known about power relations: race, class, gender, and sexuality, while applying what I was learning to better understand myself and the struggle we're all in.