EXPANDING THE DIALOGUES

I.

I've gone off of Facebook, at least for a minute. I've often used Facebook as a way to make public my anxieties and frustrations about any number of things. Most often, I've written about inequality, however voiced, in one of its many, many forms.

I don't know why I've done this. It doesn't matter, it doesn't change anyone's mind, ever. I know that the only people who "like" what I've written are people who already agree with me and my positions. I suppose I've been arrogant enough to think I might sometimes somehow say something of use to someone who didn't have it before.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

All of which is to say, even though my writing anything at all is futile at best and self-indulgent at worst, I've always tried to voice my opinions with kindness and fairness and to never (or at least rarely) make things too personal, and I've tried to use a tone that's considered and, I hope, thoughtful if not thought-provoking. And I suppose I've done what I've done because of a sad thought floating around in the back of my mind: If I die today, or tomorrow, or next month, I want my son to be able to look at that representation of me, however flawed it is as representation, and be able to get a sense of who I was as a human being. What mattered to me. Who mattered to me. My hope is that, by looking at what I posted, what I wrote, how I wrote it, he might feel closer to me as he grew up, even if I weren't there. To paraphrase and appropriate a line from Toni Morrison, the boy might grow into a man who could consider me a friend of his mind.

Now, I'm not foolish enough to actually believe that that's true, that Facebook will even exist in another year or two or fifteen, or that the boy wouldn't have far better things to do than go back and read Facebook posts I wrote about what a monster Trump is. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, the history books will do a much better job of that than I ever can or could. But still, as Zora Neale Hurston explained in such a lovely way, self-revelation is the oldest human longings.

II.

I just read the article "How Racism May Cause Black Mothers to Suffer the Death of Their Infants" (NPR yesterday) and it made my heart ache. How is it possible that we live in a world that is still -- still -- animated by such hatred, such racism, such pain, such conscious rejection of human equality and dignity that some mothers are much, much more likely to suffer this sort of unspeakable horror?

I don't know if those two sections above are related. Truly, I don't. But for some reason, they were bumping up against each other in my mind this morning.

III.

Here's an old picture of the boy, sent to me by Sister Eva. Not sure how old he is here, but probably somewhere around (over ) a year? She'd had us over for dinner, and the boy loved her favorite reading chair, which tickled Eva no end so she snapped this pic:

That seems a better direction to point at the bottom of this post. Forward, and to the future.