John Lewis

Morgan Freeman, reading the Op/Ed piece that ran in NYT the day of John Lewis's funeral.

Democracy is not a state. It's an act. --John Lewis

Get it the way

Progress

WaPo:

Richmond’s grand statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson came down Wednesday in a sudden thunderstorm and a burst of mayoral muscle, becoming the latest Confederate monument toppled amid a national reckoning on racism and injustice.

Hundreds gathered to watch crews dismantle the statue, one of five honoring Confederate icons on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Onlookers cheered, and bells rang out from the nearby First Baptist Church.

One supporter of the monuments cried.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D), bucking advice from the city attorney and relying on emergency powers, dispatched a crew to take down the statue after the City Council delayed a vote on removing it along with three others owned by the city along the avenue. The fifth Confederate statue is owned by the state

Once the equestrian statue was lifted from its base and lowered to the ground, just after 4:30 p.m., Stoney compared the moment to the end of the Cold War.

“The Berlin Wall fell, but also the system fell with it,” the 39-year-old mayor said. “Now for us, as elected leaders, alongside our community, it’s our job to rip out the systemic racism that is found in everything we do — from government, to health care, to the criminal justice system.”

There are no statues of Lenin or Saddam or Tojo or Mussolini or Rommel.

We should not be putting up monuments to exalt "the noble losers" - no matter how valiantly they fought in service to a cause that proved out to be little more than the usual desire of evil men to impose a gross injustice on an unwilling populace.

BTW, that's how you do it. You make a political decision based on the outcome of an election. You remove the offending article in broad daylight, under peaceful conditions.

I think I understand the impetus for protests and the impulse to destroy the symbols of oppression and hatred.

But we have rules. We even have rules on how you break the rules.

Don't throw rocks and then hide your hands

In Memoriam

Helen Irene (nee Hnatiuk) Tostanoski

Oct 1 1925 - Feb 19 2020

I’ve learned that grief is love - but seen from a different angle.
Grief is all the love you want to give but can’t.

All of the unspent love piles up in the corners of your eyes.
It gathers to make a lump in your throat, as it leaves that aching hollow in your chest.

Grief is love with nowhere to go.

Remembering,
and knowing others have been where we are now
is how we get from despair to celebration.

We will find each other in the darkness
and move the light to where we need it.

Best mother-in-law ever.