Skip to main content

Skittles and Tea

Once upon a distant time, 
while the pastor of a Lutheran church 
in California--itself an anachronism:  how
did Martin Luther, as germanic as kraut
and sausage--ever get to California, 
as laid back as avacado in a salad?  

 I was one of those 1960s good-doers.
The city was as White as a liberal.  
There were two Asian doctors,
but in Oakland, twenty-five miles 
away on another planet, it was 
rumored that there were Black people
willing to move to our town in order
to keep their jobs at the re-located
General Motors plant.  Oh, my god!

 I was White in those days, 
as I have ever been, and must be,
having grown up milking cows before
school, raised on lutefisk and lefse,
but I was in the majority there
in Washington State, and in the majority
still in California, where I learned
to eat hamburgers wrapped
in a whole salad of greenery 
and peppery and dressery.

 In those days, I was a runty
little Scandinavian, as I have 
every been, and must always be, since
I am glued to these chromosones.

 I did good.  
I could afford to.
After all, all of us
were White, with 
the exception 
of two families.

 Then I moved to Chicago
to attend the University of.
In south Chicago, two
or three blocks from the 
University of, in any direction,
we were an exception.  

 I had to switch assumptions,
right to wrong, top to bottom,
inside to outside, and
learn to walk gently.

 I have been thinking about
Trayvon Martin, and what he
did wrong by walking home
with a can of tea and a bag
of skittles.  He was innocent of subversion
or sedition or dating your daughter.  
He was just walking home.

 But he was Black.  
You know:  dangerous;
not one of us!

 A White guy followed him;
a White guy with a gun,
and when the White guy
caught the Black kid,
they apparently fought.
Somebody screamed for help.
Somebody shot the Black kid,
and then the screaming 
for help stopped.

 There was a trial.  
Trayvon Martin, the Black kid,
was convicted of having been shot,
but the other guy was let go:
he was just following kids like
Trayvon to protect himself
and his White neighbors
from people like Trayvon,
who buy skittles and drink tea
on their way home from the store.

 People in the majority
get ideas, and get permits
to carry.  And sometimes
they get their guns back
after the trial.  

 They should outlaw
skittles and tea; maybe
require a license 
to carry them, 
especially if you are
as dangerous as Trayvon
was, snacking on 
skittles.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more