kNOw Justice, kNOw Peace

I have a sign in my yard. It reads "kNOwJUSTICE, kNOwPEACE."

My children and I painted it last year after news broke that a police
officer had kneeled on a Black man's neck for an excruciating nine
minutes until he died.

The kids added BLM and a drawing of a heart to my handiwork.

During the past 11 months, there's been a lot of honking past our
house. Some of it accompanied by cheers, but much more, sadly, the
noise of jeers, or a forceful middle finger, or the occasional tossing
of rubbish.

Despite the uproar ... and the anonymous complaint to code enforcement
over whether a person with such a sign in a town such as ours has the
right to display "matters of politics," since there are rules
regulating the presence and placement of political signage during
election season ...
our sign stayed.

When it got egged, I cleaned it.
When it was tipped over, I righted it.

I'm not taking it down.

Even after my phone erupted with good vibrations last Tuesday after
the Verdict was read ...

"Guilty, Guilty, Guilty."

The moment - while triumphant right now - will pass.

I wanted to feel elation at the verdict. It was clear and correct, and
it was necessary, but whether it is a turning point for this country
seems unlikely.

Given the facts of the case -- the video evidence and heartbreaking
testimony of eyewitnesses, some of whom were children -- it seems
almost impossible for a jury to come up with any other decision.

And yet they have and regularly do; hamstrung, many say, by laws or
policy that give police an almost uncheckable power.

In the time it took to convict a remorselessly murderous cop, at least
two more police shootings of Black children hit the news cycle. Two
more chances for other citizens to argue about the permissibility of
discounting their lives.

It seems painfully clear that without the courage of a 17-year-old
girl who filmed the murder of George Floyd, this trial may never have
taken place. Similarly, as the verdict was read we learn that states
all over this nation are turning their legislative work NOT toward
fair and equitable policing BUT to further restrict citizens' rights
to gather in protest.

We have much work to do as a country. No one action will bring about a
solution to our many problems as a nation, but there are things we can
and must do to ensure an equitable future for us all.

Perhaps even more so than training, we must work to rid police ranks
of dangerous cops. That "One Bad Apple," saying has a literal ending
we ignore to our peril; "spoils the bunch."

And we in the media have our part to play, too. We have to reevaluate
our reliance on police as primary sources of information.

I wish I could impress upon you the benefits we all would gain by
having a policing system that is more compassionate and professional,
one that humanizes suspects, and one that is accountable and
responsive to its own failures.

I wish we all could know, without question or fear, that reform is not
only necessary it's a moral imperative.

Gardening at night

Should I go with the tall spiky plants that have wide flocked leaves and blue conical flowers, or should I choose the rounded low shrubs, with leafy greens and plate-sized pink blossoms? I've already ruled out whatever abomination has taken root in the only other option - yellow.

Still, I don't want to spend too much time on this decision. The stakes aren't high. I'll just close my eyes and pick one.

As I open them again, a dust devil has formed, circling around the strip of land I've been tasked to fill.

When it clears, tall blue flowers with spiky leaves are revealed.

Voila!

"I can't believe YOU play 'Gardenscapes'," the boy remarked as he sank into the space beside me on the couch.

Suddenly, I'm self consciously aware of what I must look like: a mother, with grey frosted hair, holding her phone at arm's length, swiping the screen with one finger hoping to crack a few nuts.

I bring the screen closer toward my body in a protective stance. As if keeping my son from seeing the balding, middle-aged bachelor avatar strolling around the grounds of some dilapidated old mansion I must renovate will save me from embarrassment.

Is it apparent that I've already spent the better part of an hour raising the needed capital for a handful of completely ridiculous restorations, by trying to clear a never-ending series of Tetris-like games?

It's all fairly straightforward, once you learn to work the puzzle. Like how you can string together five gems and earn a laser-shooting rainbow disco orb, which, depending on how you aim it, can obliterate a row of cookies or turn a single paper airplane into an airforce of fruit, nut, and berry-seeking missiles.

I don't even mind that I've been stuck on Level Fifty-Six for three days. 

"I find it relaxing."

The irony of a mother playing “video games” for the express purpose of turning her mind into mush -- the modern equivalent of immersion into the momentary respite of warm Calgon Waters – is not lost on me. 

Nor am I ashamed that I'd rather garden in the rarified air of cyberspace than dig in real dirt. I have enough dead flowers at the edge of my yard.

My son sees it a little differently, though.

"Doing the same thing, over and over hoping for a different result? I think there's I different dictionary definition for that one."

He thinks I should aim higher: like a space station in some distant galaxy, where colorful people dressed like welders wander around different airlocks performing random tasks while spying on their co-workers.

"Come on! Play Among Us! It's fun. I'll teach you.

"I don't know. It sounds too much like ... an office job."

"Pffffft," he sputters. His eyes roll to the ceiling and then settle into their most burning, side-eye position. A tiny explosion bursts forth from his own closely held screen and the unmistakable soundtrack of his player decompensating.

His voice breaks into a good-natured chuckle.

"Hmmm. Can I play yours? Maybe I can get you to Level Fifty-Seven."

College hopping

As we set out of the driveway the first sunny morning of Spring Break, I was reminded of a similar trip I made with my mother.

A high school junior, I sat behind the wheel of her car and headed west toward the edge of the state. The burgundy sedan was new and handled like it, offering a smooth ride that would make me unaware of how fast I was going.

Mom didn't seem to notice either.

Eighty miles per hour on a highway that stretched out straight ahead and seemed to be hurdling us forward forever, not just the six hours a paper map and our basic calculations could reckon.

Traveling at the same speed, but decades later and with a computer voice guiding us onward in a silver SUV, my daughter steers confidently, keeping pace with the neighboring traffic. Maybe it's nerves, but we seem to be faster now that I am the mother sitting in the passenger seat.

We won't be meeting officials or getting the low down on college life from a gaggle of half-dressed frat boys who appear in the hallway, snapping each other with towels as if on cue, as our tour parades through the dormitory.

Those days might not be over, but I can't say that I'm sad we won't get to experience such an embarrassment of such riches on this trip.

Honestly, I don't remember the processes being so fraught.

I picked a direction and followed it. One small decision after another, and here we are, college shopping. 

But then again, everything appeared to go according to my limited plan. Furthermore, tuition didn't cost $400,000 and I didn't have to mortgage a forever home and all the cars I might ever own to pay for it.

My stress grip on the armrest doesn't go unnoticed. I had phoned a relative; an insider willing and able to provide perspective who would join us in a two-car parade connected by the magic of DNA and invisible waves of pocket technology.

I am grateful for both.

We learn more than we would have on our own. Had we guessed which were lecture halls and which were residence halls, we would have been wrong.

Our plan is much less daunting than it seems -- two days, four colleges, and a reservation for an overnight stay; is stressful in all of our fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of educational tourism glory.

A hundred years ago, as my mother and I cruised toward my college visits, we had a destination, with an appointment and an application pending. I had put all my eggs in one basket.

My daughter has a zillion possibilities to whittle into a handful of hopeful opportunities. She's reaching so march farther than I had. She's worried the baskets will be full before she can put her eggs in.

We don't know yet whether this uncertainty is a curse or a gift, but we operate as if it is the latter.

We'll use these experiences to make more educated guesses as we continue to college hop.

The Talk

 I have been putting off having The Talk.

With myself.

But a swirling cloud of improprieties circling our governor and, now, a certain congressman from Florida have me thinking the reckoning is unavoidable. No doubt it is long past due.

Oh sure, I've heard from men who wonder aloud about the state of office politics. As if politics is all that's at play. They all wonder what offenses - what off-color joke or light flirtation - would upend their professional lives as they know them.

And I assure them that they would KNOW in the way we KNOW when things feel amiss.

But I don't know why I reassure them when undoubtedly they must do their own self-evaluation.

It is not enough to look at our actions through the lens of the familiar.

I'm not talking about cases. Whatever investigations reveal about evidence is still to be seen.

I'm talking about pinpointing the moment in time when the expectations shifted; when the light shone on the old boys' network and all we saw was the decay.

But I haven't heard from my daughter; who, like her mother, has been having trouble locating the middle ground.

But before we open our mouths and take that deep, buoying breath to unleash the torrent, we have some serious thinking to do.

Because it's not just one thing.

From "Me too," to "Time's Up" to "Not All Men we are in the midst of a reckoning.

Maybe the middle is where we've been all along. Making things worse.

What strikes me as an oddity in this back and forth the genders in all their complexities seem to be having is that we keep looking at the forest but pretending not to acknowledge the trees.

The common beliefs we have accepted in our lives for no other reason than we didn't have to think about them aren't holding up.

Dad fixes the car.

Mom fixes the lunch.

Doctors are men.

Nurses are women.

We just like to hug. It's part of our culture.

Don't worry your pretty little head about any of these details.

But the details we should question aren't salacious ones. The details are more mundane than you might imagine.

What do we expect? And why? 

All it takes for change is for the weight of the world -- or those in it who are unwilling to accept the state of affairs -- to shift in a new direction. Afterward, it probably won't even seem like a giant wave has capsized everything we know.

It will seem more like a clarifying correction.

Maybe it started after the dramatic downfall of a movie mogul that we lost a taste for the so-called Hollywood ending: the guy getting the girl as the credits roll. A few female names among a sea of male ones becomes so much harder to overlook.

This flipped script is more than some heady talk of disruption. There is real change coming. And it is long overdue.

There will always be time to talk. Right now, it is time to listen.