On the blog again (with apologies to Willie Nelson)

 

It's been quite a while since I've actually written anything for this blog, and too long since I've even taken the easy path and published pieces written by C. Leigh McInnis, who so graciously offered permission to publish any of his essays or emails from the Psychedelic Literature email list. Considering his gifts of insight, poetry and wordsmith, I could leave it at that and go back to mostly publishing his essays, poetry, etc., but while I will do that, I will have a thing or two of my own to say.

While I've had health issues that slowed me down (which I still have), I think the election of Donald J. Trump depressed me into a sort of passive near silence only broken on a personal level, sometimes expressed on Facebook, that great outlet for all outrage from any side or any degree of sanity/insanity or veracity. I'm cracking that shell finally and whipping up some peppery omelets of my own.

 Even through all the horrifying (or perhaps just the more publicly horrifying) police actions against Black and Brown people, covid-19 and the arising of Black and Brown people in tandem with their White brothers and sisters, particularly the younger generations, I've operated as though from inside an only semi-transparent plastic bag of despair. God bless them all, young Americans working for equality have jogged me back to a more alert attention with their energy! Younger  Mississippians in particular have inspired me as they work tirelessly to remove the most visible vestiges of Jim Crow from the town square.  The illustration to the upper left is a drawing done by student Jonathan Kent Adams.

Hopefully, this will be a fresh tilt at some of the old dregs of hatred that are being watered and fertilized from the top of the American mountain. As we all know, offal rolls downhill.

I have a very personal piece I am working on to publish here soon, but in the meantime, let me start a little slower, with something I just found and which touched me. Here is an inspiring link to a discussion by Dr. Gregory H. Williams, a very "white" appearing biracial man, and the 27th President of University of Cincinnati, speaking about life on the color line, a candid perspective on race in America.