A Paradoxical Act of Poetic Justice

Crispus Attucks was told, as he stood at the front of a crowd of unruly citizens harassing British soldiers in Boston Massachusetts, “this ain’t none of your affair.” When the soldiers opened fire, he was the first to die. Barack Obama, as President-elect of the United States of America, while dealing with Israel’s current air strikes against Hamas, is also being told, in musical verse, that he’s “a magic negro.”

Over the course of two hundred nineteen years, many gains have been made in terms of granting full equality to all citizens of the United States. Black folk have attained the right to vote. Women have attained the right to vote. Segregation by race is no longer legal. Japanese American citizens can live wherever they want. People from China are allowed to immigrate to the United States. Slavery has been outlawed. That none of these issues should really have been contested is moot. But the marginalization of numerical minority groups is rooted in the American landscape as surely as the ideals we aspire to. And full equality has yet to be achieved in some areas still.

So while I celebrate President-elect Barack Hussein Obama’s rise to the highest office in the land, I am also cognizant that Jim Clark’s spirit is alive and well today. I am cognizant that I had to send my young black, Chicano, Chilean children to school on November 5^th armed against their second and third grade classmates’ “innocent ignorance” when they commented that “Obama won just because he’s black.” I am cognizant that Rush Limbaugh (who said Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama was “all about race”), Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and their ilk and followers who may or may not believe that black people are inferior use their rhetoric and their megaphones to continue the oppressive racism of Andrew Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Kanye West’s statement that “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” in the wake of the President’s inaction when the levies broke, and my brother the teacher’s latest experience of being pulled over by the police after the officer watched three other (white) drivers make the same left turn, and the assassination plots and attempts constantly monitored against this President-elect remind me that much as things CHANGE, the more they stay the same.

Crispus Attucks was the first man to die in the struggle for American independence. The paradoxical nature of an enslaved/escaped black man dying for the freedom and creation of a country in which he was considered less than human by the legal framework that defined it should be lost on no one. The same way that the poetic justice of a man whose father was a black Kenyan and whose mother was a white Kansan, who is African American by nationality as well as visage and life experience being elected to lead that same country should be lost on no one.

In speaking with my sister-in-law and her parents on Christmas Eve, I asked, “do you realize what it means, to have him elected to be President of these United States?” Forty years ago, black people were being killed for wanting to register to vote. Forty years ago, one man was shot for encouraging black people to dream of equality. Forty years ago, Barack Obama was seven years old.

As we look forward to the changes President Obama will enact both inside and outside of our country, it is important that we take a look back as well to understand the moment that we are standing in, the moments others have worked for, and the legacy that we are heirs to and guardians of for the next generation.

Happy New Year!

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Blogging in the Christmas Spirit

It’s easy to always highlight what’s wrong with the world.  Here’s a little something that’s right!  Merry Christmas:)

By Oliver Janney 
CNN

(CNN) – A family facing foreclosure is anything but a unique story in these troubled economic times.

Daniel and Ebony Sampson with their children. “It’s a personal miracle,” she says of how their home was saved.

But this is a happier story of one family whose financial ruin was averted by the actions of a friend, the compassion of strangers, the networking power of the Internet and the holiday spirit of giving.

“This is our Christmas story,” said Ebony Sampson. “It’s going to be told for generations and generations to come.”

Sampson, who lives in Aberdeen, Maryland, with her husband, Daniel, and their two young children, has overcome more hardship than one person should ever have to face. When she was in the 10th grade, she lost her entire family in a horrific car accident. Raised by a grandmother in New York, Ebony eventually used some life-insurance money from her parents’ death to buy the home in Aberdeen, near where she grew up.

But in June, Daniel got sick. After several tests, his doctors concluded that he was suffering from salmonella after eating a tainted tomato. As a new employee of Bank of America, he had not accrued enough paid time off to keep his job as a credit-card account manager.  Watch how the Sampsons’ home was saved »

Suddenly, the sole breadwinner in the Sampson household was out of work. Though the Sampsons received unemployment checks from the government, the money wasn’t enough to make ends meet.

First came the shut-off notices from the electric company. Then one of their cars broke down. One morning, Daniel woke up and looked out his bedroom window and saw his truck was missing. It had been repossessed.

With no job, no car and no income, the Sampsons got another surprise: Ebony Sampson learned she was eight weeks pregnant.

The Sampsons returned home from church, where they are practicing ministers, on a Sunday in November to find a stranger knocking on their front door. He wanted to put a bid in on their house. Ebony told him their home was not for sale. The next day, the Sampsons were notified that they were facing foreclosure unless they could come up with $10,000 in the next two weeks to bring their mortgage up to date.

“Once we received that letter, it was like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’ ” Daniel Sampson said. “I don’t think anyone in their right mind would receive a foreclosure notice and not be rattled by it.”

Somehow, the couple maintained their sense of humor. Ebony Sampson called one of her oldest friends, Jaki Grier, and jokingly asked her if she had $10,000. Jaki told her, “Sure, just let me open up my invisible purse!”

But then Grier got an idea.

A self-described geek, Grier started blogging years ago. Since then, she’s contributed to a magazine’s Web site and regularly posts thoughts and life happenings on her LiveJournal page. So, she published Ebony and Daniel’s story, along with a link where people could make a donation.

At the most, Jaki thought she could raise enough money to help the Sampsons pay a security deposit on an apartment after their home was auctioned.

But donations started pouring in. Within 24 hours, Grier’s blog had raised $1,000, far exceeding her expectations. People started linking to Grier’s blog from sites across the Internet and around the country.

Attorneys posted legal advice. Others in similar situations offered sympathy. One woman sent a donation with a note that said she had just lost her own home but wanted to help anyway. Another woman wrote that she didn’t have a car but would walk to her grocery store with a jar of change and donate it to the cause.

Yet another e-mail came from a woman who was unemployed, with no job prospects. She donated a dollar.

With every donation, the total raised ticked higher and higher on Grier’s blog.

“Everybody wants to give to a charity, but so many times when you give to a charity you don’t really see where your money goes,” Grier said. “At least with this, you saw the little [donations] ticker go. I think that made people excited.”

Four days after Grier’s blog post, she had raised $3,400 — enough to repair the Sampsons’ car. That night, Grier went to bed ecstatic. The next morning she checked her PayPal account and was stunned to find the balance had ballooned to $10,900.

In the time it took Grier to take the donation link down from her blog, the balance had reached $11,032. In just five days, she had raised enough money to save her friend’s home. A Baltimore TV station, WBAL, caught wind of the story and put it on the air. Someone contacted Daniel Sampson and offered him a job interview.

“It’s been overwhelming,” Daniel Sampson said. “For me, out of all the donations [we] received, it was a little kid [who] came knocking on the door early Saturday morning … with a five-dollar bill in his hand. He just came up to the door and said, ‘Here you go, mister.’ Then he just walked away. I was, like, speechless. He couldn’t have been more than 8 years old.”

Now Daniel and Ebony Sampson will be able to enjoy Christmas much more than they thought they would just a few weeks ago. They say that once their children are grown, they’ll tell them the story of how one holiday season they came within days of losing their house. They’ll spend this Christmas full of thanks.

“It doesn’t seem real to me, and so I just thank everyone out there that cares,” Ebony Sampson said. “There really was no hope for us. Then, out of nowhere, just the kindness of strangers, just people that came and, you know, provided for us. Jaki was our beacon of light that led them to us.

“It’s a personal blessing. It’s a personal miracle. It makes you understand what the season is all about.” 

Angels and Demons

Pope Benedict is smoking something.  Part of the reason I left the Church after high school was I couldn’t reconcile the attitude that the pontiff displayed in his celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth yesterday.  And I look to the continued vitriol dripping from the purpose-driven pastor, and the legislation by the former special prosecutor, and the actions of my country in the United Nations, and I fear for humanity.

With all the threats to the human species: the destruction of the planet by technological deterioration; the destruction of the planet by military excess; the decimation of the ecosystem by apathy; the depopulation through greed, causing starvation, rampant disease, and the execution of millions which repeats each decade when a new oppressed group seizes weapons and power and takes out their grievances on their oppressors, the head of the Catholic Church decides that he needs to attack those whom the Almighty has blessed with sexuality.

With a smarmy, poorly-written play on words making homosexuality equal to deforestation, Benedict further rode down the path of intolerance, ignorance, hate and division.  Merry Christmas.  Had global warming been a greater issue fifty years ago, I’m certain that he would have equated saving the rainforest with keeping the races segregated; the same way the Vatican spoke so eloquently about helping persecuted Jews during World War II; and the Holy See spoke up during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw Africa pillaged and Africans enslaved and scattered across the globe in a diaspora which still hasn’t been rectified.  Why does The Roman Catholic Church, THE institution of God’s love on planet earth, miss the larger points in favor of banning women from preaching the gospel, and forbidding priests to marry?

I believe in God.  And I believe in the possibility of people.  What I have trouble with, and this is where mega pastors who preach hate, from Farrakhan to Warren, catch hell is that they preach to the small mind, they pick and choose which words of God they want to listen to, they fail to grasp the message and instead cling to the syllables that were written by men just like them.

The Pope is preaching hate, no matter what language and no matter what context.  He is preaching division and intolerance.  The celebration of Jesus’ birth (“He’s the reason for the season,” as my aunt likes to say) is supposed to be a time of love, understanding, renewal, companionship, and awe at the miracles that each of us as an individual is, and who we have to thank for that gift.  It’s not about the toys we can accumulate, or the flat screens we can acquire.  And it’s definitely not about raising ourselves up by stepping on and keeping others down.  It’s about celebrating the angels, in ourselves and each other, not demonizing others.

Why do people forget that?

Jesus would stand with oppressed

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blog.i.verse

Twas the night before Christmas

And all through the blog

Laced with insight and pithiness

Words cut through the fog

 

While Barack and Michelle

Played in holiday sun

We typed, read and quoted

To get the job done

 

On blago and cheney

And kennedy, too

There was so much to say

There was so much to do

 

As Tamryn recited

Words meant for Keith

My thoughts drifted back

To soldiers and students laying a wreath

 

For with all of our arguments

About what’s right and what’s wrong

The occupation still lumbers

There’s no fat lady’s song

 

So our work yet continues

Still we read, quote and write

But more in the morning

And for now, a good night.