Every single moment of a day is an opportunity...
 

Maybe all that we are is what people expect us to be.

Robert M. Drake

"I am an adventurer, looking for treasure."

Change The World
 

The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander.—actor and humanitarian, Jesse Williams

Jesse Williams BET Awards Speech
 

“This award, this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country. The activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students, that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do.

All right? It’s kind of basic mathematics:, the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now this is also in particular for the black women, in particular, who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.

Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.

Now — I’ve got more, y’all. Yesterday would’ve been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better to live in 2012 than 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Darrien Hunt.

Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t going to stop this. All right? Now dedicating our lives to get money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies.

There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s been no tax they haven’t levied against us, and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so… “free.”

Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter. But, you know what though? The hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. And let’s get a couple of things straight, just a little side note: The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, all right, stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is, though, the thing is that just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”

Actor and humanitarian, Jesse Williams, speech given after receiving BET's Humanatarian Award, June 26, 2016

Hmm...seems the internet monster ate the last quote I posted.


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"I remember every player - every single one - who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color that you can usually find on a roadside crew, or in a correctional institution as my friend Wendy Larry jokes. But to us the color is a flag of pride because it identifies us as Lady Vols and therefore as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters. I remember how many of them fought for a better life for themselves. I just met them halfway."

- Pat Summitt
from her book Sum It Up

RIP Pat. I am so fortunate to have seen you coach at the Summitt in Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville. It was an unbelievable experience. My heart bleeds orange.

"We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love."

-Robert Fulghum

"Everything that irritates us about others
Can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

"Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half."

Eckhart Tolle
 

~Oscar Wilde

With Obama, the Personal Is Presidential
 

With Obama, the Personal Is Presidential by Timothy Egan, New York Times Opinion Page

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Photo Credit Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

We always knew he could keep his head when others were losing theirs and blaming him, knew it from the 2008 financial crisis and on to the hard, lasting words he spoke at Tuesday’s memorial for the slain police officers in Dallas.

What we didn’t know, what could not be predicted of one so young and new to the impossible task of living round-the-clock under the glare of the entire world, was how Barack Obama would hold up as a father, a husband, a man.

No matter what you think of Obama the executive branch, it’s hard to argue that Obama the human being has been anything less than a model of class and dignity. If, as was often said about black pioneers in sports, you had to be twice as good to succeed, Obama’s personal behavior has set a standard few presidents have ever reached.

You see him singing happy birthday to his daughter Malia, on the day she turned 18 this past Fourth of July, or coaching his daughter Sasha at hoops, and you see his ambition, still, to be “the father I never had.”

You see him teasing, bantering or dancing with his wife of nearly a quarter-century. And while no outsider can know what goes on inside another’s marriage, you can’t help feeling some of the joy of that union. They still finish each other’s sentences.

It’s not fair to give him his due as a person, his high grade for character, for being scandal-free in his private life, just because a potential successor has no character, no class, and breaches a new wall of civility every time he opens his mouth. If Obama had bragged about infidelities and the size of his genitals, if Obama had talked about wanting to date his own daughter and reduced women to a number on a hotness scale, it would be about race. But when Donald Trump says such things, nobody ties it to his being white, nor should they. Trump is a singular kind of vulgarian.

And those who praise Obama as a model father or husband for the black family do him a disservice. He’s a model, without asterisk for race. It’s a hard thing to go nearly eight years as the most powerful man in the world without diminishing the office or alienating your family. He’s done that, and added a dash of style and humor and a pitch-perfect sense for being consoler in chief.

As we saw again this week, when he took the deep breath for us, when he begged us not to let hearts turn to stone when the world is a quarry of hate, he is at his best when the rest of us are at our worst. We will long remember him singing “Amazing Grace” at that service for people slaughtered in a Charleston church, their deaths a hate crime. And we may well remember him trying to wring something teachable from the ambush of police officers; their deaths also a hate crime.

“All of us, we make mistakes,” he said. “And at times we are lost. And as we get older, we learn we don’t always have control of things — not even a president does. But we do have control over how we respond to the world. We do have control over how we treat one another.”

Historical comparisons will be kind to him. You respect John F. Kennedy for his flair and wit, but wince at how he hurt his wife through numerous affairs. You admire Lyndon B. Johnson for his courage in civil rights, but are appalled at how bathroom-level bawdy he was in private. You appreciate Ronald Reagan for his charm and friendships across the aisle, but can’t ignore how dysfunctional his family was. Under Richard Nixon, the White House was a crime scene. Under Bill Clinton, it was a place of monumental self-indulgence.

What’s remarkable is that Obama hasn’t turned Nixonian or hard. He was the only president to have his Americanism challenged, the only president to be heckled with “You lie!” before a joint session of Congress. And the smears keep coming. Barely a week ago, Fox News flashed pictures of a young Obama attending his African half brother’s wedding in Muslim garb — proof, Bill O’Reilly said, of the president’s “deep emotional ties to Islam.”

For Obama, holding it together as a person has only occasionally translated to political triumph. The first African-American president is leaving office at a moment when more than two-thirds of Americans think race relations are bad — a sharp increase from the dawn of his presidency. He acknowledged some of this failure in Dallas.

“Now, I’m not naïve,” he said. “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”

On eleven occasions — Newtown, Tucson, Charleston, Dallas, among the venues of despair — he’s tried to summon words to heal a wound. If the words have sometimes failed him and us, the man, in his personal behavior, has not.

Beauty...
 

"Like almost every truly horrible thing that has ever happened in the history of our world, the end also began with a kiss."
-Dennis Sharpe

Fly at 90—I can work with that.
 

Rep. Steve King said white people contributed most to civilization. Melania Trump then showed us how...by stealing from a Person of Color.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) July 19, 2016

it really is that simple......
 

Five years from now no one will remember if you're late on a deadline, but everyone will remember if you go to print with errors. —said by someone I worked with eons ago

Heart <3
 

One small step at a time <3
 

Choice... Chance... Change...