Today I Choose

After yesterday’s confessional, a pivotal life-changing event, today we race intrepidly into the frightening arena of the first person, active voice narrative. It always amazes me (I am easily amazed these days) how difficult it is to speak from this perspective, as compared to simply re-telling events that have already occurred. 

This being Monday morning I seems like as good a place as any to start, re-start or kick-start the challenging search for the present tense, known in some circles as the literary here & now.

My lower back is telling me to resume this daily ritual in the standing position. Instinctively I arch from the lumbar and lean backward away from the computer screen. This feels a little better but I know I must return to some form of stretching, yoga or the practice I employed when in heavy and serious Ironman training, known formally as the floor routine. Deep and flowing stretch. 

I remain disturbed by current events from the global stage. As you know, or should know, I am not a fan of the current administration and their nefarious propensities to control, manipulate and persecute. Today the POTUS (as close as I can come to actually saying it) is in Singapore to meet with another strongman dictator who is a leading contributor to world suffering and has a anti-humanitarian rap sheet longer than the coastline of his Asian peninsula. Imagine my gall this morning when the headlines proclaim that human rights violations will not be discussed in their ‘historic’ meeting. Oh excuse me, their summit. 

THEN WHY MEET? WHAT ELSE IS THERE? Oh yes, war and money, right I almost forgot. More geographical-political ‘understanding’. Robert DeNiro nails it far better than I. 

I again address the absolute evil behind the .gov incarceration of, and subsequent separation of, undocumented mothers and their brown-skinned babies, as first done in Saturday’s daily diatribe, ending with my comments on other’s comments from a local news outlet’s twitter page. I still cannot fathom how someone could have the dullness of soul to insist that this crime could be justified by an ‘it’s the law’ response. Really? Excuse me Mr Evangelical hypocrite but wouldn’t ‘thou shalt not kill’ fit into that same category? The law of man should be secondary, a sub-set, of terms and conditions of the law of your God, no?

MERCY BESTS JUDGMENT. That means that compassion is better than your tribe’s interpretation of what is right or wrong. Saying that it is the law and blindly leaving discussion and contemplation to others (who you put in office to act as proxy for your racism and bigotry), is a chickenshit, cowardly and fearful attempt to assign blame elsewhere. 

I want to stand for my beliefs. On two legs and in the light of truth and justice. With a sign reading, until I can come up with something more urgent, ‘we are better than this.’

Yet the sad reality is that we aren’t. This is who we are. We suck. To allow these atrocities to continue, under the corrupt and implicit gaze of a senate and legislature unwilling to trade their bigoted base and lobby bribes for basic decency, is exactly who we are. We suck. 

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. 

My first person, active voice today, this fine Monday as I prep for my first spin class of the week, is screaming at me to do something about it. 

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, I hear it shout, ABOUT IT? 

It has now been over four hours since I, despite my weak attempt at separation of exercise and elocution, offered the same question to my class as we compared the difference between effort and result, between continual improvement and perfection, and between mercy and judgment. 

Stand up, speak up, show up. Speak your truth. Lead by example. Do what is right. 

There is criminal injustice happening right now to babies whose only crime is coming into this world with our government’s idea of the wrong color of skin. 

Somebody has to call the cops. This must stop. 

The only way we can make America great again is by voting. 

First person and active. Today I choose.