I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: covid-19 pandemic

  • it’s going to be beautiful


    Superlative in Chief is in the home stretch of his re-election campaign, and these final laps are going to be the greatest finish ever seen since the beginning of time, regardless of the outcome.

    If you don’t believe it, just ask trumpty dumpty (not original but I wish I had thought of it) who sat on a wall perched for a fall.

    Covid, covid, covid – the vaccine is on the way – what’s the big deal? It’s going to be the greatest vaccine ever invented by the most brilliant medicine men in the entire universe which includes millions of Star Trek galaxies our prominent new Space Force will explore forever and ever.

    Who cares that more than 225,000 Americans have died in that fake news story? If it weren’t for my amazing Coronavirus Task Force led by my – who did I say led that anyway? – more than a million Americans would have died by now. That’s right. More than a million if not for my leadership and appointing that  – who did I appoint for the most fabulous leadership in the history of the world other than me, of course?

    Oh Mike, the guy with the fly in his hair. I always said he was a loser.

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    I never knew I could be this tired of superlatives, but then I’ve never had a president whose entire method of communication consisted of superlatives mastered in an elementary private school.

    Clearly my endorsements of Joe Biden for President, Kamala Harris for Vice President and Jaime Harrison for Senator from South Carolina  are the most stupendous recommendations of my lifetime. I can’t wait for this election to be over next week, but I will gladly wait for all the votes to be counted.

    It’s going to be beautiful.

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    Stay safe, stay sane, stay tuned and please VOTE as if our democracy depends on it. That would be correct.

  • black women called “Mayor” from sea to shining sea


    A world wide pandemic from an attack by an unseen enemy known as Covid-19,  increasing public protests across the country led by Black Lives Matter against systemic racism in the criminal justice system and other institutions,  police brutality in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks; the deaths of two iconie Civil Rights leaders: Congressman John Lewis and Reverend C.T. Vivian – the crises facing the mayors of American cities in 2020 was a perfect storm of despair from the loss of people, jobs, faith in the federal government and too often hope for the future. And yet, a growing number of black women stepped up courageously to meet the challenges of local government leadership..

    “I’m an independent reform candidate. I do not represent the past.” – Mayor Lori Lightfoot

    Indeed, Mayor Lightfoot was elected mayor of Chicago, Illinois in April, 2019 to shine a bright light into the future as she became the first openly gay African American woman ever elected mayor of a major American city.  Chicago is located in the Great Lakes region of the Midwestern United States, the 3rd. largest city in the country according to the 2020 census with a population of over 2.6 million people.

    Two thousand miles west of Chicago on a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay lies the 16th. largest city in the country: San Francisco, California. In July, 2018,  London Breed was elected mayor of that city in a special election to become the first African American woman to serve as mayor of this municipality which has a population of almost 900,000 people. According to Jay Barmann in the San Francisco News Tuesday, September 15, 2020, Mayor Breed said:

    “People are pretty much tired of what we’re living in, as it relates to COVID. I’m tired of talking about it. I’m tired of living in it,” Breed said in her usually candid fashion in a press conference Tuesday. “I’m tired of doing all the things you are tired of doing, because I want to enjoy my life. I want to live. I want to go back to normal.”

    But, she cautioned, we still haven’t turned any corners on the coronavirus, it’s still spreading in the Bay Area, and there’s even been an uptick in hospitalizations in San Francisco in the last week. “We are not out of the woods when it comes to COVID,” she said. (end of quote)

    The driving distance between San Francisco on the West Coast of the US  all the way across the country to the Mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast where the 20th. largest city in the country, Washington, D.C. is located, is a distance of approximately 2,800 miles. DC has a population of more than 720,000 people according to the 2020 census and in the mayoral race in 2014 Muriel Bowser became the first African American woman to be elected mayor of her city. Mayor Bowser brings a refreshing approach to gun control:

    “You have a mayor who hates guns. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t have any handguns in the District of Columbia. I swear to protect the Constitution and what the courts say, but I will do it in the most restrictive way as possible.”

    Ranking 36th. on the list of American cities by population sits Atlanta, Georgia with a population of almost 525,000.  Atlanta is 625 miles south of Washington, D.C., considered to be part of a sub-region of the US known as the Deep South,  and is located among the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, an African American woman, was elected mayor in 2017. In a speech addressing the Democratic National Convention in August, Mayor Lance Bottoms had these remarks on the importance of voting in the 2020 election:

    “We know how important it is that we elect real servant leaders, leaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—people of honor and integrity, who hold justice close to their hearts and believe that the lives of my four Black children matter. In the words of womanist poet Audre Lorde, “Your silence will not protect you.”

    Finally, I felt compelled to check out black female mayors in other places like, let’s say Atlanta’s neighboring state of South Carolina, my home state for the past fifty years. Tann Vom Hove, senior fellow at City Mayors Research, listed two black female mayors from Hampton County (Francenia Ellis in Furman, pop. 275; Patricia Williams in Brunson, pop. 550), one from Union County (Mary Ferguson Glenn in Carlisle, pop. 450), one from Charleston County (Miriam Green  in Awendaw, pop.1,300), one from Laurens County (Stellarteen Jones in Gray Court, pop. 800),  and one from Calhoun County (Helen Carson-Peterson in St. Matthews, pop. 1,900).

    Through my personal research of watching the 6 o’clock local ABC news last night, I was introduced to Mayor Alfred Mae Drakeford who is the first African American female mayor of Camden, SC in Kershaw County. Camden is 40 miles west of our house, has a population of 7,200 and is full of Revolutionary War history but is better known in our home as one of Pretty’s favorite “antiquing” towns.

    Thank goodness for the black women mayors wherever they are regardless of the size of their cities – may they continue to serve their communities and always strive to preserve the Constitution of the United States against all enemies not only in 2020 but also in years to come.

    America, America, God shed her grace on thee – and crown thy good with sisterhood from sea to shining sea.  Amen.

    Stay safe, stay sane, and please stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • this country doesn’t love us back


    “There are other cases… of officers who seem to be ‘trigger happy.’ In a number of instances, Negroes have been shot, supposedly in self-defense, under circumstances indicating, at best, unsatisfactory police work…and at worst, a callous willingness to kill.”

    (Excerpt from 1947 report “To Secure These Rights” produced by Harry Truman Committee on Civil Rights as quoted in opinion by Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King on June 19th, 2020)

    We know about the callous willingness to kill from the names of just a few of the many African Americans who speak from their graves, American lives lost at the hands of police brutality in cities across the country. Samuel DuBose – Cincinnati, 2015. Terrence Sterling –  Washington, D.C., 2016. Freddie Gray – Baltimore, 2015. Michael Brown – Ferguson, Missouri, 2014. Walter Scott – Charleston, South Carolina, 2015. Rayshard Brooks – Atlanta, 2020. Tamir Rice – Cleveland, Ohio, 2014.  Trayvon Martin – Sanford, Florida, 2012. Breonna Taylor – Louisville, Kentucky, 2020. Eric Garner – New York City, 2014. George Floyd – Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020.

    This week Jacob Blake’s name was added to the 2020 infamous roll call of victims of “unsatisfactory police work” – this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As destructive wild fires raged in California claiming the life of a helicopter pilot attempting to douse the inferno, as a Category 4 Hurricane called Laura gathered the power to strike along the Gulf Coast shores in Louisiana bringing life threatening winds and water reminiscent of Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, as the number of American lives lost in the worst pandemic of our history reached the dubious milestone of 180,000 +,  a police officer shot an unarmed African American man seven times in the back when he attempted to get in the car where his three young sons waited and watched. Jacob Blake will likely be paralyzed if he survives the bullet wounds.

    Doc Rivers, head coach of the NBA franchise Los Angeles Clippers, had an emotional reaction to the police shooting in an interview on August 25th. “…we’ve been hung, we’ve been shot…it’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country doesn’t love us back…the training (for police) has to change. My dad was a cop, I believe in good cops. We’re trying to get them to protect us like they protect everyone else…as an American you need to be outraged at that video. All we ask is that you live up to the Constitution.”

    Yesterday the wide world of sports came to a grinding halt as athletes from both the NBA and WNBA, major league baseball and soccer teams all joined together to promote social justice through police reforms long overdue in our nation by boycotting their respective games. Players across the board said this killing of black people through police brutality must stop. Our lives do matter, they agreed, and we want to see genuine criminal justice changes that guarantee our families equal safety and protection under the law. Tennis players rallied around the protest of Naomi Osaka by postponing the semi-finals at the Western and Southern Open scheduled for play today. No justice, no peace, no sports.

    Senator Kamala Harris reminded us in a statement this afternoon that our pledge of allegiance calls for “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” We know, and we have always known that promise is unfulfilled for people of color, but now cell phones record that broken promise every time a video of these egregious acts goes viral on social media to be seen by anyone and everyone. Pretending, denying, disavowing, obfuscating no longer are viable options for people of good will who embrace the truth.

    Wake up, America, it’s time to love them back. We can, and we must, do better.

    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned. By all means, VOTE in November.

     

     

  • nero fiddled while Rome burned, but who set the fire?


    Summer of our Discontent

    There once was an emperor named Nero

    Who fiddled and called himself  Hero,

    His people complained,

    They held Nero to blame,

    But Nero set fire to their peepholes.

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    As paratrump (who knows who they really were) forces stormed into Portland, Oregon this month, I have been horrified by the pictures of peaceful protesters being picked up on the city streets by unidentified individuals dressed in camouflage carrying automatic weapons, whisked away in unmarked cars by these individuals, taken to unknown destinations in these unmarked cars. An invasion of an American city perpetrated by an American president who devotes himself to distinctly “unamerican” activities.

    As we collectively mourned the loss of civil rights icon John Lewis this past week, we were reminded the struggle for justice and fair treatment continues. As I watched Portland ignite in flames last week, I thought of the emperor Nero’s alleged response to the fires that burned in ancient Rome. Fiddling away. Actually fiddling.

    But for the rest of the story, I discovered that perhaps Nero did more than fiddle. Some theories emerged afterwards that Nero was responsible for the fires. Sound familiar? I wonder if Portland would be in flames if paratrump troops hadn’t been sent to that city.

    While fires burn in some of our nation’s cities, the Covid-19 pandemic rages with a greater vengeance in many of the places we call home across the entire country.

    This is without question another summer of our discontent.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

     

     

     

  • the horse you draw is the one you’ll ride


    I originally published this post on December 28, 2013. While I had this conversation with one of my first cousins in Texas after Christmas six years ago, I found his words strangely spoke to me today as a spike in South Carolina coronavirus cases brought the pandemic closer and closer to Pretty and me.

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    A year can fly past in a hurry and yet the passage of time, regardless of our perception of its speed, never leaves us unchanged. I was talking to a cousin who called me on Christmas Day to wish me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  I appreciated the call and the visit we had. The thousand miles that separated us couldn’t break the ties that bind us through our DNA.

    We were talking about the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to call them, and Gaylen who has spent over forty years hanging out with cowboys at rodeos in and around the Houston area told me one of their favorite quotes:  “The horse you draw is the one you’ll ride.”

    I like it.  No apologies.  No excuses.  No whining about why did I get this horse.  No wondering about whether this rodeo was one I should’ve signed up for.  No mulling over how I ever got to be a cowboy in the first place.  It’s now or it’s never – so you ride.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.