#or more specifically by the injustice of tuberculosis

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

One of the weird things about 21st century life is that in every majority-christian nation, the system is set up so that people with the most resources receive the most care and support. So, like, if you go to a hospital and you have a lot of money, you get treated first.

But in the Christian sacred texts, God is extremely clear about how social orders should be set up, which is that the last should be first to care and support. So the poor and marginalized should have access to the best care and support, and whatever resources are left after the poor are well-supported should be used in service of those who aren’t poor.

I think it is weird that God is so unambiguous about this, and people are so unambiguously into God and God’s will for us, and yet we don’t do much to amend these systems.

(We ARE better at providing care for the poor than we used to be, which is why there is so much less poverty today than there was 30 or 50 years ago. But it’s utterly obvious that we do NOT have a system that offers preferential care and support for the poor. Instead we offer preferential care to the rich--which feels so natural and inevitable to us that I often can’t see past the confines of this injustice. But it isn’t natural or inevitable. There was a time when monarchy felt inevitable, after all.)

[lecho]

CHARLES WILBERT WHITE – African American Artist (1918 –  1979)

Charles White was born in Chicago in 1918. The son of an African-American domestic worker and a railroad dining car waiter of Native American ancestry, White grew up in extreme poverty. He showed an early interest in art, using found materials and an oil paint set that his mother bought him for his seventh birthday. Art became a refuge from the poverty and violence in his neighborhood and from the unhappiness in his home after his father died and then when his mother married a belligerent and often drunk steel mill worker. White would often spend hours alone at the public library or the Art Institute of Chicago, while his mother was working, fueling his imagination and expanding his public school education.

When he was in the seventh grade, White won a scholarship to attend Saturday classes at the Art Institute, providing his first formal lessons in art. At age fourteen, he worked as a sign painter, creating signs for theaters and local shops. He also joined the Arts and Crafts Guild of black artists, receiving further instruction in art and providing an opportunity for him to exhibit his work. Through the Guild, he began to meet other black artists and intellectuals, including Katherine Dunham, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks. These meetings, his frequent trips to see family in Mississippi, and his continued visits to the public library, where he discovered the works of black writers, laid a foundation for his commitment to African-American social causes.

In 1936, while in high school, White won a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. He began to address themes of the social injustices facing blacks and, in 1938, he began working on projects through the Works Progress Administration, including murals for auditoriums and exhibition halls. This led to the commission of his first mural: Five Great American Negroes.

White moved to New York in 1942, studying for a short period of time at the Art Students League, and forging numerous relationships with social activists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals. He continued to execute murals, studying and working for a time with David Alfaro Siqueiros and other Mexican muralists in Mexico City. He also continued his immersion in social causes, providing illustrations for several leftist publications. His travels through the south, where he personally experienced violence and racism, strengthened his resolve to battle social injustice through his art.

White contracted tuberculosis while serving in the Army in 1944, requiring extensive recuperation. Forced to limit his exposure to oil paints, he began to focus more on drawing, continuing to address universal subjects of social injustice, as well as depictions of specific incidents of African American history, such as The Trenton Six, a drawing based on the false arrest and imprisonment of six African American men. By the late 1940s, White had his first solo exhibition in New York, and soon was receiving substantial critical attention. In 1950, he married Frances Barrett, a social worker, and, to aid in his continued battle with tuberculosis, they moved to Los Angeles in 1956.

During the 1960s, White executed a series of massive drawings and continued to receive numerous solo exhibitions and honors, including an honorary doctor of arts degree from Columbia College in Chicago. From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, he created a series of "wanted" posters based on Civil War posters advertising runaway slaves and slave auctions. In the 1970s, he resumed painting, and continued to receive numerous honors, including his inclusion in the first all-black exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, solo exhibitions at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and his appointment as Chair of the Drawing Department at Otis College of Art and Design. Continuing to suffer from the illness that he contracted while in the military, White died of congestive heart failure on October 3, 1979. His wife, Frances, died in 2000.

Besides being an artist of extraordinary ability, White was also a man of great integrity, honesty, and compassion. White's work and life were recently celebrated in a monograph written by Andrea Barnwell, Director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Writes Barnwell, "Charles White's art, easily identifiable by its bold figures, left an indelible imprint. This romantic revolutionary believed wholeheartedly in the art, mission, compassion, and dreams of all black people. Encapsulating the hopes and joys of humanity, his life and work encircle the globe."

http://www.cejjesinstitute.org/cwpp/biography.php

[mysfwkittenblog]

The year was 3020. It had been a thousand years since the great plague of 2020 had ravaged the land and taken the lives of over a million people. Within a year the world had been changed and injustices of old had been revealed and taken action against. Those with power unknown had their power and corruption revealed to the world. Workers once seen as ‘weight’ or unnecessary suddenly became the only ones holding nations afloat. Who really cared about who became clear to see. The invention of the cure did not come without trouble within all these times. It was only the work of one exhausted doctor that they managed to finally find a treatment for the virus. It was not before it had taken its toll on all nations, unfortunately. The old countries and continents of Europe, America, Asia, along with many others, were brought to their knees by this. However, when a home is brought to their knees there will be some who fight to stand up., These people who continued fighting for a cure, fighting so everyone had a right to live, became known as the Ones Who Braved. They were honored and given statues that lasted long after their deaths and their descendants deaths too. - But of course, history will always find a way to repeat itself. Small stories of sickness began to reach the news. People say that, “It is no big deal. Our medical supplies is way better than it was back then.” The sickness grows larger. People have grown complacent and lazy, expecting for things to stay the same. We have cured cancer, we have cured HIV. We have cured many ailments that had plagued the people of a thousand years prior. But what was not counted on was a sickness of old resurging. One who’s cure was lost to time and therefore must be rediscovered before it is too late. We fail. The disease takes hold of the young first. It then targets the old and the weak and people. We know it has a name, but it has been lost to time. The tragedy of 2830, in which there was a data crash and hundreds of years of recorded data were lost but partially retrieved over the years. It spreads like a wildfire in the middle of a dry plain. Coughing, fevers, chills. We think it is the flu at first- as rare as it is now- until the blood starts flowing. There are tales of a sickness from a thousand years ago. More so, if the records are correct. The name has been lost to time but the symptoms are the same. The start off slow and without warning, and there is no patient 0. It all happens at once and despite how much as changed, this cannot. People are separated. Families are torn apart by the sickness and only allowed to see each other through glass walls and hospital masks. Hundreds of cures and tests are done but no cure is found. In desperation, a device thought to be too dangerous was brought out. It was a way to see into the past, to talk to those long since dead. The machine is activated. Some call it magic. Some call it a miracle of science. Some simply do not have a word for it a and deny its very existence. Either way, it is used. There are doubts that it will work but it does. It is not clear, as the technology from the time period is primitive compared to now, but it is able to work. They reach a small woman in a dress first. She is sick and pale, with blood flecking her mouth. They try to speak to her but she is too weak to do anything but cough. They move to the next person. This person isn’t pale and has health in their face. She is surrounded by people dressed in blue and white and there is glass- thick and clunky, they note. They speak to her and she responds with a startled look. “Hey, John, I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” The woman walks to what the people of the future assume is a ‘bathroom’. It is foreign and positively primitive to them. She enters a stall and sits down, looking into what they assume is a version of a phone. “Who are you?” They respond without words. Images are shown on the screen, of the future and then the sick. Pictures of bloody and pale faces, of children clinging to parents just as sick of them. Then there is a symptom list that rolls across the screen and her eyes widen. It is an old disease, even for her time. “It looks like tuberculosis. There’s a cure for it but it takes a year for it to fully purge it from the body.” She was still in a bit of shock from being contacted by what looked like the future. The things she saw in brief glimpses were things only dreamed by children or madmen. Still, that disease was killing people, she could tell. “Pyrazinamide. Or Isoniazid. This things will help. If you can get into my phone you can go through the internet and find what you need. I don’t know the specifics but-“ Her phone suddenly grew hot and she dropped it, wincing at the crack that spread across the scene. They find the cure quickly after this. There are lists upon lists of treatments, things they would not have thought of or tried due to believing it was below them. In times of great need all bets are off, however. They take the cure with gratitude then find a photo of the woman who helped in a section called the ‘Gallery’. Full body photos are taken so they may honor her. It is several months later, when the cure is known and active in helping the survivors of the plague, that her statue is built. She joins the Ones Who Braved, but her words saved the world of their now and not her own. She will never know of her statue but her name and help will live forever on. The future now knows to not snub the past. The past can teach lessons and have solutions for problems that we deal with now. “Our future is saved from one of the past. We will not forget her name.” @shy-canadian-snowflake

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

James Baldwin: How One Man Learned to Channel His Destructive Anger

Notes on the text:I used James Baldwin’s “Notes on a Native Son” as published in The Art of the Personal Essay as edited by Philip Lopathe and published by Anchor Books in 1995. 

This is a beautiful and intense expose on the two natures that reside in every person. For although the two specific subjects James Baldwin talks about here are himself and his stepfather, David Baldwin, what he says here can be said about any one of us. There is good and bad in all of us.

For better or worse James sees a lot of himself in his stepfather. His father was an angry and bitter man who had “lived and died in a bitterness of spirit and it frightened [James], as [they] drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness was now [his]” (589). It should be noted that David Baldwin had died on August 2, 1943, the morning of the infamous Harlem Riots. David grew up as a black man in the South during Reconstruction and had been made bitter through his experiences there. The injustice he experienced as a black man during this time period was impossible for him to shake off. What David experienced during Reconstruction was similar to what his stepson James, among thousands of other black people, was now experiencing in New York. And his son felt the same anger and bitterness in his heart that his father did and that terrified him. He was worried that it would consume him like it did his stepfather. David Baldwin died of tuberculosis, but what made it worse was how it took his mind first. When that happened all the hatred and bitterness that David had kept in his heart really came bubbling out and that really bothered James: “In my mind’s eye, I could see him sitting at the window [of the mental hospital], locked in his terrors, hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him too, by reaching out to a world that had despised him” (590). 

James saw the same intense level of anger in himself. Life in 1940s New York was not easy for a black man. It seemed like the whole world was out to get him, and that the only way to survive it would be to fight fire with fire. To fight back through acts of violent, vicious, and unrelenting anger. It all finally exploded for him on one night in New Jersey when a waitress told him that her restaurant doesn’t serve Negroes. All of a sudden all the rage exploded inside of him and he decided that he was going to make an example of her by killing her. All he had however was a half full pitcher of water which he threw at her. It was only after she ducked and it shattered on the wall behind her that enormity of what he had intended to do dawned on him and he ran. It was in that moment that two facts became abundantly clear to him: first that his outburst of anger in that situation could have cost him his life. But “the other was that [he] had been ready to commit murder. . . [and that his] life, [his] real life was in danger and not from anything that other people might do, but from the hatred that [he] carried in [his] heart” (594). He realized in that moment that he had to find a way to let some of that hatred go or else it was going to kill him.

Although as was said above, James was afraid that he had inherited his stepfather intense, destructive, hatred and bitterness, at the funeral James was reminded of the amount of love David had in his heart too. David was a minister and his funeral was being held in a church, and as one of the singers started singing David’s favorite song James started having flashbacks to a time where he was sitting on his stepfather’s knee in the hot, enormous, crowded church, which was the first church they had attended: 

It was the Abyssinian First Baptist Church on 138th street. We had not gone there long. With this image a host of others came. I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently I had had a voice and he liked to show me off before the members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I remembered that he [was] always grinning with pleasure when my solos ended. I even remembered certain expressions on his face when he teased my mother- had he loved her? I would never know. For now it seemed to me that he had not always been cruel.I remembered being taken for a haircut and scraping my knee on the footrest of the barber’s chair and I remembered my [stepfather’s] face when he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine. I remembered our fights, fights which had been of the worst possible kind because my technique had been silence (600).

There had been a great amount of love in David’s heart- love that lived side by side with the hate. Just as it did within James. Just as it does within us all. 

So now comes the all important question- what was James to do with all that hatred that in heart? Let it all out and run the risk of it doing more harm than good? Hold onto it longer and run the risk of holding onto it too long? The answer was two fold: acceptance and resistance. Acceptance of the world as it is, while still fighting to make it better: 

It began to seem [to me] that one would have to hold in mind two ideas that seemed to be in opposition.The first was acceptance, the acceptance, without rancor, of life as it is, and [of] men as they are: in light of this idea it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But that does not mean that one could become complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never in one’s life accept these injustices as common but must fight them with all of one’s strength. This fight however begins in the heart, and now it had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair (603-604).  

So how did he channel his anger in a nutshell? First he met the world where it was, and resolved to meet people where they were. It’s hard to be mad at someone when you know that they are just being who they are. In doing so he accepted that injustices do happen as a natural part of life. He was neither the first person, nor would he be the last to experience the sting of injustice. But that didn’t mean that he accepted those injustices, an injustice was still an injustice and he resolved himself to find against them for a better world. Like an athlete who loves his and accepts its limitations, but still works to better it every day, Baldwin was determined now to love his world and accept its limitations while still working every day to improve it. 

[neverquiteeden]

#i got radicalized by tuberculosis #or more specifically by the injustice of tuberculosis #and i do not know how to reconcile my own plenty with the world's want #because I lack the courage to divest myself of all wealth #and i like my kids and want to pay for their college #but mostly it's the courage problem

Bringing the tags out into the open

One of the weird things about 21st century life is that in every majority-christian nation, the system is set up so that people with the most resources receive the most care and support. So, like, if you go to a hospital and you have a lot of money, you get treated first.

But in the Christian sacred texts, God is extremely clear about how social orders should be set up, which is that the last should be first to care and support. So the poor and marginalized should have access to the best care and support, and whatever resources are left after the poor are well-supported should be used in service of those who aren’t poor.

I think it is weird that God is so unambiguous about this, and people are so unambiguously into God and God’s will for us, and yet we don’t do much to amend these systems.

(We ARE better at providing care for the poor than we used to be, which is why there is so much less poverty today than there was 30 or 50 years ago. But it’s utterly obvious that we do NOT have a system that offers preferential care and support for the poor. Instead we offer preferential care to the rich–which feels so natural and inevitable to us that I often can’t see past the confines of this injustice. But it isn’t natural or inevitable. There was a time when monarchy felt inevitable, after all.)