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| ISSUE NO. 605 |
| WE ARE NOT A COUNTRY OF LAWS . . . to regulate gun ownership and gun violence. We are a country of laws that support gun ownership and gun violence. There is no comfort to be had here. If you are seeking comfort, you are going the wrong way. There is no comfort for the people who lost a child, sibling, parent, or a friend to the laws of our country - that is why 'thoughts and prayers' provoke anger rather than gratitude. The children who ran in terror from their school building will not be 'moving forward'. Their healing is beyond us now, another part of the legacy that our country is enacting each day that we lawfully fail to protect them. Forty-five years ago, Audre Lorde wrote: What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself, a Black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours? ...For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid. ...In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation, and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. ...We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. (excerpted from "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", published in The Cancer Journals and in Sister Outsider, originally given as a speech on December 28, 1977 at the Lesbian and Literature Panel of the Modern Language Association. The first ten people to email us your name and mailing address will receive a copy of both.) We are allowing a small contingent of elected officials to destroy us. We are left only with the questions: what will you do without the lie of comfort and safety? How will you break your silence? In solidarity, |
tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . "Despair is a luxury we cannot afford." - Roxane Gay, in a commencement address to New York's School of Visual Arts. |
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