Shutdown Week 12: Anti-Racism ABCs

Dystopian streets boarded up to thwart theives don’t scare me.

Eking out alfresco cafes here and there in the pandemic shutdown, I find a seat.

From my lone coffee chair I hear neighboring chats.

Great pseudo-intellectuals compare this 2020 spring to 1968.

How shallow the words ring from fellow boomers conflating serious demonstrators, hothead window smashers and professional ransackers.

“I was there, you know”, I want to interrupt and say, “in 1968.”

Jacketed in fringed denim and tie-dye.

Kaleidoscope eyes spiritualized reality.

Lucy in the Sky laid down groovy colors on the streets.

Marching on Washington.

Not Lake Shore Drive.

Or Union Square.

Progress not perfection drove our activism.

Quaker’s silent prayers for peace undergirded our courage.

Rolling Stone Magazine announced tickets to Woodstock, a music festival for serious protesters, hippies and dope dealers.

Sinners-turned-saints came marching in with sit-ins and shut-downs.

The mailman delivered March on Washington alerts from the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and Another Mother for Peace.

U fought for civil rights having gone your whole life without knowing one black person.

Violence erupted when non-violent Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis.

We never stopped writing letters, and when we could afford it, we telephoned Washington; the Vietnam war ended, racism didn’t.

Xgen’ers and millennials are younger than me now, older than I was then.

Yeastlike, they rise in the cities demanding “Defund the Police”. 

Zenlike, cities bow to the anti-racist revolution, even my city. Maybe.

Applauding the masked and unmasked demonstrators, I have hope.

Black lives may finally matter in my

Curious covid coronavirus city, Chicago.