My latest video about the state of this nation. I didn’t know what I would be talking about. I chose to just jump in the deep end and go for it. 🏊🏿♂️
In the video, I mention bees and honey when I meant to say bees and flowers. Damn, how did I fuck THAT up? 😆
Inside a card on YouTube, I dropped the following podcast from Banner & Backbone Media. Thanks, Nick.
💪🏿 KingRay
I can’t think of a way to begin this comment to you, or even really what I want to say. The only thing I’m sure of is my motivation. That I want to reach out in the darkness that divides us, two people, one, who has poured out his heart and shared his worldview and his “how I see it”. The other, me, a white woman, up in her years. I think I hear you. It’s hard for me to not launch into defensiveness and justification. I’m going to do that, eventually, probably. I know I don’t have to tell you I don’t speak for the entire white race, and I know you don’t speak for the entire what-we-are-calling the Black race, as if we are different species in some sort of a competition. Well, maybe we are, but if so, it’s only because we’ve been forced into a pen, a fighting pen, to duke it out, for the benefit and amusement of the ruling oligarchical class. But I digress. I’m a particular individual with a particular past. I come from money. My parents were conservative racists who taught me carefully. They didn’t care about anybody. I didn’t care about anybody. The only suffering they ever did was the nose to the grindstone variety. The white folks who don’t care about Blacks, or immigrants, or homeless people, or genocide have never suffered. They protect themselves from exposure. I’m not going to sugar coat this. My father wound up murdering my mother and committing suicide, and that is what accelerated the crash course I was already on, hastening my journey to find my own heart. I had to ask for help and rebuild myself, beginning with resisting picking at my scabs, turning the page so I could slowly develop some skin, start to come back into the moment instead of sitting there, looking unplugged, or worse, just rocking. Complicated. I was very angry with them at the time of their deaths, which made it difficult to grieve. I have lived in fancy white neighborhoods, and I have lived in poor neighborhoods. People who are poor, who have suffered, are far kinder than the people I’ve met who are yuppies. Right now I am the only white person in my neighborhood and I ride the bus. It is the nicest neighborhood I have ever lived in.
There are kind, humanitarian, white people who are holding on to the middle class by a thread, too- maybe even fewer in numbers as we’re all financially stressed, but when I was rich I didn’t meet them, because I was too fucked up from my upbringing. But years of suffering and seeking teach a person how to be a person, and how to treat people. Every person I meet now I see as an individual, and I care about that person. I am writing all this to say I care about you. Going a little woo-woo now. As I went further inside, on the journey through suffering to find my own heart, my heart went further outside, past myself, my little circle of friends and family, to larger circles that included “what tortures did the Blacks go through? What are they going through now? Where is Iraq on the map? What is a Shiite Muslim?, what are those Eastern religions about?, How am I ever going to learn forgiveness?”, etc, etc. This is going to sound a little defensive, and maybe it is. When the 50.50 actions began, after a little research, and ever since, I’ve been having conversations with Black folk - again, I hate to use that distinction, but of course that really is the point- “Stay home! We white folk’ve got this! It’s our fucking turn to carry you on our backs, to be y’all’s human shield, etc.”. I do y best to do my homework, and I think it’s part of my job to learn about Black History and speak out against white washing the past, etc., etc. Now let me say this. Everybody has their particular issue that they champion. I am not Black, and while I firmly believe a Black Lives Matter and stand up against prejudice in conversation, and I am forceful about voting rights and election fairness and all the things most Left Wingers care about, Black is not my main issue. My burning interest is the intersection of artificial intelligence and consciousness, and really anything AI.
Yeah, that's about it...