10/25/2005

rosa parks and thoughts on death

i hate noting deaths. but this one is important and needs to be noted. i've seen a lot online and on tv, i'll go with this from democracy now:

Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks 1913-2005
Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died at the age of 92. It was 50 years ago this December that she refused to relinquish her seat to a white man aboard a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested and convicted of violating the state's segregation laws. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would spark the civil rights movement. The boycott would also help transform a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Junior to national prominence. In 1958 King wrote "no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.''' Parks had been involved in the fight for freedom since the 1940s. She was active in the NAACP, helped raise money to defend the Scottsboro rape case and attended trainings at the Highlander Folk School of Tennessee. The Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday ''She sat down in order that we might stand up. Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom.'' Henry Louis Gates Jr called her "the Harriet Tubman of our time." After he was freed from jail Nelson Mandela recalled how Parks had inspired him and others in the South African struggle against apartheid. We'll have more on Rosa Parks in a few minutes.

why do i hate noting deaths? why should this 1 be noted?

let's deal with the second question 1st. this is a big deal. rosa parks is historically important and signficant. and i think we say who we are by what we choose to note at our sites. i can't imagine that any site on the left would not note this death but i've gotten e-mails on it and spoken with cedric who also got e-mails about this.

i can't fathom why a so-called left site would feel this wasn't news.

did the death have to happen in february (black history month) to get noticed? that's what t asked me when she called today. she also asked if i was going to note rosa park's passing? of course. it was never a question.

she's a symbol of so much: civil rights, activism, the struggle for equality, the power of taking a stand, just go down the list.

t told me that she was surfing the net this morning and was shocked by how many were taking a pass on rosa parks' death. i asked her what time she went into the salon and she didn't have to be in until noon. she said she spent hours searching and 'largely in vain.'

was it news at the salon? yeah. t said all the women were talking about it, regardless of race.

i asked t what 1 thing she would want to say about rosa parks was?

'that she held up a light that showed a problem and let us follow her out of the darkness.'

i told t i thought that was beautiful but t said it was nothing any 1 who thought about it wouldn't say.

so what's the next rosa parks going to be illuminating?

t said she hopes it's the issue of sexuality because it's still 'something hidden. you guys got will & grace but we really don't have anything like that. there are plenty of gay and lesbian african-americans but it's like we don't exist in ads and tv. maybe every 1 thinks the guy on spin city should tide us over for the next decade?'

t feels that the slice of time given to african-americans is already tiny and when it comes to sexuality 'or disabilities' there's even less time.

we shared stories about learning about rosa parks in school and t said she thought 1 reason kids liked rosa parks before they even knew much about her was due to her name. 'rosa parks.' 'every 1 likes parks and roses are beautiful flowers. the name captured the peaceful nature of parks we learned about and the beauty.'

t said 1 woman's whose hair she did had been crying. it was a white woman. she shared with t that she was in high school when rosa parks took her stand and that it made her think a lot about whether or not the american dream was really a dream for all.

t and i talked about how the awakening effect rosa parks had on the country crossed racial lines and t offered that if bill clinton were in office there wouldn't have been hesitation or delay in clinton making a statement the way bully boy drug his feet most of the day. she also thinks the media would have taken their cue from clinton and done the kind of coverage that democracy now did today. this wasn't just a headline on democracy now, amy goodman & co dug into the archives to find an interview from 1956 to let you hear rosa parks talk about her experiences in something more than a brief sound byte. and then john conyers jr. was a guest and he spoke of rosa parks who helped with his 1st campaign for congress and then went on to work on his congressional staff.

t said she saw the news at the common ills last night because she doesn't own a tv. her tv blew out in 2002 and the fact that the big networks seemed stuck in the sitcom mode when it came to african-americans made her decide there were other ways to spend her money. she listens to democracy now on the radio and otherwise surfs the web and listens to music.

i asked her what she listened to today? she said the soundtrack to lady sings the blues because the news brought her down and the soundtrack seemed to reflect her mood. she said when she saw the thing at the common ills, she started hitting the links sure that c.i. had to have the facts wrong. when she read the 2nd link, she put on lady sings the blues and except for the hour she listened to democracy now, that's all she played nonstop. she even took it to the salon and popped it in there.

i could relate because i've been in an otis blue mood myself. but i pointed out that there were upbeat songs on lady sings the blues too. like 't'ain't nobody's bizness if i do' and 'what a little moonlight can do.' t said those were the songs that kept her from nonstop tears.

of the sites, by white bloggers, that didn't feel rosa parks' deaths was important, t asked me if i thought the people even had african-american friends? i don't know those people so i said i didn't know. she said that it's bad enough that they couldn't relate to the accomplishments of rosa parks but it was really shocking that, if they had any nonwhite friends, they wouldn't even toss out something, a line even, just to note it for them.

cedric is furious. i urge every 1 to check his site for a post he's going to work on as soon as he's 'calm.'

here's the reason i don't like to note deaths, or reasons. i'm never sure what to say. i always feel awkward and worry i'll say the wrong thing. that's 1 reason.

then there's the fact that with each rosa parks or susan sontag, we lose another brave voice. rosa parks last few years weren't 1s of good health but she was alive and she stood for something even if her health limited her. i start thinking about how people like howard zinn, gloria steinem, studs terkel, julian bond, and other brave voices are getting on up in the years. these days, these bully boy days, we really need all the inspiration and all the leadership we can get. we don't get it from congress.

c.i. will point to people like naomi klein, dahr jamail, susan faludi, nancy chang, rebecca walker and a host of others. (truly, it's a long list.) and those people do exist. but each voice lost is all the more painful to me because these are days when we need every 1.

i'll talk about robert parry for a 2nd because e-mails have come in on him since c.i. noted that i had met robert parry.

i did. i was married at the time so don't expect to hear 'and then we hit the sack and he was amazing!' (though i'm sure he's amazing.) robert parry was some 1 i heard much of and when some 1 said he was at the hotel and offered to point him out and introduce my then husband and i, my husband was all for it. i was already nervous.

now i can meet an actor or singer or anyone and rarely get tongue tied. (i would get very tongue tied if i met gloria steinem.) i can tell you stories about u2 that i'm purposely tying my tongue on (though i've shared them with kat). (personally, i can take adam clayton. the rest of them? like i said, i can take adam clayton.)

so we were walking over and i was already nervous. then, as we got closer, i realized he looks exactly like my father in some older photographs. i couldn't go through with it. i just stood at a distance and watched. my ex-husband got to say hello and he reported that robert parry seemed really nice. i'm sure he was really nice.

but even then, and this was a few years back, i was aware that robert parry wasn't 28 and aware that no 1 had come along in the mainstream media with his kind of fire for the truth. my father, and i'm not saying robert parry is old enough to be my father, had just had surgery and i was already intimidated because it was robert parry, seeing his resemblence to my father only freaked me out more.

robert parry's probably got many, many decades left (he's not old) but the fact that you can look around and see no 1 in the mainstream doing what he did at newsweek or associated press makes him even more important to me. (1 summer, i lived on his lost history book. that summer alone, i read it too many times to count.) (when ava told me she had written him, i was in awe of her. i'm not joking.) (my ex-husband still says that if i hadn't been married and hadn't been with him, i could have talked to robert parry and more - figure that out on your own - but with my 'sexual powers' on hold, his words, i was at a loss.)

when you start following events in the world, you start realizing how few people even try to tell the truth. that's why robert parry ranks so highly in my book. in the independent media world, which he is in now, amy goodman ranks highly as well.

i don't know if the corporate media got so strong and entrenched that no new robert parry can come out of it or if people just don't feel the need to battle for the truth now? but robert parry battled a time when people were taking huge passes. i have a lot of respect and admiration for him. (and if i met him today, i'm sure i would still be tongue tied.)

fyi, i'll be posting later for a period of time. i don't know how long. but i'm having sex with my ex currently and we're spending a great deal of time together. don't read that as announcement that we're getting back together. as i see it, we fell back into an old pattern, if there's something new that can be built there, great but i'm not going to act 15, no offense to my teenage readers, and act like 'oh we're in love again!' (we never stopped caring for each other but the marriage broke up for a reason, i've noted that here, if we're able to deal with 1 another honestly, great. if not, he was always a great lover and a great guy so it's worth my time for those reasons alone.)

he knows he'll pop up here and says his parents can get over it and i can write anything, good or bad, about him. but for those who've wondered why the sex talk has been less of late it's because i didn't want to post on that for fear that some would say 'oh happy ending!' or some such thing.

so here's another reason and i really don't want to type it, on why i don't like noting deaths, when c.i. had the cancer scare it really screwed up my world. i can't imagine a day when i don't call c.i. at least once to gripe or laugh about something. i feel the same way about elaine, we've all been friends for years. but, knock wood, elaine hasn't had any health problems thus far other than a root canal which she put off forever so if you ever e-mail her about that tell her that i told her that was what she needed when she kept making excuses not to go see a dentist.

there are people who are your touchstones and you know that just checking in with them is going to make the world a little better. c.i. loathes talking on the phone in long conversations but it's a testament to our friendship that i can tie c.i. up on the phone for an hour before getting the 'this conversation has been a long 1' hint.

i couldn't stand to lose c.i. or elaine. we go back so far. there are times, confession here, when i meet some 1 and, if i get along with them, after i think how wonderful they are, and this is true of when jim and i first started becoming friends, i'll start preparing myself for the possibility that death could come. elaine tells me i'm goldie hawn in best friends because goldie's always picturing her parents death in that film to deal with what will come.

i just don't handle death well. and we'll leave the analysis of that to elaine (who's given me plenty of psycho-analyzing on this subject over the years).

so let's find something bright to go out on. did you know elaine and i hate each other?

i didn't. elaine didn't either. but she had an e-mail where some guy claimed that he had figured us out and we hated each other.

why?

because we're not always plugging each other on our sites.

i actually asked elaine, and every 1 else, not to note my site if they could note some 1 else in the community instead. i do pretty good with my readership and there are so many members who've just started up sites.

as for elaine, i probably haven't mentioned her that much. when i got back from my vacation, john roberts got confirmed and i went into a depression over that. so elaine didn't get the kind of build up that i honestly would have liked to have given her.

but readers here had 6 weeks to see how wonderful she was and i think they all know how close elaine and i are. i'm less prone to reveal her secrets than i am c.i.'s but that's because elaine's shy. c.i.'s just private. with elaine, i will stop to think, 'is this something she would want discussed?' with c.i. i just throw it up here and know if it pisses c.i. off, i'll hear about it and then it will be over.

that really is the key with c.i. and i think i've noted that before. c.i. is 1 of those people who will get out and then let it go. (which is why each day there can be hope for the new york times even though the previous day the new york times proved itself worthless yet again.) ge it out and it's over.

2 weeks ago, c.i. asked me to note something here and i did and noted that c.i. asked for it to be noted. but the conversation started with, 'can i ask you something' and i thought 'oh crap what did i write this time?'

with elaine, she lost both her parents not long after we became friends and that's part of the reason she's shy, my opinion and i'm not the psychologist so take that for what it's worth, but she is shy and i probably register those months after her parents die to this day when i think of her. with c.i. it's another story.

i've known c.i. to be depressed, really deeply depressed, only twice. 1 time was a death and elaine and i have both noted that, the other time was a party. it was this wonderful party or would have been but warring factions put an end to that and c.i. called it off. the night of the party that wasn't was the most depressed i've ever known c.i. 'took the bed' comes to mind. and the party was actually symbolic of more than 'let's all have fun' but i won't say more because i don't need the call that begins, 'can i ask you something?'

but otherwise, c.i. never gets down. c.i. gets tired but even then, c.i.'s the 1 talking you up or finding the silver lining. there's a mutual friend that we have, who doesn't blog, and we were both at the hospital five years ago when her daughter needed surgery. i'll call her x. it wasn't a good time for x. her daughter was having surgery and the cat died the day before. c.i. can take on anyone's problems and did. empathy to the extreme but even so we were all laughing after 20 minutes and c.i. made that transition happen.

which is another reason i'm always on the phone with c.i. unlike x, i'm not asking, 'what's our position on this?' (x really does call whenever she hears something on the news to find out what 'the position' is.) but if things get a little too tough to handle, i always know i can get a quick fix from a quick call to c.i.

thinking about all of this, i never think before i start writing as i'm sure most of my readers can tell, i really think elaine and her brother's reaction to their parents death registered strongly. as it should. but i think seeing the pain they were in, and elaine was still in high school, made me even more wary of death. or scared of it. let's call it what it is, scared of it.

i'm glad wally's safe and i'll note that i need to add corrente to my blogroll. i'm sorry but until sherry pointed it out an e-mail today i didn't know that they linked to me. i'll put them on the blogroll tomorrow. i would do it tonight but i have ... plans.











thanks to c.i. for catching the title of parry's book. i had it wrong. it was lost history. let me do a disclaimer because i don't think c.i. knew i'd be mentioning: c.i.'s pointing out a flaw in a book title does not in any shape or form mean that c.i. feels my recollections are correct in other areas. you should laugh now.
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