I left the United States almost thirty years ago, and I’ve been following the American presidential campaign against my own better judgement. I find it hard to believe that we have now heard candidates for president deny slavery caused the Civil War, insist that the United States is not and has never been a racist country, and claim that immigrants are “poisoning” the country’s blood. But then, in the quieter corners of the City on a Hill, a king’s pair of Ivy League presidents resigned recently within the mystery of how their respective Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion projects proved incapable of denouncing campus advocates for genocide.
I remember when my son was three and we had just exited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, built on the spot where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was shot. Up to that point in his brief life, my son had never uttered a racial thought, so far as I know. But on leaving the museum, cruising in his stroller back to the car, he pointed to a group of high school students in the parking lot and asked, “Are those black people?” A museum built against racism had taught him race.
I know there is value attached to being aware and cosmopolitan and knowing what’s going on around the globe. But the more I hear and experience the world out there, the less I want in. So please, lose yourself with me in the words and images that follow. Whether the pieces make you wince, smile, feel, or think something you’ve never thought, they are all written with hope because you have to hope to write. They’re a refuge from the junk that bombards us perpetually. Take your time. Make them last. They’re real too.