Beauty Can Wait

This will be a short post. The events of the last couple of days are historical. I live in Canada (where we are very far from perfect), but everything in the US affects us all. I spent the morning and half the afternoon on Twitter on Sunday. There’s no looking away. Beauty can wait. It can. I never thought I would say this with half the conviction. But here we are.

Paula Simons on Facebook said a lot of what I’m feeling.

I started just by listening, reading, watching videos. Witnessing.

This Op-Ed in the LA Times by Karen Abdul-Jabbar where he says, “What I want to see is not a rush to judgment, but a rush to justice.” And, “Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.”

This story in The Atlantic just had me weeping. Because yes, how, how do you Kneel on a Neck for Nine Minutes?

It drove the point home for me. And I know that if you’re one of my readers, you don’t need the point driven home. I know I’m preaching to the converted. But it seems important right now, for those of us who have even a small space staked out on the internet, to say something, anything. To refuse to be silent.

I think we all know, those of us in Canada, elsewhere, that there has been a huge piece of the story early on in our Covid-19 stories that has been left out due to the digital divide, the class and race and gender issues. Rebecca Solnit on LitHub quotes MLK who said, “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” 

I’m going to end by sharing a couple of quotations that people I follow have tweeted.

From Claire Schwartz:

“The apocalypse...is not when the world ends; it’s when one single person is killed. The entire universe becomes deformed when one single person is tortured.”

—Raúl Zurita, trans. Borzutzky

“The death toll is always one, plus one, plus one. The death toll is always one” —Teju Cole

...we are each other's
harvest:
we are each other's
business: we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

Beauty will be here for us, but this time, this time. We have to be here for it. We have to end this. Because one unnecessary death is intolerable. Evil is intolerable. Racism is intolerable. Inequality is intolerable. Hatred is intolerable. The disparities are intolerable. Violence against Black people, and Indigenous people and all BIPOC is intolerable.

I’m honestly just a gutted horrible mess over this. I haven’t cried over Covid-19. I’ve cried over this. I read Twitter most of the day, various news sites. And then we had a family Zoom call and that was lovely. What a privilege to know that all your loved ones are safe. And then a big cocktail while listening to Jason Isbell’s song, Be Afraid, repeatedly. Most of us don’t even know what real fear is. I know I don’t.

The line by Teju Cole just keeps repeating in my head, the death toll is always one. It guts me.