Turning Points

 

From Forward

"... Chauvin’s conviction may represent a turning point in holding police accountable for the deaths of so many Black people, which the prompt laying of charges against the officer who shot Wright suggests. That officer will face a trial. Evidence will be presented. A jury will deliberate. And perhaps, like in the Chauvin trial, a guilty verdict will be returned. But once again, this is hardly a foregone conclusion. Accountability in the extrajudicial killings of Black men never has never been guaranteed.

But even if she is found guilty, holding police accountable will never be synonymous with justice. Nothing short of addressing the material conditions of Black Americans that have led to these violent encounters can ever be.

And so as we breathe a collective sigh of relief over the Chauvin verdict, let us gird ourselves for the fight ahead against systemic racism in all of its dimensions."

Padraic O Tuama / "It is in the shelter of each other that people live" (an Irish saying) / "... for the rest of my life ..."

When this came up on my YouTube suggestions early this morning, I was reminded of Pádraig Ó Tuama's book that I learned about at Alive On All Channels.  It is a heartening book I hope to read again.

And then this arrived in my email:

I lived in divided Berlin in my 20s. And after the Wall in that city fell in 1989, I never imagined that there would be another event in my lifetime which would so clearly signify a Before and an After for the whole world. But the murder of George Floyd, in the context of the last year, was such a turning point and Minneapolis a new kind of ground zero. 

What happened here rippled out across this city and then across the world. What happened here was about our world. And what was world-changing is, in large part, what started to happen inside many of us. 

Ever after, when I use the word “we” or “us,” I understand in a whole new way that I do so in a White body. I will be walking and living and working with that understanding for the rest of my life. And — both/and — I hold that knowledge together with my clarity that when time becomes history, the generations for whom we are the ancestors will see an “us.” 

-- Krista Tippett