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Happy Birthday America!

Simon, Paul Simon singing with Art Garfunkel, wrote a bevy of songs that fit the 4th for me.
Always.
Honestly I don't know why, but they never seem to beat the crap out of her while asking for something MORE.

Freedom, pursuit of happiness, right to ask questions, public schools, roads, parks.
An amazing idea let loose.



What birthday are we celebrating?
America you are a math problem 2013 - 1776 = 237 ?
I've lived 54 years of that.
A thought hits me.
I've lived about a fourth of her history.

Have I thanked her lately?
No.



 Thank you America.




America is home to me.
It pains me when I listen to something like this:



That's LaVar on those heads, and Marsalis. They seem America to me.
The LaVar of the children - with his hands on the side of the car. In a traffic stop.
So we do come in her most uncertain hour. 
America needs to think hard about what LaVar Burton had to teach his 33 year old son.
I have to think hard about it.

If you don't listen to the video above my remarks are meaningless.

One time, when I was close to 30, I was walking in Westwood- back when Westwood in LA was hip. Also walking was a guy who was black, in a yellow sweater, and who was clearly a college kid walking around with friends. In one second I blinked and he was on the ground in a choke hold.
Jack saw it coming I think. He was yelling kind of, "What are you doing?" But he got told in no uncertain terms to get out of the way. He made a real effort to intervene-as I recall-it was a time when on the other side of town the "crack wars" were hot. This was so violent. I recall that day to him as he is in and out the back door today,  and on asking Jack -he recounts it even now. Yes, memory-we seem to have one.
What I see in my mind is him kind of flying through the air, and his friends just saying-this is our friend he goes to UCLA. Please listen...

So....

I went to work the next morning in South Central. 93rd Street School.
Teaching 4th graders in 100 degree heat, no air, no opening windows, no materials.
In overcrowding, not nearly enough desks. And I felt really strange.

Thinking about what I had to offer the kids.

A perspective.

So around our house we've been talking about America today-this week.
How our ancestors probably represent many sides or perspectives. Including the Revolutionaries.
The poor, the ordinary, the thinkers, the dispossessed. It is true that in our thoughts, attitudes, we are deeply affected by the times we are in, by the choices family made, by what we were taught, by what our times took on as change.
It's amazing to me that I was trying to put this into words to my mother, who is ill with pneumonia and has severe loss of words when speaking. She stopped me by saying, "There is always so much to work for."

I'm bound to work for bringing the arts to children-poor children-and an experience of that right to create- which I see as America's gift.

She gifted it to me.



In our discussions several small threads unwound around us.
My daughter and I , and my mother, discussed the "n" word and Ms. Deen's fall from grace.
What it was about, why it happened. It's churning in media as something to take our conscious off things like unequal neighborhoods, schools, so on. Eventually Sophia said-"Mom, Grandma was raised in the South (virginia) and she never spoke like this once, (she hasn't) AND she worked in these issues." And I thought about that.
But then we looked at Jimmy Carter asking for the entirety of Paula's works to be considered. Her work in homelessness and foodbanking. That was something that made us sit with it.
I'm not happy when I see on the John Stewart Show a comedian excoriate her for being fat which is different than holding racist views to me. For being a fat woman in her 60's. Over someone who said some stupid shit. That's a prejudice too.
And it is internalized by young women as a call to anorexia.

I found her plantation wedding thoughts deeply disturbing. My mother said, fumbling and coughing to do so, to my daughter-that's completely intolerable. Mom is in a mode where she says very little and is weak at 95 pounds-but she definitely loves butter. She does not know Ms. Deen having never seen her show and only a few recipes of hers.

So we were left feeling this was a sad thing, if you watch the special on Richard Pryor, on his life, that's a heartbreaker I've seen twice lately- he uses this word so much, but you get to a point where Richard goes to Africa returning planning to stop using it. He says no one was called that in Africa. No one.
That spoke to why the word is utterly an American invention- that tells us of something we need to learn from its having use here. Richard got it. If ever we needed redemption-this word is about that.
It is a vestige of what we can learn from our past for our future. We need to address it now.


So once a long time ago America decided-no royalty.
We've struggled with that over the years, but we definitely "said" it.
I think our decisions about $ are creating this new royals, Kardashian's and celebrity, as it was once Rockefellers and so on...but whatever.... we took kings and queens out of the picture. No one misses that in school- no matter how crappy btw. Last night I was reading in the LA Times all the things being bought for the new royal baby that is soon due. Plus I glimpsed all the royal maternity clothes.
and the royal beauty. All the pomp and the joy over what will be a child born into a loving family and the best that can ever be bought.
Plus Kim just had her West.
While I was reading a little screen popped out in the left hand corner.
It said something like "small child dies locked in car in heat"
Boom, then it was gone.

Here I was reading about a baby that will want for nothing while somewhere a child is lost.
And because I hadn't reacted fast enough to click an article- a child who was anonymous to me-another sad story- in a blink gone.
I've taught children lost to poverty for a very long time.
And children that overcame poverty and all the in betweens.
But I do know when one life "counts" and another doesn't. I do know it isn't healthy for one child to arrive with articles about all that is being purchased for them.
This is something that for some reason brought me to Jesus.
I always get a sense of wonder about the notion of his start in a stable.

America has amazing children.
On the 4th I'm sure we'll all be taking them to fireworks, thinking of family, hoping that our future-in their hands- is one of hope and promise.

Whatever else we tried in America we have had a past that did some things to help our children-and I hope we are still on the road to providing all of us access to the best public system possible. I hope we get why.

Yes, this is rambling, incomplete, unstructured writing.
It's written between cooking my mother breakfast, cleaning, folding wash. It's a work in progress.
I'm going to cook baked beans, deviled eggs and grill for the fam.
And sing an American tune.
It's all right.

America, happy Birthday.