Well, life in the time of COVID seems to vanish. My intention was to complete this blog post in late December. It is now March! We are still quarantining...but both my husband and I have received our first vaccination and we'll get our 2nd on April 2nd! December feels like it was yesterday but it also feels like it's been a year or longer.
Protests continue on the streets of Portland, alternative policing is still being talked about...and shootings are out of control.
In my previous post I talked about Yiddish being my connection....the source of my AHA! moment. Among the many suggestions for how to say BLACK LIVES MATTER in Yiddish was the phrase, "AfroAmeriker Blut iz Nisht Kayn Vasser" which translates to African-American Blood is not Water. Somehow this statement resonates for me...more strongly in Yiddish than in English. When anyone thinks they are justified in murdering someone because that death is of no consequence; that the spilling of blood is of no more consequence than spilling a glass of water, it is time for society to wake up and do something!
My piece is made of glass. Even the letters are cut from glass. In a Jewish wedding we stomp on a glass, and listen for the shattering thunk. We understand that glass is fragile and we want the newlyweds to understand the precious fragility of marriage. Human life is equally precious and fragile.
By depicting the chalked outline of a body on a sidewalk, I wanted to communicate the anonymity of those who have died on our streets by violence, specifically out of hatred, racism, and ignorance. Stare at the outline and tell me about that body that bled out on concrete pavement. Male? Female? Genderless? Black? White? Straight? Homosexual? Religious? Non-religious? YOU DON'T KNOW!
If you are reading this blog you probably aren't part of my intended audience. I am talking to those who like to say..."All lives matter." I am speaking to those individuals of privilege and power who don't believe that black people matter. They don't believe that each and every human regardless of their gift wrap (skin) is precious and matters. And they probably won't see my art, nor read this blog.
But I learned a lot during this journey. Beating back racism is complex. Human beings don't have rheostats that control their ignorance, but we all need them. I am not well schooled in the world of electricity, but I chose rheostat as my metaphor quite purposefully.
The definition of a rheostat is : an electrical instrument used to control a current by varying the resistance.
Our learning, our emotions, our reactions don't operate with an on/off switch. Human learning is filled with AHA! moments, but they take time to develop....and even when we think we get "it", we likely only understand a fraction of "it". We need to pursue the rest of the answer and figure out our role in conquering our own biases. It's sad to say that it will take time...because this form of hatred has existed for too long. How do those song lyrics go? When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
I guess the best I can do is to say "I'm on the path and I'm still learning."
