AMERICA'S MUTANT MITOSIS

AMERICA'S MUTANT MITOSIS Cells grow by division. Such growth is part of a process known as mitosis. We learn about it in biology classes. We observe its human applications in Bible study with Abram and Lot; Ishmael and Isaac; Jacob and Esau. In his 1967 classic, SOUL ON ICE, Eldridge Cleaver rhapsodizes about mitosis in a chapter, "Primeval Mitosis." If at the most basic level of cell life, mitosis manifests , then it surely pertains to higher, larger life forms. Not all splits or mitotic divisions are successful, however. In April 1861, the Confederate States of America (CSA) tried to separate from the United States of America (USA). CSA nearly succeeded! But for the intervention of President Abraham Lincoln's January 1, 1863, "military measure" known as "Emancipation Proclamation," that freed the CSA's 4 million black slaves to fight for the USA, and against the CSA, for their freedom from physical and legal slavery, the CSA would have succeeded in splitting away. But America's civil war mitosis was incomplete. A mutation was born from the conflict, the incomplete split. Under it, blacks had legal citizenship rights on paper only, but no political or economic equality to whites. In fact, in life, black citizens who had given their all to preserve the USA were thereafter blamed, lynched, stigmatized, ostracized, Jim Crowed, miseducated, lied to,  cheated, massively incarcerated , after the infamous white capital and political rapprochement in 1876, the Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel B. Tilden Presidential vote . "Toward a more perfect union" indeed American mitosis continues now in 2018, to live up to its creed, and to be fair, just, honorable to all, most especially African Americans!

I AIN'T STUDYING YOU

"I ain't stud'n you," is a down home expression, which, depending on its use in a given context, might mean "I am not thinking about you," or literally, "I am not studying you." Our late, maternal, great-aunt Dedove Merriweather had said it often, as had her peers in Canton, Mississippi, where I was born. Years later, blues singer , Bobby Rush had a big hit by that name: "I ain't stud'n you," replete with fancy dancing girls as he performed live. That thought occurred to me today, as I read many news accounts of the latest tweets, barbs, charges in the saga of the President Donald Trump incumbency: "I ain't stud'n you!" But, how can I not, dare I not? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q_pdutDQPs

AGE OF TRUTH?

Truth does not age

FACTS & OPINIONS

FACTS AND OPINIONS A simple recitation of facts is more effective that a clutch of opinions , or opinions mixed with with facts. Facts are difficult to gather. They often require time and energy to research, sometimes money. It is reasonable to ask what is a fact? A fact is an assertion proven true. Assertions are statements that are proven by probative evidence; that is demonstrably reliable evidence. Such evidence It can consists of numbers, charts , drawings, specimens, photos, witnesses, impacts on a given environment , oaths, admissions in certain cases. An opinion, by contrast, is not an assertion that needs to be proven; or supported by evidence; whose reliability leaves much to desired, when opinion is compared to facts . Too much opinion and too few facts have been the downfall of many people. This can come about due to an undue reliance on the speaker or writer. It may be due to haste, desperation , negligence or simply sloth or mental incapacity. One must know some facts to know other facts . Knowledge helps , always. So does proof. Do not be offended when someone says "google," when responding . Such a statement is encouraging you to seek proof of an assertion. Proof of facts adds to your own knowledge base, empowering you, helping you, enriching you. When someone says, "believe me," grab your purse, your wallet, loved ones , as you are then dependent on the graces of man, not of God.

SPIRITUAL RECYCLING

SPIRITUAL SPHERICAL RECYCLING There are special places and times. We, the living, mark these special places. Certainly all in life celebrate them, commemorate them, in ritual and in custom . Mankind does so. Animals do so . Plants do so. It may be that so-called non-life does too. Our date of birth is a special time . Our place of birth is special space . Swallows do return to Capistrano . Salmon return to spawning spaces. Galaxies, stars, planets, comets, meteors, orbit in periodic spheres . Given these periodicities and the glory accorded them by existence, it is no great exaggeration to await any "second coming" or whatever number of this God or that; of this phenomenon or that phenomenon. Each "return" affirms, universal law; confirming nature, spirit, life, being. Completion of spherical recycling is found in our returning to the place, or to the space, in the spirit, if not in the letter, of where we first came in. Amen.

BLAMELESSNESS

BLAMELESSNESS By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman 01/01/18 This New Year's Day, 2018, I reflect upon “blamelessness:” That which is or was without fault. Ancient Greek and Roman writers hailed the ancient Ethiopians (Africans) as “blameless.” Nearer in time to us, Booker T. Washington's “white glove test” is a trope for blamelessness. A finicky New England, spinster near his community in Malden, West Virginia, where Washington had lived as a child, kept hiring and firing houseboys. She was never pleased with their housework. Her fierce reputation as a stern taskmaster preceded her. Booker T. wanted out of the hot, sweaty, salt mines where he worked. He needed money for a school that he had hoped to attend. He decided to seek her employ as houseboy. She conditionally hired him, then put him to work cleaning a room. He cleaned the room. But,the lady used white gloves to show that dust and dirt remained.. Next time, he swept, mopped, dusted, polished, waxed, that room multiple times. Finally, he called her in to inspect. She took out her pair of white gloves, and rubbed them in out-of- the- way-places; in every corner, and crevice. No spot nor stain besmirched those white gloves, so that white lady hired him as her houseboy, Later, after he arrived at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, walking, penniless, he employed the same “white glove test” principles to earn his tuition , room and board, by cleaning college classrooms. After graduation, now at Tuskegee, Alabama, those same “white gloves test” principles were repeated until they got their kiln to make brick of their own to construct campus facilities, buildings, and to sell. Throughout his fabled career as educator, author, race leader, organizer, Booker T. Washington used the same “blameless Ethiopians,” white-glove test principles to perfection. He convinced Julius Rosenwald to build 5,000 black schools across the South to educate our people, and he inspired many thousands. From January 1, 2018, let us “blameless Ethiopians” replicate the “white glove test,” as our legacy.

THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF'LL....EXCERPT.

HOWARD THURMAN. CIVIL RIGHTS. & HOWARD U. "Although the philosophy of nonviolence was far less familiar than the idea of armed self-defense, it was not a completely unfamiliar method of political struggle. And as the Freedom Movement evolved and the practice of nonviolent activism began playing an increasingly important role, it turned out that these two approaches-- so dissimilar on the surface--were in fact quite compatible... "Even before the war, Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British colonialism had been attracting attention in black America . Especially important to nonviolent activism's spread to the U.S. civil rights struggle was theologian Howard Thurman, who in 1936 went on a "Pilgrimage of Friendship" to India with his wife, Sue Baily Thurman, Methodist minister, Edward Carroll, and his wife, Phenola Valentine Carroll. At the end of Thurman's visit, Gandhi told him 'It may be through Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.' In 1953, Thurman became dean of Boston University's Marsh Chapel (making him the first tenured black dean at any predominantly white university) holding the position until 1965. When Thurman became dean , Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the last year of residence at the university for the doctorate he was to receive June 5, 1955, and Thurman was an important influence on him although the two men seem not to have been very close personally . Thurman had also been a classmate of King's father at Morehouse College in Atlanta and was a family friend. From 1931-1944 Thurman had been dean of Howard University's Rankin Chapel. James Farmer, the founder of CORE, had been one of his students there, and it was Thurman who introduced Farmer to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international, interfaith, interracial organization dedicated since World War I to working for peace and to training activists for nonviolent struggle . FOR would have a formative influence on some of the nonviolent activist eaders who preceded the activists of the 1960s--figures such as Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington; Reverend James Lawson, who mentored the Nashville student movement; and Farmer, who found in FOR "a cadre of black and white pacifists primed to act on the race question and examining with close interest the progress of nonviolent direct action in India.' "From time to time well before the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins of the 1960s, acts of nonviolent protest had taken place in the United States, often imitated by prominent or rising black intellectuals . In 1935, Charles Hamilton Houston, then dean of Howard University's law school, took a ferry from Norfolk , Virginia, to Washington , D. C. He refused to eat supper behind a screen in the ferry's dining room, so he ordered food to be brought to his cabin. Then he refused to pay the additional service charge that almost doubled what the same meal would have cost him in the dining room. in the same year [1935], Howard University student, Kenneth Clark--a budding psychologist and editor of the school newspaper , who later would convince the Supreme Court of the damaging psychological effects of school segregation on black children--was arrested for picketing the U. S. Capitol to protest the segregation of its restaurants. In 1940, Pauli Murray , an FOR member who would become the first African American to earn a doctorate from Yale Law School and the first black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia 's segregation laws by sitting in the whites-only section of a bus. In 1943, Murray, then a law student at Howard University led female students in a sit-in at a nearby cafeteria that refused service to blacks." P.149-151, THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF'LL GET YOU KILLED by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. (2016)