What Would Tort and Tyre Do?
This is the original / from drafts /continued version of my last post, the birthday post for my dear beloved child, Tucson.
Importantly, The longer/real/whole truth version of the sprained ankle on a mushroom walk story is that T’s ankle sprain happened when and because his uncle, my brother, picked him up, unsolicited, in the middle of a hillside trail — then promptly slipped on the muddy slope and dropped him on a rock. Meanwhile yes I was busy disappearing into the underbrush identifying fungi after fungi snapping pictures and consulting field guides, immersed in a local wonderland that it felt like I discovered (in the heart of babylon, the colonizers literal backyards…).
Lesson/Message: and a little CHILD SHALL LEAD them.
Next time follow the child’s pace and always always ask permission and consent not only to touch or adjust someone’s body but also when offering help or assistance of any kind! Do not _blank_ savior it. That’s not cool.
But if by mistake you have already done that? Take responsibility. Be accountable. Listen. Apologize. Do Not Make Excuses! Don’t try to explain you’re side. Recognize and take the time to look at try to understand and learn from the harm you caused inadvertently consciously or not.
And by the weekend after the birthday, Saturday, last weekend, T still hobbling about, Mom (again thats me) insisted on going surfing — in 40s-50 degree temperatures in January — all the way down in Manresa… past Santa Cruz’s infamously windy Highway 17 over the mountains… we were late/running on CPT as usual but anyway she forgot that T gets car sick next thing you know he’s vommed all over himself his tablet and Granny’s fleece vest smh. (And has to wear the backup clothes all day on the cold beach. Good thing his brand new neon green and black hoodie, a birthday gift from Granny, was safely stowed away in Moms backpack.)
So let’s her it for T yeah?! Show my kid some love and support. Black Lives Matter. Black Kids Matter.
So on a super related note, to both recent news and my kids 6th birthday, last year I stopped taking T to forest school. not like quit exactly just stopped going there… to be even more specific driving. I made the complicated, agonized, lonely unpopular decision that, because the way to the forest school from our home is literally lined with cops patrolling those main Berkeley streets every day, I was not willing to risk my safety — no, not just that, my life, my child’s safety, our freedom, our bodies, both our lives — twice a day five days a week. Nope. Too much, plain and simple, whether others are willing to see it or not. Police pull over Black people for traffic stops more than any other race like 80% more. Neurodivergent Black mages like me are like several times more likely to be killed at such stops or to not survive any encounters with police whatsoever. I did not like those odds. Still don’t. Cannot fucking stand them. And won’t risk it.
But I did not want to have to make this decision. I especially did not want to have to do any of all of the juggling and the mental gymnastics by myself. I felt bad for Tucson who would as a result be more by themself, at home.
but very soon found consolation in teaching T how to read and bearing witness, literally sitting back to watch his absolute joy in reading, then of his own volition, writing — sounding out spelling composing plots and inventing characters — his own wonderfully imaginative illustrated stories.
Of course I asked for help! You should already know if you know me. I am not ashamed to ask for help. But it didn’t work.
It absolutely broke my heart that no carpool could be found or arranged for the one Black child in his class, the child of the only Black single mom in the community, one of the minority children of color at the private forest school, a forest school founded and run by a nonblack single mom of color in the hopes of allegedly operating with more accessibility and encouraging more diversity. Womp womp. How holisitic was this vision? Not comprehensive enough to consider transportation? Or to require carpooling as it is also a means of saving the planet and trees and the forest and protecting nature… as is protecting and supporting Black and Afroindigenous matriarchs and their families and children especially in an increasingly gentrified antiblack climate, but I guess I digress… How about these factors,
Even though
- this was our second year in attendance in a row as such^
- Tucson had been a “cherished” member of the Berkeley forest school community
- Carpooling had been possibly previously and enabled us to attend the year before
- Other parents and and white families and children at the school still participated in carpools and shared rides for their children in the Berkeley area
- We live in a central area of Berkeley
- I asked several times and explained why it is necessary
- I asked for our situation to be made known to the entire community, as a matter of necessity and concern
- We had so called friends at the forest school and in the community. No one stepped up.
We’ve been all but siloed.
In fact they — the whole forest school community… all just stepped down and stopped including us on email threads and group texts and school announcements. We were displaced from forest school. Because of my prescient and very real concerns about traffic stops.
And where did these concerns come from?
Sandra Bland.
Say her name. On her way to buy groceries never to return home again.
Tyre Nichols who literally, legally DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG — was stopped with a turn signal on heading home in broad daylight — only to be bruttally beaten to death, only confirms it, again.
Of course he is not the only one. Black mages are the ones you’re even less likely to hear about.
Look forward to supporting the bill Black Lives Matter, Anti Police Terror Project and other community members across the state plan put forth this year, in California 2023, to outlaw and remove police from traffic stops altogether.
Because the truth in reality is that cops, they’re the thugs who set the despicable example. the ones normalizing and legitimizing the continuation of lynching as an antiblack intimidation and oppression and value theft tactic. Landlords, bosses, banks, boyfriends, husbands, other family members, giant only bookstores, energy companies, politicians, cities, states, policies, laws, supreme courts, they all follow suit. Like clockwork they have turned against Black mages. Tried to bury us by routinely ignoring the fact that we are seeds, systematically denying our water and sun, yet still we rose.
We will not be displaced or disappeared! I am not about to disappear. I am in bloom.
Quotidian Light. You sound like an angel… I’d like to get to know you. Even from across the veil.
Rosebud from People’s Park. Monique Johnson. Port Chicago. Tyre Nichols. Tortuguita.
I’m glad everyone is starting to talk about #StopCopCity now, finally. I have been following and supporting from a distance for long before this historic moment
Pause. Think about that. Moment of silence. More.
But now, now that its finally in the mainstream media now that people are amplifying all of the facts and information and grief and connections more, more as it should be, should have always been, and from the core always has been since police announced this dystopian plan and the community and city of Atlanta overwhelmingly spoke out AGAINST its construction.
#stopcopcity is hella giving me #NoDAPL vibes.
I still struggle so much everyday to escape the particulary binary of thinking of things as possesing the ability to be either good or bad and not completely other, more often than not paradoxes of both made up relative qualities.
Mitakuye Oyasin. We are all related. It’s all connected…
I want to say this is both good and very bad.
The “good” is that the call is amplified now. They outcry and the attention is not only nationwide but worldwide now.
Matter fact I really hope Greta Thunberg decides to visit Weelaunee Forest.
Because it is a HUGE global issue with planetary implications.
And the implications are what’s so very, very fucking bad.
Since I went to standing rock 8 months pregnant well tomorrow my child will turn 6 years old. Since that time they have begun construction on the pipeline across stolen Lakota lands and ancestors burial grounds, and the pipe has already leaked and polluted thousands of miles of Mni Sose. As warned.
KXL has also burst and leaked recently with catastrophic effects.
What activists and protestors and Earth and Forest defenders are warning right now with cop city in atlanta is extremely fucking real.
Weelaunee Forest is the largest urban wildlife green space in the country.
Calls to Defund and abolish the police and polices forces nationwide in the us have risen up increasingly ever since the 2020 murder of George Floyd. The remaining moderate liberal response short of that, defunding and or complete abolition, has been to suggest retraining or somehow reforming the police. Only data shows that that does not really work. Nothing fundamentally or significantly has changed with those efforts in terms of getting police to be less killers and murder people less. In fact 2022 saw the highest numbers of extrajudicial executions committed by police officers ever on record. Yet still the vast majority of those murderers remain on the loose! And the majority of the people they killed? You guessed it, were Black. And Native.
The proposed monstrosity in Atlanta Georgia would be a place for police to train on how to kill and terrorize. Not reform at all. It would cost billions of dollars. Not defund and redistribute those resources to community.
The climate crisis is real. Trees really do create oxygen. Forests really are the lungs of the planet.
And Black and Indigenous and people of color worldwide are and have always been not just the most impacted by climate chaos but that too — the guardians and stewards and protectors of nature, ecosystems, the thriving diversity of life, of and all around the entire planet Earth.
copcity is a nuclear bomb. It would be built on stolen Muscogee Native land where settler-colonizers enslaved Black bodies on a plantation then later exploited and abused others in prison labor camps. It would destroy hundreds of acres of resiliently healing nature trees and forest wildlife. It would catapult the already astronomical cruel and unusual white supremacist police states of the prison industrial complex of us-America to terrifying actually genocidal levels. It would go down in history about as well as Auschwitz has. Cop city absolutely must not be built.
This is war.
What can we do?
1. Support the forest protectors on the ground in Weelaunee/ATL. Contribute to their legal fund. Follow @stopcopcity @defendatlantaforest accounts and pages and other Black community organizers and activists in Atlanta like the @dunbarcreekcollective and Muscogeee tribal members
2. Boycott and divest. Transfer your Bank of America account to a credit union. Boycott Delta, Home Depot, Coca Cola, Waffle House, UPS
3. Contact and pressure all leadership in support of this absolutely horrible ideation and demand that they stop and withdraw all funding and support for cop city. Looking at you Morehouse and Spelman alums!
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