Monday - George Floyd : I can't breathe. I needed to put it in the title

Today I watched live video of people filing past George Floyd's casket. I thought about him, and what a waste that he died, and what a wonder that it is his murder that is inspiring so many people to pay attention to what people of color have been saying all along: Black lives matter. We, white folk, have been too careless, ignoring the reality that people of color live with all the time. We don't get called out for the things they have to fear. It doesn't take wrongdoing, only being somewhere that a white person, unthinking and entitled, thinks they shouldn't be. It's one injustice piled upon another upon another until it's not a minor thing, not to be worried about, but a veritable chain of mountains of wrong.

It's time to stop. We cannot undo what was done, we can stop doing it in the future. That's all there is to it. And we can try to make amends, make reparations. People whose ancestors were held as chattel, and then treated as less-than-human until they could not stand it anymore, are owed. America has sinned but has not atoned. We are complicit.

It's not a zero sum game, so lose the resentment that ending Racism means losing something. It means we all gain.

I don't have any answers, but at least I'm starting to see what the questions are.

My wife is a gardener. This time of year she spends most daylight hours when the weather is not wet outside fine tuning her garden. She loves her flowers and they show it. 

I am not a macro-photographer and I don't own the right equipment to do macrophotography, but these flowers silently demand I try, so I do. I am not going to judge the results. The photos are not a replacement for the flowers themselves, but they will be around long after the blooms have faded.

Here you go, seven peonies and a rose.

If you aren't sure which is the rose, shame on you.

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