Wednesday - a short meditation on love, hate and the sTrump'et

This evening I attended a small shiva minyan. A person I am friendly with lost his mother last week and though the funeral was small and private, he decided it would be okay to have small gatherings, less than 15 people, in his back yard. If you don't know what shiva is, I will tell you. It is a weeklong mourning period  in the Jewish ritual, during which the person who has lost a close relation, usually parent, sibling or child, though one can sit shiva for other relations, stays home, and mourns intensely. In normal times, people will visit to offer comfort and consolation, but these being abnormal times, these rituals have been adapted. 

The mourner loved his mother and will miss her. 

On my way to his home, I passed a small BLM demonstration, perhaps a six or eight people with signs at the side of the road near the Chappaqua exits and entrances to the Saw Mill River Parkway. They were peaceful, one of their signs read, "Honk if you believe Black Lives Matter." I rolled down the window, gave them a thumbs up, was greeted with V signs in return and cheered when I beeped my horn. These people, young and old, Black, Brown and White, were full of love and hope. Seeing them and contributing in my very small way warmed my soul a little.

And then I thought about a man who sees love and calls it hate, a man who only thinks of himself, and uses and abuses all around him. As long as they kowtow, as long as they treat him as their master and lord, he will smirk and grant them small favors. But go against him in even the smallest way, that smirk turns to snarl and the small favors becomes a slap in the face and a kick in the rear. This man understands loyalty as a one directional: you are loyal to him no matter whether his loyal to you.

Today, he snarled and showed his pettiness, his inability to understand that the BLM movement is about love and justice, mercy and atonement, his typical of how he views the world and himself. There is only one thing hateful about the painting of a BLM mural on Fifth Avenue in NYC, outside the Trump Tower, and that is his reaction to it. He views it as directed at him, not at the world, a slap in his face, a way of making going to his home distatseful to him. If it is, then he has made it that way. 

What it is, to me, is a message to him to open his eyes, to recognize that while nobody's life should be in vain, it is Black lives that are being taken by the police. Where are the onlooker's videos of White men held down with a knee on the neck until they've lost their life?

It is time to unelect the sTrump'et, time to take back our nation and begin to restore democracy, with more justice and perhaps more mercy that we have had before.

Tonight's small selection of photos were taken on a summer afternoon in Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan. It was a time when our thoughts were on other things, and nobody knew that one day, the chairs in the park would be withdrawn in an effort to help enforce social distancing.

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