What We Can Learn From Tulsa, 100 Years Past

 "Don't take the law into your own hands. You take 'em to court!"

Those words meant nothing in Oklahoma 100 years ago.  After a black man was arrested, police barricaded the upper courthouse floors where he was being charged, to protect him from a gathering who apparently wanted to lynch him.  A group of armed black citizens arrived at the courthouse, hoping to prevent a lynching.  Shots were fired... initially, two black people and 10 white people lay dead.

A white mob was enraged, and burned the black part of town to the ground -- thousands of acres of property, hundreds of businesses and homes, untold lives lost -- into the hundreds.  The black man who had been initially charged in court was later released and fled the area. Nobody -- black or white -- really believed in courthouse justice back then, it seems.  Guns and mobs held power.

Wiki:  The 1921 Tulsa massacre began during the Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a Black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old White elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody. After the arrest, rumors spread through the city that Rowland was to be lynched. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of White men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being kept, a group of 75 Black men, some of whom were armed, arrived at the jail in order to ensure that Rowland would not be lynched. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control. As the group was leaving the premises, complying with the sheriff's request, a member of the mob of White men allegedly attempted to disarm one of the Black men.^{[citation needed]} A shot was fired, and then, according to the reports of the sheriff, "all hell broke loose." At the end of the firefight, 12 people were killed: 10 White and 2 Black. As news of these deaths spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded.

One hundred years have passed, have we learned patience in trusting the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution?  Have we become educated enough to believe in reason and logic leading to the truth, over force and might? (ie/  'What I say is, is..." depending on the power, money and dominance of the "I"?)  What if others refuse to go along with the self-proclaimed superiority of the self-annointed powerful, and deny them the authority and legitimacy of such dominance and force?  Will it be up to "the guns" to decide?  How do they respond to unarmed innocents and vulnerable people?  God help us-- by force?

You hate to see that.  The system manipulated, the damages left by legacies in leadership roles, even temporarily -- the aughts* have taught a hard history lesson about the lasting damage a few short years of power can do, worldwide even, in reshaping populations on the globe (ie/ our current refugee-on-the-run crisis, with no end in sight, much of it due to the lasting legacy damage of the Bush-Cheney worldwide-crusade "intervention" years, where our guns and soldiers presented under cover as missionaries, building schools for girls, distributing candy and pencils to homeless girls and boys, promising that American democracy could be imported, because the Bush/Cheney supporters really wanted to imagine it that way... that guns and soldiers could gift these trinkets of democracy from the American taxpayer.

The cleanup is never so easy as the initial destruction, to the environment especially... 

People can repopulate and reach maturity so much easier than trees, say..  Who speaks for the trees?  In the next wars, the selling won't be so easy owing to the devotions of these young naturalists being raised to respect the life of the environment around them, and even... "over there".  If we would allow the killings of Somme again without blinking an eye at the human costs, I would bet my bottom dollar the children of today will not allow the landscape to be scarred -- all the living environment! -- even if they accept the costs of human life as merely the price of doing business in the 21st Century.)

The clock is running on the Joe Biden project, pre-midterms.  The push to implement legal progressive policies. (I think the courts will indeed strike the Black-preference financial programs that seemingly favor POC applicants -- peoples of color -- not only because such racial preferences are unConstitutional but because they are not politically palatable to the majority.  The old-guard lawyers and professors have learned to keep quiet about this, but I don't believe our millennial citizens, legal newcomers, workers, and other "white" people who are excluded from participation...)

Guns are out there, we all know that.  Carjackings this past winter were up, everywhere in the Midwest it seems.  And you hate to see that, because like with the street shootings, it's the vulnerables who most pay...

America, seemingly, its becoming more lawless, with more grievants encouraged that they will find justice in the streets, where it is faster and more accessible.  The courthouses have for years put up barriers to exclude, and even where they try to reach society's vulnerables to give them a fair hearing inside, unelected justice leaders too often usurp these roles too -- deciding who qualifies for assistance services to get in the door, for example, is often left to lower-educated, clerk-level hires.

What happened 100 years in Tulsa, Okla. is tragic.  Many people have the luxury in America now to live their lives looking behind.  That's costly.

The future is coming straight at us now.  Armed. And you can't tell friend from enemy on sight -- you are sorely mistaken if you think in today's America you can tell by wealth, skin color, legacy name, or even place/occupation of employment who will be America's protector and who will further the destruction.  (Look at what that Bush boy did in just eight years before Texas swallowed him back up...)

We spend a day today -- Memorial Day -- looking behind, relaxing, recounting, and re-upping our spirits to get out there again Tuesday morning in America and do our best to defend what is best about our country.  All of us.  In whatever way we have been called -- as mothers (the hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation -- don't outsource the cradle-rocking, mamas. Your children really do need your work to be valued as number one, even if society given you no further rewards beyond what you essentially nurture from seed.  Big job unto itself-- there's a reason why I listed you as the nation's number one workers:  invest your time and talents in your children; they deserve your full attention, and society needs you to get that job done, first and foremost...); the builders, who grow our homes and roads and allow the rest of us to advance, newcomers and legacies alike;  the daily workers, whose routines and reliable service keeps the rest of society alive, essentially -- like the slaves on plantations past, we need to acknowledge that even in non-pandemic, shelter-in-place times that without their services -- every damn day, that's what "essential" in essential services means -- legacy society cannot survive;  the growers, the ones who plant the seeds, the ideas, the investments, the fresh things that grow our economy.

Whether you are a mother, a builder, a worker or a grower, take some time this Memorial Day in America to appreciate the past.  The unseen grandmothers who might be excluded from the gatherings, but who are so often the unappreciated matriarchs of extended families today;  the men who left Earth much too early whose bodies tolled from working to provide for those generations alive today that the mothers helped nurture and keep alive; the single men and women who contributed their time and talents to what so many of us benefit from in this country today:  health, education, the caregiving that keeps the grandmothers alive in the nursing homes.

When we read the stories history leaves us, we need to ask how reliable the narrator is -- who is she?  Is she writing from experience, or wistfulness?  Can she be trusted to tell the truth, or has the work been revised to protect the innocent and credit those whom the author most wishes to "pump" at the moment?

The more we read, the more we can evaluate our writers this way.

The more we live, the more we can use critical facilities to detect the whiff of manure, and question ourselves what the agenda is of the author collecting the grievances and putting them down for posterity.  Too often, it's for money alone.  That too -- those costly revisions -- take from the story.

Happy Memorial Day, 2021.

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* We "aughta" not have listened to warmongers Cheney and lil Bush who led us into some of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in American history.  The media who manipulated us into those wars is slowly, ever so gently, fading from the newspages;  the professors, ministers and those in semi-leadership roles are retiring, passing on their pulpits to their own sons and daughters, who will be challenged to reconcile the history their fathers left them to the truths uncovered by the next generations of comers...

I don't think -- as in the case of Tulsa -- that it will take a century to uncover the truths about America in the Bush years, which led to the ongoing Obama wars and overthrows of foreign governments; the election of New York businessman Donald J. Trump (the locals could not corral -- or convict -- him there, and the same media took to covering his antics with glee as he captured the nation's heart); and the current administration leadership of President Biden, so far who has not activated American troops to "defend" America's national security interests abroad, and who is being pressured to secure the national borders, if only to track and test, for pandemic purposes, who is entering our country today and might need assistance.

Now that's a mouthful, but heaven knows, we've got an important year in the history books coming up.

Much like Reconstuction, will the federal programs being pushed immediatly post-national crisis hold?  Will citizens rebel and push back, making the country more unequal, in fact, than ever?  As prices rise, and housing becomes scarcer and scarcer, how will the upper classes respond as their isolated places are more and more breached in public?  By locking down, ordering in, and staying put?  For how long?

Beyond my paygrade, as they say, but I'll plan to do more reflecting in the kayak, on the water.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Take only what you need, and don't leave your trash behind for others to clean up.  God knows, if we all took responsibility for ourselves and our own minors and elders and vulnerables, the country as a whole might breathe a sigh of relief today too.