DISORDER

DISORDER

It was 2023 and I was still  recuperating from 2020. Instead of my former gregarious self, I tire in crowds or big groups and I don’t keep up small talk as much as I used to. I came to love the quiet world inside my house with my computer, my thoughts, and my music.  At that time, in 2020, the world was entering deep into the COVID pandemic, and the killings of unarmed black folk in the United States drew world attention with the murder of George Floyd. Trouble was bubbling up out of the quiet and violence was popping up all over the place, not unlike the pandemic. It seemed to me there was a secret gang that stretched between many police forces, working in clandestine agreement to see who could and would kill a black person, like the dares of young men in gangs who require hits as a show of bravery and toughness. Living with or near my grown sons saved me from getting too strange, I think, in that shifting landscape. But, because my sons are Black, I lived through the whole period with a thread of terror. Please God, let it not be them this time.

I still feel strange in 2025. The things I see in the news creep me out. People are talking about fascists and gays, Black history and angry white mothers. What’s going on? We are in a moment of great change and transformation whose nature and direction, as of this writing, are not clear.  It seems as though we are going through a major shift.  I felt like that in 2020 and I still do. This great re-positioning of the world reminds me of other periods of transformation that I have seen happen in my lifetime.

I am witness to, and part of, other worlds that are almost completely gone. I’m talking about a way of life that was lost during the early stages of racial integration. My family lived its own part of the story of America’s marginalized black community. We were part of the old Black “elite” class.  From what I can see, the “old” middle class or “elite class” of black America has almost completely disappeared, at least in its early form.  I miss the community we felt in the 20^th century, and the shared sense of purpose that most Black people had as part of their identity under segregation. I wish that Black Americans didn’t still have to spend so much time and energy responding to adversity, now with less sense of community than before. It’s been painful to see the merry-go-round of recriminations and denials in public discourse that I have witnessed since girlhood, still going on with no end in sight. I lived through the 1960s and the 1970s when adversity brought people together and when ironically people were more hopeful. It seemed then like we were on the verge of getting somewhere, only to find later that when we got there, we found another version of the same challenges. Like others in my cohort, this makes me feel tired, disgusted, and yet obliged to once again rise to the occasion.  We live a tug of war in America, always almost resolved.