Today is Monday, Zoom Lunch Day
You all are invited to join our Zoom Lunch session today. Usually, this is a perk for paid subscribers, but we want as many people to understand what is going on in the Iowa Legislature today as possible.
Iowa Writers’ Collaborative columnists Laura Belin and Ed Tibbets will be our Monday Zoom Lunch guests. Their decades-worth of experience covering Iowa politics means they have the background to help us understand what we citizens could be in store for in the upcoming legislative session. The future of public education and the towns with remaining schools are on the line. Click here for your link to today’s Zoom session, starting at noon central time:
There will be no paywall for today’s Zoom session. Please join us and discover why we have a great tribe of Potluck Zoomers each week.
Click: MONDAY ZOOM for the link to today’s session.
Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King
My son and I sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on January 20, 2009, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. We staked out a place on the steps near where Dr. Martin Luther King stood to make his:
As for dreams, that was a day I couldn’t believe I lived to see. I naively thought it meant we had moved beyond racism. It was a day when total strangers of all shapes and colors met the gaze of one another, eyes often glistening, breathing in the moment that we had lived to see MLK’s dream come true. A candidate had been judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.
An elderly man seated next to us had been there when King made that speech on August 28, 1963. We held hands briefly.
On Obama’s inauguration day, strangers talked as if they’d known each other for years. We exchanged hugs. The joy was palpable. It wasn’t just the peaceful transfer of power we were witnessing, it was a dream come true. We believed the spirit of that day would be our new reality.
I lived on Capitol Hill in the early 1970s and have been in the city hundreds of times. I had never before seen the nation’s Capitol so eerily empty of cars yet packed with people—until the political pendulum swung dramatically to the right to the election of the man who proceeded Barack Obama, by playing on the racist, misogynist side of America. He would become America’s 45th president, which resulted in a fury unleashed among women that resulted in The Women’s March. The day was January 21, 2017, the after that president was sworn into office. I was there, too.
The fury and resolve expressed that day was as powerful an emotion as I’d felt on January 20, 2009. Yet, oh so different.
Like all dreams, we wake up.
But racism is the opposite of being woke.
Today is a good day to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…Dr. Martin Luther King, ‘I have a dream.’
We have a ways to go.
In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, here are some columns by Iowa Writers’ Collaborative members you might have missed. Today would be a good day to read:
‘Being Woke,’ by Robert Leonard
‘What white people get wrong about Black dads,’ by Dana James
‘A legacy of redlining’ by Kiara Fish, via Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices
https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety
The “dream”, is that only what it is? An allusive hodge podge of nightmare mixed with the hopefulness of a “pick me up” dream? Each century is filled with cut throats a plenty, who leave their humanity on the doorstep and turn into raging bulls, murdering wholesale the very life blood of their countries and that of their neighbors. We quickly join in this mercenary work as defenders of “liberty” when in fact we are protectors of our own status quo at the cost of others’ lives.
I am baffled how we have managed to come this far and finally managing our own planets destruction about as efficiently as possible by simply ignoring it. The warning signs have been out for years, and the fixes too ameliorate the most destructive parts fall on deaf ears. Ignorance has its bliss, but it also has its payback! How many years has it been since we have even heard a mention of the radioactivity that has been pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Japan? Meanwhile we focus all our energy on more and more destructive wars as far away as possible from that “little bobo” while we try and keep another lunatic from committing a nuclear tragedy within sight of Chernobyl!
Dr. Kings voice and sense of justice focus on fairness everywhere in every place. Not simply for the black and brown, but for all of us everywhere. To attain that “dream” we must give voice to ending war and fixing the problems that exist that will, in due time, kill us off as a species if we don’t stop our suicide mission with nature.