An essay from Dubois' Souls of Black Folk, one of Polis' friends in the media giving him a massage, and a bill ratcheting up greenhouse gas restrictions.
An essay I wanted to highlight from "The Souls of Black Folk" by W. E. B. Dubois
I recently listened to "The Souls of Black Folk" by Dubois (see the Wikipedia link below if you're not familiar) and one of the essays in particular struck me. Well, more than one did, but I am going to post on this one.
The essay is "Of the Coming of John", the second to last one in the collection.
There are a lot of things that one could take from this essay, but I want to briefly mention a couple.
While I listened to it, I was struck with the sense of "damned if you do and damned if you don't" that the title character had to have felt. I'm going to skip over a ton of details here, but seemingly at every turn this young man faced some sort of criticism from someone, and that includes his own race. He goes to college and the black people in the small town that saw him off were proud and crowing about his return. The white people in that same town talk about him coming back full of ideas above his station. He struggles over whether to return to his little town, eventually deciding to return, and then finds himself ostracized from both groups.
I could see this feeling being somewhat universal (that a change in your life has the potential to distance you from the people you grew up with), but, more to the point of Mr. Dubois' story, I wonder how many young minority and/or poor people have a more visceral struggle and feeling of this. I wonder how many of those folks who do feel it abandon their plans to get out of poverty or bad circumstances because of it. I wonder what if any solution there is to this.
I've wondered it since I started at the high school where I began my teaching career. The best I could ever come up with was to bring it out into the open: mention to people that change and growth might mean a (temporary, one hopes) change or loss of some relationships. Normalizing it, saying that it's part of the process and to be expected, would I hope give someone heart.
What do you think? Any ideas?
The second thing that stuck out in listening to this essay was how markedly different today's world is from back when Dubois wrote. Do not mistake me in thinking that I'm saying racism is cured. Do not think I am so naïve as to believe that every racial problem in this country has been solved.
What I am wanting to point out is the tremendous progress we've made in this country in terms of racial equality.
I won't go through a laundry list, if you're curious either read or listen to the essay yourself in its entirety, but it is striking the difference between what people work themselves up about today vs. what was seen as normal back in Dubois' day. I think it gives a sense of perspective on today and also on the arc of freedom and equality that this country has progressed through since its founding.
It's not an excuse to remain vigilant or to not call out racism, but it's also reminder of what people have worked and died to achieve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk
Defining things in a way that Polis can't help but look good!
The article below was frustrating to read in that, if you read carefully and aren't a fan, you'll note that as construed the "promises" are defined in such a way that Polis comes out a winner.
If and when you see me talk about how some members of the press grade him on a curve, this is what I mean.
Let me detail a couple (you're welcome to read up on the rest).
Look at screenshots 1 and 2.
If you live in a rural community and have to buy your own insurance, do you feel protected or supported in terms of high health care costs?
Did Polis' little offhand remark about zero income taxes, meant to titillate and get a credulous press corps chatting about how Libertarian he is, have anything whatsoever to do with lowering the income tax rate? I thought that was the hard work of Jon Caldara and Jerry Sonnenberg. Polis didn't do crap.
If only we all could be evaluated on the same scale as Ms. Metzger evaluates Polis on.
https://www.coloradopolitics.com/governor/4-years-later-polis-inaugural-promises-revisited/article_c87fc3da-90fd-11ed-b6ab-430fd15d62a9.html
