Today at lunch, I sat down with my lettuce wrap – strawberries, sunflower seeds, and the kind of fresh, CSA lettuce that my kids eat without dressing and then ask for seconds of – and I was going to watch another episode of Stranger Things.
If you’re familiar with the show, you’ll know why, after watching an episode yesterday, I decided I would take a break from it today. I love the 80’s vibe, but content is pretty intense. The Billy character is the spitting image, down to the red lips, wide blue eyes, long lashes, and wavy hair, of a young man I knew as a child. Watching the show is like time travel. But watching it every day feels like a bit much.
Today, I wanted something different, and for some reason, the Netflix original Queer Eye Season Two caught my eye. I never watched Season One. I didn’t watch the original version, either. I didn’t even really know what it was about.
When the show opened to the strains of “Amazing Grace,” my interest was piqued, but I was also pretty cautious. What point was the show trying to make? Where were they going with this?
On the way home from the airport after our trip to Branson, MO, my husband and I sat in the back of the car and chatted with my dad and our oldest son sitting in front. My son asked me about the fastest speed I had ever gotten a ticket for.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to have a Barbie. She had a disproportionate, over-sexualized body, and she wasn’t welcome at our house. My mom always said I could have a Barbie when I was 12; we both knew I wouldn’t want one anymore by then.
I played with my friends’ Barbies whenever I had the chance, bringing over my brother’s GI Joe doll to act as a rugged stand-in for Ken in our make-believe play.
At my grandma’s house, there was a collection of old Barbies that fascinated me in a way the ones my friends had did not.
Today is Tuesday, June 19, Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day.
I found Just Mercy: The Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson, on another blog that features books, and I agree with most of what was said. I got the book on inter-library loan and finished it in just a few days.
While the book gets compared to To Kill a Mockingbird, I would note that while that book is a work of fiction, the stories in Just Mercy are about real people whose lives were destroyed by a broken justice system – some of the prisoners mentioned never receive justice.
It was eye-opening to me to re-discover the history of racism in the South (including convict leasing) that I didn’t know the depth of. It sent me back to the Chaplain’s post on race. While we had talked here and there about different issues, that post was the first time I had the open window to a full perspective on his take on current events and race in America.
Getting a better understanding of the continuing race issues in our country was tough. I had to take a break from reading a couple of times. The book focuses on the Deep South, but laces in stories from all over the United States, a grim reminder that injustice for Blacks and the poor are not limited to one area of the U.S.
I felt indignant as I read. I hated the thought that one of my kids could be put in the position that the prisoners in the book found themselves in. I felt for the mothers and grandmothers who in desperation approached the author, a lawyer, for help for their children and grandchildren. I felt for the young people who had been wronged.
My first thought was, what can I do? I still don’t have a good answer for that. It’s so frustrating to know where to begin to bring change when the status quo is so deeply institutionalized. Yet the book made it very clear that even when the way forward seems obvious, our legal system is so convoluted that years can pass before meaningful change is made. By then, it can be too late for those who need it most.
We are paying so much, as a nation – in emotional currency and in actual dollars, to support a system that is destroying us. It destroys trust in the establishment; it destroys lives.
It was good to read about the work that is being done for justice, but it was difficult to know the cost which is being paid by those who are still waiting for reckoning.
For years, I got my hair cut at Walmart. I was too cheap to pay anyone more than $20 (with tax and tip) for a cut. Between small kids and my inability to justify self-care to myself, I didn’t get my hair trimmed often enough. When I did make the trip, it was typically an act of desperation.
When you don’t pay for a good haircut, you don’t get a good haircut. I would walk away with something that was only a shadow of what I really wanted – I went hoping for something low maintenance, fun, a little edgy. And finally, I got sick of going to the hairdresser only to come home feeling frustrated by the results.
So I started using our buzzer to cut my own hair.
