Status Updates From Alone Together: Love, Grief...

At the heart of my understanding—gleaned not only from the generation who endured the Holocaust but also from my own explorations into spiritual practices—I know I am powerless over almost everything that might happen to me. But I do possess some power to choose my attitude.

My mother used to repeat a saying that is nearly universal in multiple languages (she spoke seven): “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

During World War II, he had been imprisoned for a year in Buchenwald concentration camp at the age of fifteen, and I wanted to understand how he managed to get through it mentally. He told me, “Everything was so terrible I just had to believe the next day would be better.”

Mississippi public policy seems to have morphed into a modern-day version of eugenics blended with social Darwinism. It feels like an attempt to eradicate people living in poverty by neglect. Welfare funds totaling $94 million were embezzled in a complex scheme that robbed the poor to enhance the lives of the powerful. The Black & poor, uninsured, &with insecure access to food&healthcare—are left to languish and die.

It’s time to get your ass outside and live for each other. Sing and do not stop. March and do not stop. Work and do not stop. Write your story across the sky and don’t despair because despair is the most powerful weapon of the dominant. It will only make you weary and, ultimately, afraid to stand in the light.

Building this new world for us is not a passive thing: You have to march out into the sunlight and grab that power and carry it where you need it to go. Light the torch to knock back the night. Don’t sit back. Take action, exercise your voice. Yes, vote, of course, and make sure everyone around you votes.

We are in this together. And I think that connectedness scares the hell out of those in power.

People are going to want change. It has to be more about each other than about a toxic need to build a monument to ourselves. I think we will need to honor the deep feeling that we are building a monument to each other. As I’ve always said, there is no them, there is only us.

How does one cope when all the people who loved you best, one by one, disappear forever? Maybe you tell yourself a story.

In Chicago alone, Blacks account for 72 percent of virus-related fatalities. “Those numbers take your breath away, they really do,” says Mayor Lightfoot. Six hours away, in Minneapolis, a policeman will kneel on a Black man’s neck as he begs, #ICantBreathe.

Those who are dying are Black & Brown. Your people have always been both essential & expendable. The Bay Area’s highest rates of infection and death are in your neighborhood of poor Blacks & Latinos. The Black female mayor of white San Francisco takes action; the white female mayor of Black Oakland hides out. Neighbors on Nextdoor accuse you of making everything about race. Yes, you respond, exactly.

The Navajo Nation registers the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 in the country, higher than New York. It’s the latest in five hundred years of “epidemiological invasions,” which, combined with colonial practices, wiped out 70 to 90 percent of Native populations by the early twentieth century.

Around the world, domestic battery rates soar as stay-at-home orders are implemented, layoffs increase, and women and children are trapped with men with histories of domestic violence.

Kwame: "Words and books show us that we’re all one, you know? Like, I can read Night by Elie Wiesel and know that I have no direct connection to having been in a concentration camp, yet I feel it. I understand its weight and heaviness, its evil and terror, the author’s fight and survival—I understand all that. Books, literature, and language allow us to understand that we are more similar than we are different."

Integrity is real. It is the only thing that I own. Nobody else owns it, my integrity, and there might be some days when it’s all I’ve got. I knew then that I could not surrender it or compromise it or give it up because it was my last stand against whatever would become of me without it. Integrity was and is the last little voice inside that tells you that you’re crossing a line.