Some contemplating weather, here.

After watching I am not Your Negro, I was struck by both the heart of the documentary as well as with the problem of trying to truly understand what it must have felt like to have three intelligent, talented and famous friends laid low so early in their lives by a force or the manifestation of a power one had been trying to name and wittle down all one’s life. That latter aspect must have been a powerful depressant for Baldwin. I’m not sure I could have been so strong, been so full of the moral courage required.

But that’s neither here nor there. By the time I left the movie theater, I was sifting through my minimal historical knowledge of the civil rights movement and thinking about both the victories and the long series of defeats culminating with the War on Drugs and mass incarceration rates that targeted mainly minorities and rival(ed) Stalin’s gulags in terms of numbers. And even if that story leads to the first Black President, given the current administration’s regression, I felt a strong melancholy in my heart.

All this rain really does help distill one’s thoughts.

Because given my, admittedly mediocre, historical knowledge of the Civil Rights movement, it seemed to me that for the perpretrator of the assassinations, the wanted effect had resulted. In other words, Stalin’s words of “no man no problem” were true [1]. Furthermore this only proves that violence works as evil people intend. The murders of the mentioned leaders and the subsequent ones of other civil rights movements only seem to work. What then to do in the face of such an evil, sometimes banal, subset of people?

It appears to me that many on the side of white supremacy want democide of the “other” and if any one complains, then genocide it is [2]. With Trump and Bannon in charge and given what we can gather from their actions and words, I’m now thinking on the banality of this evil history and how it extends to the current day’s problems and how we can confront this latest regime.