What is the price.
to sell this small piece of my heart?
It was our dream –
to travel with the dogs.
To cross the county,
as you once did.
Now the world has changed.
I think my heart has now healed enough,
to sell this small piece of it.
It still bleeds..
however,
when I do.
© words by Dan DeMarle 9/22/24
We are in an imagination war. Someone told a story and got enough people to believe it, that it seems real. Cross a border, why is it a border? There is no line, there is no portal. It’s just some people said that’s the border and now we believe it. This issue is, we can easily tell another story. That is what authors, writers, artists, parents, and grandparents do. We tell stories. We can tell a better story. Maria Frances Brandt
“But if we imagine that we’re supposed to be divided and we imagine these constructs to live inside, we can get very committed to those constructs. And then our imaginations can get very limited, because it’s just like, oh, what can I dream? For me as a Black, queer woman, it’s like, what are the dreams that I can dream inside of the boxes of Blackness and queerness that someone else has constructed for me?
And that’s never felt like enough room, because I’m a spirit, [laughs] you know? I’m this massive energy like all humans are. So, so much of the work for me, of radical imagination is: what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance? And what — how do we make it compelling? Is it — do we tell the right kind of story? Will that make it compelling? Do we need to write new music to make it compelling? How much conflict is necessary to have a compelling future, since humans seem to love it? I’m like, is there a right place for it? [laughs]”
There’s a thing with siblings. If you read Prince Harry, you know that the second child is called “the spare.” But what if you have more, say 7, seven siblings. You see siblings share a great deal of DNA. We are essentially different copies of each other. More and more I think of myself and my siblings as slightly different updates. There’s obviously version 1.0 the oldest. Then of course 2.0, 3.0 all the way to 8.0. Not so much that we are literal upgrades, just different versions. From a hereditary perspective depending on situations 8 different chances for the genetic line to continue. There’s obviously much more than that, and we are not clones, at least in this iteration, although twins do occur in the next updated version. At this point, we have survived our progenitors. Maybe having achieved our genetic purposes we are just waiting to see which of our software crashes first? Which model outsurvives the others? Although we like to think we are so different, anyone from another planet or country can easily point us out as clearly Americans. I’m sure they can point out many more similarities. We are after all just slightly different, in the big scheme of things, genetic copies of the original source material.
© by Daniel DeMarle 6/10/24
I was watching a crow land on the top of the utility pole in my backyard, while we were eating dinner. I looked through my binoculars and said oh that’s disgusting it is eating a baby bird. My wife looked at me and said “You’re eating an egg and chicken omelet”
© by Daniel DeMarle 6/10/24
The way out of situations is to recognize that there is reality but reality is perceived differently by every participant. It’s even as simple as the fact that someone who is color-blind sees the world differently than someone who is not. The way out of a situation isn’t to force one view of reality on others but to find the common threads as the beginning of a way to bring a new shared view into a hopefully better-shared reality. This is what South Africa did with its Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Because at the end of the day, there is no greater right or greater wrong, there is just conflict and death. One can always point fingers and try to say you are guilty or more guilty than me, “I did this because you did that”, “Well I did that because you did this.” “Well…” but the dead do not care, nor do the soon-to-be dead. Sadly some think that death is an acceptable response, which is quickly followed with just not our dead. I do not hold that view.
Flumoxed and bamboozled,
walking into the New Year’s party,
to find,
that we were all required,
to wear our shirts 50% off.
There were many, many,
carefully draped shirts,
let me tell you!
The hosts threatened,
to make next year,
Pants 75% off!!!
I can’t wait!
© words and picture by Dan DeMarle 1/1/24
Rochester Public Market
© photo by Dan DeMarle 11/21/23
This is how white people see racism. Something looks weird but you can’t quite figure it out. It’s annoying but in a bit, you’ll just ignore it and move on. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. Save the picture to go back and look in a few days, you’ll never unsee it. So when someone tells you about a racist event, a racist structure, a sexual assault, a sexist workplace, a business that is not accessible or friendly, or how they walked into that place and they could tell (though you were oblivious) that it was not a safe place for them. Remember this picture. If you spend enough time, you’ll see it too.
© words by Daniel DeMarle 4/14/23
On Monday, 3/20/23 the Police shot and killed a 35 year old man. Both the Rochester Police Department and Monroe County’s Sheriff’s Office were involved in the shooting which is reported to have involved multiple police officers. As the D&C has reported in 3/22 there was one police killing by an RPD officer. In addition “There were five killings involving RPD officers in 2021.”
This leaves the question why are there so many fatal police shootings in Monroe County. There was recently a study released looking at bias at the community level and fatal police shootings. The study was labeled “Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents” The study looked at data gathered from the Harvard Implicit association test (IAT). Which is the most widely used method of measuring an individual’s implicit biases and then when gathered by zip code, an areas implicit biases. As noted by the authors of the study “Project Implicit (implicit.harvard.edu) has been collecting various IATs and measures of explicit bias over the Internet since 2002. By geolocating respondents, we used this data set (Xu, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2014) to compute point estimates of implicit and explicit biases by region.”
The study found a strong correlation between the implicit biases in a region and the number of fatal police shootings of individuals of color. Specifically, the study found that “We find that the implicit racial biases of White residents predict disproportionate regional use of lethal force with Blacks by police. This association is robust, reliably emerging across two conceptually distinct measures of racial bias, multiple imputations, three different transformations of the outcome measure, traditional and bootstrapped distributions, and above and beyond 14 sociodemographic covariates. Though the implicit prejudice of Whites is sufficient to significantly predict disproportionate lethal force (Analysis 1), the strongest predictor of lethal force was the regional implicit stereotypical association between Blacks and weapons (Analysis 2).” This means the more a community associates people of color with weapons the more people of color are killed by police.
The reason to write about this is that Monroe County is one of those racially biased communities with a strong correlation between that bias and the fatal killings of people of color in our community. In other words, our community’s racism is strongly correlated with the death of people of color by police. This is a striking and a very disturbing finding. That can not be said enough or loudly enough. Our communities racist attitudes are directly correlated with fatal shootings in Monroe County. The question then becomes what are we going to do about it? How long are we going to let it persist?
© words by Daniel DeMarle 3/25/23
Although we are all inundated with information, at times certain words or images make you stop, take deep breaths, and grasp again the true picture of the insanity of America. That happened to me tonight.
Today, in between seeing patients I took a break to watch my beautiful brown skinned 3 year old grandson, while his mother helped chaperone his sister’s school field trip. We played games and then he went out to play by himself in the backyard while I watched from the window.
This evening I started watching this wonderful piece on Netflix. Then I had to stop. I had to stop when they showed pictures of the manacles used to hold 3-year-old slaves so they could sell them at auction. I then pictured that joyful boy who had played just a few hours before in my backyard in a slave market with those manacles on.
Formal slavery in America only ended because the South lost the civil war. Once again, slavery in America only ended because the South lost the civil war. If there had not been a civil war, we would most likely still have slavery. Again, if there had not been a civil war, there would most probably still be slavery in the United States. Until that time, the Supreme Court had consistently upheld slavery and many members of Congress and a number of past presidents owned slaves.
Racism and hate are real. Americans were happy to take brown and black babies from their mothers and sell them to other people. There has never been a national reckoning with that fact. We live with its continual repercussions every day.
If you want to do something about it, try watching this show on Netflix. I will finish it at a later day and time.
© by Daniel DeMarle 3/7/23
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