Pools, Climate Change and Miscegenation...

 

Taken at Bethlehem Community Center by the author, spring 2023

© August 30, 2023, the Griot Poet

“Too few public pools

“There are more than 10 million private swimming pools in the United States, according to a C.D.C. estimate, compared with just 309,000 public ones. That figure includes pools that belong to condo complexes, hotels, and schools, so the number of pools truly accessible to the public is even smaller. The biggest reason so many Americans can’t swim is that they have too few places to learn to do so.

“Then the expansion stopped. In the 1960s, many towns across the South **filled or destroyed their public pools** rather than allow Black Americans to swim in them. Northern cities, strapped for resources amid suburbanization and white flight, struggled to maintain their pools. This is how public investment in pools withered, one more ghastly sacrifice America has laid at the altar of anti-Black racism and twisted fears about miscegenation.”

Mara Gay, New York Times

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/opinion/drowning-public-pools-america.html

I came to Earth via Kate Bitting Hospital,

Now, Reynolds Clinic,

On what used to be Seventh and Cleveland, now Cleveland and Martin Luther King Avenue.

The segregated hospital was named after the wife of RJ Reynolds, the tobacco magnate,

One of 12 hospitals for African Americans,

It’s where my mother worked as a nurse,

It, and all the others, no longer exists.

 

I attended Bethlehem Community Center for preschool and kindergarten.

It was, and is, right up the street from the hospital,

It was, and is, predominantly minority, with some immigrants,

We once had a pool where I learned to swim, to my big sister’s chagrin (she found out abruptly after I dove into the deep end of a then-segregated pool).

That pool is now closed.

On a recent visit to Bethlehem earlier this year, I saw the site where the pool once was now a surface cemented over.

 

My old neighborhood is still De Facto segregated.

I being a rare exception, some have been trapped in “The Racist Matrix” for generations.

A ghetto was brought over from Germany to the US.

After Germany put on steroids, American eugenics.

A place exquisitely designed to sequester possibilities and shatter dreams.

Black children are more likely to die from drowning,

Because if they HAD any pools in their neighborhoods, they’re cemented over.

If you’re lucky, someone’s dad (like mine) erects one of those plastic above-ground, temporary pools and invites your friends to come over, play, and cool off in it.

 

Occam’s razor:

Pair ceiled public pools with climate change,

The fear of water in black children,

The fear of miscegenation with white women,

Society has designed a slow crucifixion.

We’re barreling towards 3 degrees Celsius,

And the need for humans to keep cool in an ever-warming environment.

 

Who wins?

Which group has a survival advantage: 10 million private pools or 309,000 public ones?

Which groups are disadvantaged?

Are pools and universal healthcare inalienable human rights?

Or is this some National Security Study Memorandum 200/Thomas Malthus Eugenics strategy?

Or is their plan to keep a numeric majority to cook us before heaven or hellish eternities?

 

Who knows?

I just know that my granddaughter can swim because her parents can afford her lessons at a swim club [for] it.

It used to be that learning to swim didn’t require a middle-class wallet.

 

I just know that I attended,

Bethlehem Community Center from pre-k to kindergarten,

I learned how to read, how to swim, and how to grieve our loss of Dr. Martin Luther King,

As rifle shots rang out [and] confederate flags in the parking lot passed by our windows.

They were thrilled. We were devastated.

The same flag of insurrection was carried by their grandchildren at the US Capitol on January 6th.

The city of Winston-Salem left a cement surface like it was a marker to a tomb.

 

Even pre-k, to kindergarten:

Even there, in that innocence,

They couldn’t leave us alone...to swim.

Ase'...

 

Image Source: Pinterest

© October 31, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

Vote!

That’s the point of this piece and its last note.

If you’ve voted already, you’re an actual patriot.

If you haven’t, or won’t, you don’t have anything to complain about,

And, no social media “zinger” posted after our rights are gone will change it.

 

You either live in a municipality or Cul de Sac, so wealthy,

So de facto segregated, it doesn’t matter who’s running the republic,

Just as long as you get yours in tax cuts.

 

I grew up in a ghetto,

Not because my parents didn’t want more,

Segregation, when I was born, was de jure: legally mandated.

I got hand-me-down spelling books ten years out of date,

And light-skinned teachers who could “pass” on the west side of Winston-Salem, NC, to purchase the latest math and science books: we studied stencil graphed copies.

My big sister came home from the civil rights marches with black eyes and a bloodied forehead.

 

I’m trying to remember how that was so “great” that you’d want it back again!

That some fragile snowflakes want to replicate it,

The one thing that my past taught me,

Is this longing for a bygone era

That never existed is psychotic.

 

In 1898, a fusion government of 50/50 white and black republicans were elected to the Wilmington, NC legislature,

Dixiecrats and the KKK ransacked the state house,

Driving out the elected officers,

Burned down the black newspapers,

Staging a successful coup on U.S. soil without punishment,

One-hundred and twenty-three years before January 6, 2021.

 

In 2007, a gangly young Democratic Senator announced his candidacy for president,

He self-depreciatively made fun of his big ears, and funny name:

Barack Hussein Obama.

He ran on a platform of “hope and change.”

Simultaneously becoming the first to receive Secret Service protection while a candidate.

 

In 2018, Cesar Sayoc,

As democrats battled to take back the House,

He took it upon himself to mail bombs to:

Billionaire George Soros,

President Bill and Secretary Hillary Clinton,

President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama,

Vice President Joe and Second Lady Jill Biden,

Senator Kamala Harris and Douglas Emhoff,

Senator Cory Booker,

Actor Robert De Niro,

And Reporter Keith Olbermann,

Over a dozen bombs were sent,

 

Arguably during a time when republicans were in charge of the Presidency, the House, and the Senate,

 

Don’t tell me your pop philosophy about “both sides ism,” like political a la cart,

Don’t placate me that if you ignore them, they will “go away,” like an unpleasant fart,

Don’t tell me their party is “tough on crime” when they’re clearly not!

 

One side is violent; the other isn’t.

One side holds its members accountable; the other doesn’t.

 

John Edwards, Anthony Weiner, Al Frankin, and Andrew Cuomo,

 

Once rising stars in elected government,

They were held accountable for their actions by their party’s members.

 

Oliver North lied under oath, protecting Ronald Reagan from impeachment for Iran-Contra.

 

George W. Bush won re-election after allowing the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, 9-11, and attacked the wrong countries - Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of Saudi Arabia - for it.

 

You elected:

A man credibly accused of rape by E. Jean Carroll and twenty-six other women,

A philanderer with the sexual mores of a polar bear:

Cheated on Ivana with Marla Maples,

Cheated on Marla with Melania,

Cheated on a pregnant Melania with Playboy model Ronan McDougal and adult film star Stormy Daniels,

Ran a dubious business that was probably a front for Russian money laundering,

(Why he won’t say anything bad about Vladimir Putin)

He used Michael Cohen to pay off the aforementioned adult sex workers because someone told him that’s “probably not a good look.”

(Michael went to prison for him)

Bragged about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape,

He AIMED a mob at the U.S. Capitol,

Intent on murdering his Vice President, and the Speaker of the House,

STILL petitioning the NOT Supreme Court to block access to his taxes,

(Occam’s razor says he’s broke as a joke)

The only time he’s not committing crimes are the few hours he’s somnambulant.

 

He’s the embodiment of Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho,” and Damien Thorn in “The Omen”:

 

Quote:

American Psycho ends with Patrick staring into the camera, with his voiceover confessing, “There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”

 

And somehow,

The wires were crossed

Between Evilgelicals, Y’all Qaeda, and QAnon,

EIGHTY-ONE percent voted for him!

To use a European colloquialism:

Do you want this crazy bloke to have the nuclear codes again?

 

I’m not supposed to be a poet or a Ph.D. in Nanoengineering.

 

I grew up in a ghetto.

Where gas is STILL expensive, and food is cheap.

So we’ll be encouraged to stay on “our side of town,” self-segregating.

Life was exquisitely engineered for my defeat.

But I was supported by the spirits of my ancestors, who survived worse than this.

 

“Nanos gigantium humeris insidentes”

First recorded by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century,

Also attributed to Bernard of Chartres,

Also by the founder of Physics, Sir Isaac Newton:

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

 

Like my sister: Ase’ (Ah-Shay),

 

It has three meanings:

A word of affirmation, like “right on” or “amen.”

A word for life force, energy; Prana in Sanskrit, or Qi in Asia.

A word meaning having the power to create that which one speaks!

 

Every election is the election of our lifetimes.

Every election decides the impact of climate change.

Every election, we’re fighting against fascism,

Who don’t require goose steps or swastikas: just willing participants!

 

Every election either gives power to those who see problems and have plans to fix them,

Or, those who don’t and gain power by ignoring or exacerbating them,

 

Senator Raphael Warnock said that a vote is “like a prayer for the future” you envision,

 

Affirm your future and those of your children,

Affirm the future for the children you may never have or live with,

Be the Prana, Qi: life force for Gaia,

Save the world beneath you that’s dying,

Create a world that you want at the ballot box,

Armed men with small penises aren’t a threat,

Those idiots are terrified of the power YOU possess!

 

Take a deep breath and know you stand solidly on the shoulders of giants.

 

Ase’ (Ah-Shay)!

VOTE!

For the Children...

 

The missile which was thrown by Russia is seen as over 30 people were killed and more than 100 injured in a Russian attack on a railway station in eastern Ukraine on April 8, 2022. Photo by Andrea Carrubba/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images | Business Insider

© April 10, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

Fifty-two dead and hundreds maimed,

Russia claims to be liberating,

Ukraine from the Nazis in his addled brain,

The missile with the missive in Russian graffiti:

 

“For the children,”

 

A clever double entendre

In a war prosecuted by terrorists,

The head potentate of war crimes,

Vladimir Putin,

Head of a military superpower

Led by a war criminal,

 

“For the children,”

 

This barbarism isn’t “genius,”

It’s psychotic,

But his American cheerleader sporting a dead ferret on his addled head,

Lying profusely, it’s his hair over a bald spot,

From a botched plastic surgery

For which he reportedly assaulted his first immigrant spouse,

A flaw to his warped sense of self-perfection,

His narcissism can’t admit it exists,

A metaphor for the uncomfortable truths of his life he refuses to accept,

(Like being a business failure and NOT a "stable genius")

 

Putin is sitting at the end of a twenty-foot desk,

Followed in his limited travels by oncologists,

Who specializes in cancer of the thyroid,

 

It might mean that his immune system is compromised.

 

The irony, for a KGB agent who specialized in turning citizens of other countries into fifth columnists,

(Look at his 2016 - 2020 Manchurian Candidate)

Putin used kompromat against his victims, “useful idiots,” and opponents,

 

In a world recovering from a deadly pandemic,

Such knowledge might be terrifying to a terrorist,

Putting Putin at the end of twenty-foot desks,

 

Ferret toupees and twenty-foot desks:

Metaphors for quote so-called “strongmen,”

Prolific liars who “can’t handle the truth,”

Who create parallel universes around themselves,

Experts at forming personality cults around them,

Surrounding themselves with treacherous “yes men,”

Who steals from the strongmen as he steals from citizens,

The kings of flaccidity demand their flunkies only tell them “good news,”

Their fake shields hiding their impotence,

 

Murder becomes a requisite

To keep the illusion fresh:

Murdered women, men, and children in Syria, Crimea, Ukraine,

A million Coronavirus pandemic casualties in the US,

Gun violence that becomes serial naval gazing, and endemic,

 

“For the children,”

 

We need to have a global determination,

Of the mental health of any country’s leaders

They should have a battery of psychological tests,

Before RUNNING for office,

BEFORE taking a salary,

Before becoming a premier or president,

 

Because of their loose grasp of reality:

It,

Determines the allocation of resources and whether humans starve or are fed,

Determines how (or IF) we deal with climate catastrophe,

Determines whether we transition to renewable energy,

Determines the price of gas and groceries,

Determines whether we are served by elected representatives or ruled by dictators,

Determines whether we have truths that set us free, or gaslighting,

Determines whether France has Manuel Macron or Marine Le Pen,

Determines whether we explore the stars or fall from Sisyphus' precipice from Homo Sapiens to Homo Stultus,

 

Who we put in power should answer to their population, not astroturf campaigns and special interests,

The future we cannot predict, but

The future we’re supposed to make better for our posterity: “For the children.”