The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

 It has been one week. Sabbath to Sabbath. That the world turned her attention to the place often in the periphery of being unless the news shatters the perception of innocence and assaults our eyes with the unseeable. Last week, during celebrations for the Jewish people, Hamas hang glided intentions of destruction and rained down terror upon hundreds of young people at a music concert.  They indiscriminately killed people, raped women, snatched hostages, all in the space of moments that the Israeli government was unable to respond.  It was a weekend. it was a holiday. It was planned. It was barbaric. It was evil. It was inhumane. It was terror. I was offline last Saturday, my television not tuned into the prior week incessant wrangling about the American elections and the will=they-or-won't they of the Republican congress.  My husband and I were enjoying much needed respite. Even Sunday, when I took a little road trip up to Vermont to just be, I was not fully aware ...

 America is in trouble. America is in trouble. America is in trouble. I remember sounding an alarm about what was coming when I was still a budding-reluctant-activist after a shooting happened in my new town of Kirkwood, Missouri. February 2008 was when the shooting happened. That was also an election year. I joined with other community members to talk across race, ethnicity, age, gender, and location. Oh those days of people still innocently thinking the good. When African American kids were marginalized in what looked like a literal Mason-Dixon Line in the high school. The Atlas kids, the ones who needed more educational attention despite growing up in this somewhat affluent suburban school system. Well, they mostly came from Meacham Park and their parents may have been tired of fighting the then all white school board.  White and claiming to be liberal, but white still. With one Black woman principal who had her little kingdom of this program and the Black Achievement Award...

 If you were like me, or maybe not, you were somewhat glued in to the ever-increasing-drama of a government shut down. For days on end, weeks, months, even, the news kept giving us the drama of a "will they or won't they" about the MAGA republicans attempt to shut down the government in service of their overlord, the 91-indicted, commercial fraud, sexist, racist, empty vessel tyrant wannabe dictator who is only trying to save his own skin. They were capitulating over and over and their speaker was just the 15-vote weak-willed one who couldn't hold it together. Well, except to try to blame the Democrats and the Senate when Civics 101 means that laws are passed in the Congress first and then voted on in the Senate before they are signed by the President. Didn't anyone else grow up with "It's Just a Bill trying to make it to Capitol Hill" Where is Schoolhouse Rock when you need it. Then, instead of being the leader and not just a MWM with a title, McCar...