2021.
We Will Get Over It When We Go Through It.
I first saw this quote on a t-shirt in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We lived there.
It can mean different things to different people. I’ll bet that my reaction was not in sync with the wearer’s intentions.
“I like your T-shirt.”
My compliment was met with a smile and a thumbs-up.
No picture on the shirt; just text. Real life 3D moment. It comes and it goes.
Two years later, the phrase re-enters my conscience at the same moment as did the ‘Roots’ television series. Thoughts happen like that.
Cynthia once told me that her grandmother really liked Chuck Conners (The Rifleman), Lloyd Bridges (Sea Hunt), Ed Ashner (Mary Tyler Moore Show), and Lorne Green (Bonanza). Her admiration for these celebrities/actors turned to serious dislike and bitterness after witnessing the awful racist, evil characters they portrayed in the TV series.
She could not separate the person from the charactor they played. I vaguely recall that the actors took considerable risks to their careers in playing their respective evil racist characters in Alex Haley’s epic saga.
Can life imitate art? Art imitates life. I digress.
Tell Me Something Good!
It is 2023. And we have gone through it; since 1977, in the case about ‘Roots’. In fact, we have gone through it since 1915 with D.W. Griffiths’ ‘Birth Of A Nation’. Google it if you don’t know.
You cannot depend on or insist upon that artists be the truth of what they portray.
On the same side of the same coin, you can’t discount a measure of complicity, on behalf of the artists, in the art they create. Everyone’s mileage varies.
Cynthia’s grandmother’s mileage leaned towards; ‘If it looks like a duck …’
Choose your heroes wisely. Don’t choose a book by it’s cover or algorthims. That song may have a funky beat, but what are the lyrics telling us?
Bringing this back to the T-shirt; we will get over it once we go through it. The trick is to side-step it in the beginning by teaching truth to our children and not be afraid to truth-slap some grown-ups who didn’t get the memo. Word.
Asé
Peace & Blessings,
”Guided by the Ancestors”