@Lookout @Lookout
the great video. Yes, ashamed of the US. Starting when I was in High School I became slowly more and more ashamed and disgusted at what I thought wa th lost promise of this country, and how it devolved from what it should have been into what it had become and was ever more becoming. Then education stepped in and I realized that it never was anything else, the more history I learned, the more I saw the extent to which the cultural, social and economic malady had been here ab initio. We don't need a path correction, but a complete dislocation and restart.

Trump, the great malady, should have been enough to trigger at least stirrings in that direction, but instead it is the same old thing, with a few, who would've been trying to make things right anyway being sidelined and stymied by the vast number who simply point to Trump as a scapegoat and excuse, while plotting simply more of the same-old-shit, but without a wall and with 25% less blatant racism and christofascism.

EDIT: Have a great one, btw.

Light rain this AM. I skipped the SOTU and all the rebuttals. Just not worth the frustration.

Just a few items I wish were discussed:

The US practices democracy by selecting self-proclaimed leaders over elected ones.
The US supports selected violent dictators in Saudi Arabia, Fascist in Brazil and Ukraine, and declares war on any Western country working on a socialist platform.
The US has plenty of money for war and aggression but not enough to help our young folks, nor provide healthcare LIKE EVERY OTHER DEVELOPED COUNTRY!
The US will prosecute truth tellers like Julian and Snowden because we refuse to see the US as the evil empire.

I could continue but that's a good start on the issues which make me ashamed of the US and what it has become.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIh68Kh_-s]

@Tall Bald and Ugly
for reading and for the well wishes.
Have a great one.

nice on the Marley, his son will be in town tonight(h/t eyo) but no funds for tickets to spare. Typical. I have either $ and no time, or time with no $. Makes getting things accomplished a juggling act, most days.

Best wishes for your health issues being resolved speedily and in your favor.
Have a good day Good people!

@magiamma
Have yourself a great day.

sculptor and printmaker

Ms. Catlett became an educator, too. After graduating cum laude from Howard University in 1935, she taught high school in Durham, N.C.

Howard hadn’t been her first choice. She had won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, but the college refused to allow her to matriculate when it learned she was black. So she entered historically black Howard, with one semester’s worth of tuition saved by her mother. She earned scholarships to cover the rest.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/arts/design/elizabeth-catlett-sculpto...

“I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful,” she later said of this period. ... In 1949 she was arrested, along with other expatriates, during a railroad workers’ strike in Mexico City. Eventually she gave up her American citizenship and was declared an undesirable alien by the State Department. In 1971 she had to obtain a special visa to attend the opening of her one-woman show at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

https://solidarity-us.org/atc/160/p3685/

The Chicago artists were greatly influenced by Marxism, and the role of the Black worker in American society was crucial to their work. They were committed to the belief that art should provide a tangible function for the African-American community. Some were dedicated social realists, while others used modernist aesthetics to create art that communicated universal ideas through Black experiences.

Many of these artists were members of the Communist Party, believing that Communism as an ideological and political tool offered the best solution to both racial discrimination and class subordination. They utilized Black Chicago in their art as a metaphor to help explain broader issues of social, political, and cultural oppression.

From Chicago she went on to New York to study abstraction with modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine, and from 1944 to 1946 she taught working and lower class Blacks at the George Washington Carver School. Working with students in New York broadened Catlett’s awareness of the Black experience in America. For Catlett, these students reiterated her mother’s experiences as a social worker.

https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/elizabeth-catlett
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnpu6sk1NL0]