Hand of Ananke

Philosophy and the Fisherman

Chester steps off the crowded bus on the bright, humid, Rochester, summer day. His dark brown skin is wrinkled and somehow his straw thin arms with knotted elbows hold up the bucket and fishing poles. His stride is youthful, belying his seventy years on this Earth in this city. Before long he is halfway down the Charlotte Pier, casting a line into the slowly churning lake water.

A few younger, grumpier, men have already started their daily fishing. They have their favorite spots and Chester has seen them arguing with each other over them. He does not care. He knows he’ll catch one or two to fry up for dinner and just have a relaxing day in the sun and the breeze. Though for the most part he is thirty or more years their senior, he has no trouble settling into place on the concrete.

They say you should not eat what you catch out of Lake Ontario, that there is too much pollution and the fish can make you sick. Chester does not care. He has been eating fish out of the lake since he was a boy, his father taking him on Sunday after church. Sometimes, just sometimes, he can feel his father sitting beside him. He can always feel his Leroy, his only boy taken from him by cancer.

Still he is not bitter, and he spends his retirement taking the crowded “1” down to the Lake, smiling as he pulls his dinner out of the water. Life has not been good, and it has not been bad “it’s just been” he’ll tell people. Once and awhile, the young ones even listen.

The Echoing Silence of Your Own Irrelevance | Hand of Ananke →

This is what I think of One Million Moms and Live Action (and social conservatives in general.)

More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (via tonylucero)

(via stfuconservatives)