His Name is George Floyd

I don’t need to tell you what’s going on. If you’re reading this shortly after I post this the first week of June 2020, you know.

If you’re here later than that, maybe scrolling backward through this blog’s posts or you landed here randomly from a google search, I am speaking to you from the week that America urgently spoke up about racial inequality in the United States. In spite of the pandemic, people are gathering to protest. At the center of it all it is peaceful and also full of fury, and around the edges are the destructive opportunists whose actions are too often conflated with the message – that the time has come to tell a clear eyed truth about how life in America is unfairly divided up according to race. I don’t know if this week means things are going to change, but I know this week shows how much it really needs to. George Floyd was murdered for our sins.

So as far as knitting goes, these are not the days for it. I look at my work, and there is no love there. It just feels wrong.

I’ve been sending out donations every day during the protests. I choose a different connection to what’s happening each day the protests endure because as enthusiastically as I would be with them at any other time, during Covid my husband’s state of health means I have to stay away to keep him safe. So I write checks. Thus far I’ve sent donations to the George Floyd Fund, Reclaim the Block, the Go Fund me for Homeless Black Trans Women, the Massachusetts Bail Fund, The Equal Justice Initiative, and tomorrow I’ll contribute to The Poor People’s Campaign. Any one of those causes would love to hear from you too, if you care to join them in their work with even a small bit of your money.

That’s all I have right now. I know it’s not nearly enough.