It’s 2022. It’s more than fifty years since the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told a cheering multitude of a dream he had. Part of his dream was that people would be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. Who could argue with that?

All kinds of people are arguing with that, here in 2022. Some of my classmates (Glendale, Arizona, Glendale High School class of 1972) cannot bring themselves to say three simple words: “Black lives matter.” Yet those same people have no problem saying the three simple words “Blue lives matter.” (For those of my worldwide readership that do not know, “blue” in this case represents law enforcement.) A husband of a classmate of mine sent me an article that posited that the man who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck and kept it there till he died was a “fall guy.” There is derisive response to the accurate teaching of history. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel with accurate information about the Holocaust has just been banned in a Tennessee school. I conclude from these symptoms, and many other things I have seen and heard in the last few years, that Racism in my country is on the surge.

What can I do about it? For all it’s worth, I can denounce it. I can try to understand it and codify it and urge anyone listening to do the same. I can become more aware of its presence. In short, I can do almost nothing.

But I must stand up to be counted. The image above is the best my artist/poet self can do to make something that is relevant and unique to my perspective. And my perspective includes the notion that Racism is insidious and murky and omnipresent, that it thrives on denial and suppression, and that there are powerful forces at constant ready to divide us. So my image includes a smple from Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges, who is almost exactly my age, and of a Black man getting a drink spilled on him while doing nothing more than tying his shoes. I have a quotation from Paul Simon’s “Blessed,” written long ago, which I took the liberty of substituting one word to fit my theme. The other elements of the image are ambiguous, and the acrostic poem is somewhat effaced, as if censorship and/or vandalism was in play. But here are the unoccluded words:

diss tort shun

doesn’t take an awful lot a People to oppress
if you have some folks on top to scourge unwonted flesh
sadists of fascisti circumvent a pervenu
slow your roll, Utopians–the time is WAY too soon

As with most of my acrostics, there is some “loss of signal” due to the Procrustean strictures of meter, rhyme and acrostic spine. I would have liked a better word than “parvenu” but it was the closest to the Them vs. Us syndrome that words-ending-in-u had to offer. But I felt I got lucky with “unwonted” because it is so phonetically similar to “unwanted” that most of us will subconsciously connote one for the other.

I hope a change for the better will come in my lifetime. But I don’t have all that much lifetime left to me: even if I live to be 100, the journey is more than two-thirds over. But I intend to denounce Racism until my dying day.