This Week

What a week it has been.

The Supreme Court upholds Obamacare subsidies.

Funerals are held for the people who were killed at AME in Charleston.

The Supreme Court makes marriage equality the law.

Governor Haley of South Carolina calls for the confederate flag to come down.

President Obama gives Reverend Pinkney’s eulogy.

Bree Newsome takes down the confederate flag and is arrested.

Arsonists are still burning black churches.

I don’t even know if I have all this in the right chronological order, but it isn’t in any neat order in my mind. I’m feeling like the country is being hit by good and bad, from right and left, and there is no logic pattern to it. Part of me feels like we are making progress.  Yes, it’s taken way, way, way too long for marriage equality to be the law, but it is finally here. At the same time, government officials whose names I won’t give space on my blog are saying they aren’t going to follow that law. And Supreme Court justices are proving to me that you can be narrow and hateful and still sit on that bench. Obama’s eulogy is pretty amazing, but I look at his face as he talks, at the grimness there, and I know how much better it would have been if he had never had the need to say these things. A governor is finally calling for that flag to come down, yet a brave, strong woman is arrested for taking the action to bring it down.

So, yes, I guess progress. And yet…

It’s such a big yet.

Meaning? I guess that we do, very much, still have a long, long way to go. And that, as Obama says, we can’t just slip back into silence or complacency. And that, thank goodness, there are good people out there as well as the bad, and we have to remember that and use their courage and persistence as reminders of what we ourselves need to be doing.