Racial tension, Racial perception, Racial intensity 25 years after Los Angeles Riots #RodneyKing

Don, Ben, Jon all dissect several kind of intellectual border crossings within their framework to reflect/analyze race relations in America today.  Don is a collective thinker who magnifies his Black race with a "we" persona and the frivolity of the white race/conquest.  Ben forces Don to look deeper into the individual mindset that drove him to this position.  Jon has a blended perspective and sees past the color barrier to embrace all races. On an every day level, it matters who your friends are.  Jane and Jon have friends of all different races and I suspect Don & Ben do, too.  Jane has crossed racial taboos to have a Black child and raise him with a Baptist/Lutheran Midwestern frame of mind.  We all examine key events leading up to the L.A. Riots - Daryl Gates approval of a choke hold method to restrain individuals, the death of Latasha Harlin and choke hold death of James Mincey, Jr which ended in a large settlement.  There was no PCP in Mincey's system and toxicology reports were on the side of the victim.  Who is winning the war on racism?  Police brutality seems to win out at every turn except in the Guillermo Yanez case.  Tune in to this riveting episode with also a critique on Ben Carson and his mindset.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/tabernaclefaith/2017/05/01/25th-anniversary-of-la-riots-what-future-kingdoms-will-rise

Los Angeles life vs. Minnesota

Living in a dual homeland

Comments 3

by Jane Hoffman

There is a division line inside my soul and it has geographic entities.  I dually exist in two locations, Los Angeles and Duluth.  One side of my soul is fed through the woodlands and a diet of visual saturation of birds, migration, birch trees and subdued twilights.  The other side of me kicks garbage through the streets, bonds with the homeless as I make my way into the indoor swap meet where my friend, Rownak, runs an aromatherapy store.  The buyers come for the low end prices of high end products.  She has oils named Beyonce, Hillary Clinton and Kardashian.  A scent of a woman underscores the endless gypsy quality of people trapsing through the multiple stores.  The stores are lined up and open every day for the bargain hunter.  I score a leather belt for $1.00 next door and a silver studded belt with rivets my son now sports at his McDonalds job.  Even in 65 degree weather in downtown L.A., there is a human rhythm of excitement, tempo and beat the weekend before Christmas.  This is what I flew here for.  I come to find the missing fragments of my soul I left behind and to treasure a few lost pieces.  Leaving Duluth didn’t seem so bad this winter.  It was around 20 degrees when I left as opposed to last winter when it was minus 40.  I have endured two and a half years now.  I wouldn’t call it home but it is an ancient home.  It is a vestibule of my memory that taunted me from age 1 to 16 when we would visit my Aunt Fanny on West 5th Street.  Her husband, Silvio DeSanto had a telescope in the attic to view Lake Superior’s ship trafficking.  My roots are half way sealed in Duluth through a ventricular vein that routes through the emissary vein to my superficial temporal veins.  What does that mean?  My emissary vein is the diplomatic context of my circulation that shield painful parts of my past and only opens the door to the windows I want to see.   My father’s family came from a place within that circular trouble in my inner world that only surfaces with some warm memories.  He was the 9th of 9 children born on the advent of the depression.  His brother, Tommy Hammerstrom, died of rickets at age 4.  His parents were 2nd generation Swedes.  My father entered WWII three months after he turned 18.  He was a limo driver for English diplomats in England.  My father contoured his life to say it had been rough but he actually was born into a Post war generation that was the most prosperous in the last 100 years.  After graduating from UMD in 1948, he worked at 3M 32 years and became a millionaire.  He invested in stocks and bonds.   But his soul rested in WWII even in his awake adult life.  The struggle of living overshadowed him.  Duluth, the city, to me is the city of archangel steeples and a jagged, hilly landscape embraced for hardship. The sun is often foggy and luminous and the clouds can cast gloom.  The houses are often turn of the century, the brick and stone are possessions of the cityscape.  I practice endurance and overcoming through towering over and observing the constructive make up of the city as I do my driving job 2-3 days a week.  I often drive 150 miles in one day.  Northern Minnesota has that self-sustinence feel as you drive through the silent country pass Rice Lake road to Fredenberg.  People who live here in my mind reap from the silence and their connection to the forest.  The low flying hawks just above me as I drive are speaking a language without symbols.  The roads wind and bend.  I find my way back to my white colonial home which I have made my own.  When crossing the country once a year to go “back to California” I am returning to my other half where my identical twin sister lives with her 14 year old son.  A place where my son can reunite with his cousin.  I can go back to First Baptist of Beverly Hills in which I first started attending in 1987.  It’s a church of about fifty members.  Faith Ford of Murphy Brown, David Choe – a famous Korean artist who designed the Facebook walls and Chance Raspberry, a cartoonist for the Simpsons all derived from church.  I was able to connect with two of them over the Christmas break.   In California, life gives flight to my dreams.  In Minnesota, I engulfed in my heritage.  I practice responsibility caring for the disabled.  I am a better citizen.  I still don’t know fully who I am but I know that I live between two places of beauty.  The coniferous forest that breeds pines and sanctuary and the wild chaos that comes from a blended flux of mass immigrants that keep my heart in tempo to the true America.  I move 4 homeless blankets to make room for my rental car behind Rownak’s store.  It gives a feel of the transience I feel.   I hold the dirty blankets which are an element of someone’s home. As I shift them to the sidewalk, I see their owner.  The exchange in handing him the blankets is an awakening to the earth I stand on.  I can comprehend that temporary delusion that life has a sense of permanence.  All I know is I have to keep moving.

The truth and Nothing But the Truth Circa 1989-1990

Dear Tony;

No one could ever fully know the impact of Larry Welch, MFA, on my life.  I glance thru his photos and public videos now and perhaps he is a mad genius who reprogrammed himself in the world.  Perhaps, he is a suffering saint who could never requite the love of his mother.  I somehow end up with men like these.  One famous talk show host whose only ideal of a woman is Margaret Thatcher and Larry W., with a mother complex, who ran through 6 women at the church minimum to break a trail of hearts while fulfilling his dream.  He came closest to love with Nancy D. but his cleats stepped over my heart like a love bearer who had lost his way and just needed a source for his oracle.  Yes, his over confident demeanor and strange composure was something that both attracted me and made me cringe.  He was life over death, steel over cotton, breaking down the contents of my soul into a recipe of ingredients that would unravel my destiny.

Larry, Larry, your timing was off.  I reached the peak of love for you when I handed you that monumental Shakespearean book on December 23, 1989.  By Spring, I was on the other side of town, directing my play at the Hollywood Baptist Church.  Yet you told me at Sharkey's that this was the night that we were to meet...tonight?  Six months after the anti climax you come swooping in for your ravenous remains.  Out of awkward curiosity, I accepted.

You looked much worse naked than with clothes.  You were already 40 and I was only 29.  That was a monumental difference at the time.  A 40 year old man, once defined as middle aged.  You had that Taurus the Bull swagger and your confidence was that of George Clooney while you resembled Opie from Mayberry RFD.....

TO BE CONTINUED

Los Angeles in winter

The sun shone

God touched my arm

with sunlight

I felt bestowed, endowed

singing to the hidden angels below

scraping the earth from dawn to dusk

groping the earth's crust

shrinking, my soul dampens

past homeless people

I share my money

my eyes display grace

are they duping me or have they a longing face?

I clung to the sunlight

not strong enough to burn me

70 degrees

just perfect for my sanctity

somewhere in Minneapolis

I could have frozen

but this day the sky was open

it was a day for blessings

nocturnal sunshine

a glowing face

no fear of death

a desire to live

a knowledge of survival

a recognition I no longer struggle

in the real sense

a latino mother with a rudimentary sign

asked for money

while her child suckled her breast

I told her about social services

she said "I qualify in two months"

"dos menses"

a hold up?

food stamps are guaranteed

but life is not

I bent down

"here's two dollars"

maybe I should have given her the box of vanilla wafers

or a piece of carrot cake

that had a small white fork taped to the container.

the wafer

the cake

the sacrament

the blessing.

Day of the Dead

Los Angeles Hollywood Forever Cemetery
October 22, 2011

People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

I copied this from Ernest's Tumbler....

Reviewing this quote, I think it is partially true..like when a person doesn't really want to try because it is too painful to change. That is why I chickened out moving to Minnesota. I was scared to break my routine and temporarily sacrifice for the greater future. But I know it will happen because I crave the fresh air, river and woods like a toxic drug that I must inhale...my body will be drawn back to that place...a place I cannot resist.....In the meantime, I swim once a week at Lionel's...I enjoy the coming and goings of various people. It is a huge complex of people. Last week I met a human resources person for a temp agency, this week I met a 4th generation Californio...that's what they were called back in the day. She was friendly and nice in the jacuzzi. I am helping a sixty eight yr old thru a divorce. He is broken hearted over the the fact that his Bulgarian wife left him. She had a demanding daughter. That is part of the dissension of the marriage. L.R., the 68 yr old is not saved. He also is very sex oriented and I ignore this aspect of his personality. He is lonely and not emotionally self sufficient. His intellect is the best part of his personality. I think he enjoys my company. It feels good to help someone. Going to his pool complex relaxes me and makes me feel like I am experiencing the better part of Los Angeles. I both defy and embrace L.A. Like most cities, it is more appealing at night.