Taking a Deeper Breath

"Fifty nifty United States from thirteen original colonies...." That's a line from a song I learned in elementary school as part of my sanitized history education. We were taught about the "discovery of America" as if Columbus were the first to arrive here. As if there weren't diverse nations already thriving here for thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived. Each year at this time we talked about the Pilgrims and Indians and the big feast they shared on that "first Thanksgiving." We did not learn about the eradication of Indigenous peoples, felled by new diseases brought by Europeans, and then by  genocide at the hands of colonists and "settlers."   We were not told that Native Americans were enslaved by the English colonists, although one scholar reports that "between 1492 and 1880,  between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved  in the Americans in addition to 12.5 million African slaves." Stealing lan

I have never had perfect vision. In fact, I wear trifocals these days. But I don't need my glasses to see with much more clarity now than I had at the beginning of the year. I have 2020 vision now. Perhaps you do, too. This has been an extraordinary year by any measure. How many times have I heard someone ask, "what else could happen?" And then   we find out .   I keep thinking that we must have hit the bottom by now, but then we sink lower. It's been gut-wrenching, to be sure, but eye-opening, as well. The onslaught of challenges and changes has brought deeper perspectives on so many fronts.  What seems clearer to me now is the breadth of all I have wrongly assumed and taken for granted. My White privilege surely accounts for many of my former assumptions and expectations, but it goes beyond that; I've held -- and still hold -- a number of privileges that have colored my views.  With the privilege of an able body, I took for granted not only the pleasures of dail