Gird Up Your Loins: Resistance Is NOT Futile!

Donald Trump is ruining and dismantling our country. In his misguided effort to “Make America Great Again,” he is trying to take us back to what many of us know as the “bad old days.” Trump seems to want to destroy what is best about the United States by pushing back the progress we have made in every area: arts, culture, race, foreign policy, education, health – you name it – and he and his Project 2025 have a plan to disrupt and tear it apart.

The most upsetting thing about all of this is that we, the people, are letting it happen. I, like many of you, am frightened by all the chaos. I haven’t known what to do about any of it, so I have done nothing . . . other than talk with friends about our country’s decline and how abnormal the president’s actions are.

However, now, I say it’s time to get into some “good trouble.” How? By pushing back with letters to the editors of the newspapers still publishing, regardless of their political leanings, decrying the unnaturalness of everything Donald Trump has done and is doing. My city, Dallas TX, only has one newspaper which tends to the right of things. I will write to it beginning with this blog post as an open letter to my fellow citizens.How else can we push back? By serving as witnesses to the detaining of the undocumented as they leave their Immigration Court appointments. We can push back by calling and writing our municipal, state, and federal representatives urging – no, demanding – that they push back against what they know is wrong. And finally, by meeting with friends and neighbors to figure out other ways of resisting.

Even though it doesn’t feel like it right now, we, the people, have the greater power, not Donald Trump and his minions. Let us gird up our loins and act as if we are in charge of this nation’s destiny. Because we are!

 

Vicki Meek Has Done It Again

A standing room only crowd turned out at 9 AM, July 6 on the lawn of N.W. Harllee Elementary School to witness and participate in the much-anticipated reveal of Vicki Meek’s newest Dallas project. This endeavor is part of Nasher Public, an initiative to provide more artist-driven public art in Dallas. And Meek is in the thick of it.

Artist Vicki Meek Adresses the Crowd

Lead Artist of Phase 1, Meek explained, “The first phase of the Urban Historical Reclamation and Recognition (UHRR) Project focuses on the Tenth Street Historic District, one of the last Freedman’s Towns in America. [Meek’s] project installed five makers in culturally significant locations throughout the District.”

Meek continued, “Phase 2 will identify a disappearing Mexican American community to center the project. [The role of] Lead Artist will transfer to UHRR cohort artist Angel Faz.

Working closely with the Tenth Street community, especially the elders, the sites to focus upon were identified; sites that, for the most part, are now bereft of that which made them significant to the community. The culturally significant locations in Phase 1 are identified by QR codes posted on signs about the height of a parking meter, and include Eloise Lundy Park, named for the first African American to serve on the Dallas Park Board; the former site of Dr. Nathaniel Watts’s home and office, an African American physician who cared for the Tenth Street community for decades; the former site of Sunshine Elizabeth Chapel CME church; the former site of the Tenth Street business community and Simpson Pharmacy; and the site of Black Dallas Remembered founder Mamie McKnight’s former home.

To access the QR code content, first get the free Kinfolk app from your app store. The first QR code is near the corner of Anthony and E. 8th Streets.

Check it out. Walk around the Tenth Street Historic District and learn about the Freedman’s Town in Oak Cliff. It will open your eyes! Vicki Meek has, indeed, done it again.

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The author with the artist, Vicki Meek 6 July 2024