What will we ask of ourselves

I worked on the inaugaration and walked through the day with that kind of weight on my heart , a small but insistent melancholy.

A combination of yes happiness, deep personal spiritual joy, fury and lostness.

On facebook, on twitter, in blogsI get to be a witness but as of yet I am not sure I am a lover.

I don't talk about it often because in a lot of ways I fell I am both a dissapointment and disappointed , but I am a member of ( tangentially) the young black and fabulous. And the tools we use to connect with each other.

Facebook , I was on there when the only other people were Harvard Yale and Brown.

I have always felt apart from it and even more so after graduation. Once my fatehr got deported and I went to work basically anywhere taht would pay ,I felt the governement had revoked my membership. I was red painted and out. But I still have connections.

And watching facebook, and the like I'm not sure how I feel about it .

Most of my friends who are there are at balls through connections, and they are as they should be basking in the glow of being part of that knowing elite, that Ivy League ancestral club that for us was often denied, no matter how hard we worked. Of having president that is literally less than ten steps away.

For many of them this is the moment. We are as they say the next big thing.

We were spotted as microtrends.

And suddenly our opinions matter . Isn't venue after venue that a year to six months ago went " WE DON'T CATER TO SPECIAL INTERESTS ( insert derisive sneer) damn near falling over themselves to FIND ME A MINORITY.

Aren't these same places that wouldn't even feature WOC writers or thinkers or even properly invest time in meeting with them , creating shows and themes and ISSUES around our existence, thanks to Michelle Obama.

Shouldn't we be drunk on this possibility? Shouldn't I be chomping at the bit to be included? Shouldn't we be sating our thirst on the flow after centuries of dehydration?

To realize that those who don't even know our ANTHEM will now be under a president that for better or worse we have enveloped as ours.

To be quite clear I delight in seeing these people I love , many of them in fields they question, feeling pulls to service that can not be matched in their need to pay off bills ( OH MAN do i understand that)

To be awakened to the idea that they can be leaders, but

What will we ask of our leadership?

Not of our out there some old guy, or elite gal that we don't really feel connected to but , now that we feel that we can be our own leaders

What will we ask of ourselves?

At this moment more than ever we MUST require more than just being there.

Becoming a new face of power only means that those whose lust is power and influence will be quick to copy your face.

Consequently they will be quick to abandon it or pretend not to know it when it no longer offers the mysteries or privileges they believed it promised

The speeches were appropriately florid and Rev. Lowry underscored how silent and deep the rift between some of us is . ( yep people don't know Lift Ev're Voice and Sing, glad I sing cause my mandibular dropped THAT fast )

But my fear is that in that speech there was a mention of work, of getting down to teh unpleasant, of elbow grease and I see no joyous mention of that.

In that speech an entire world was singled out as an other and told how to live, but nothing was said of that same rhetoric being used to exterminate a people

What will we ask of ourselves?


To remember deeply what it means to be asked in, to remember what being asked in cost, to see how it has unfolded and to be cautious of how it unfolds

What will we ask of ourselves