Let Me Say One Thing To Clarify

There Was A Brief Moment After 9/11 When Colin Powell Said We "should Not Rush To Satisfy The Desire For Revenge." It Was A Great Moment, An Extraordinary Moment, Because What He Was Actually Asking People To Do Was To Stay With A Sense Of Grief, Mournfulness, And Vulnerability.

I Do Not Follow Closely Anymore, Since There Is A Limit To How Much Heartsickness One Can Bear.

We Act And Walk And Speak And Talk In Ways That Consolidate An Impression Of Being A Man Or Being A Woman.

When Some People Rejoin With “all Lives Matter” They Misunderstand The Problem, But Not Because Their Message Is Untrue. It Is True That All Lives Matter, But It Is Equally True That Not All Lives Are Understood To Matter Which Is Precisely Why It Is Most Important To Name The Lives That Have Not Mattered, And Are Struggling To Matter In The Way They Deserve.

What Does It Mean Then To Live With One Another? It Can Be Unhappy, It Can Be Wretched, It Can Be Ambivalent, It Can Even Be Full Of Antagonism, But All Of That Can Play Out In The Political Sphere Without Recourse To Expulsion Or Genocide. And That Is Our Obligation, To Stay In The Sphere With Whatever Murderous Rage We Have, Without Acting On It.