Goodbye to all that

Let us first praise Nasty Women of the Year, two who gave their lives.  Heather Heyer was murdered by a racist who drove all the way from Ohio to protect a statue of a seditious general in a Charlottesville, Virginia, park.  Erica Garner was "radicalized" when a New York City police officer killed her father with an illegal chokehold and wasn't even indicted (the man who took the video got harsher treatment).  She already suffered from asthma when she became an activist with Black Lives Matter, and this week she died from a post-partum heart condition at age 27.  So her child will never know its mother or grandfather, thanks to America's bone-deep racism.

At the end of the day, and of the year, it isn't about government programs or departments destroyed from within by right-wing termites, or about police forces rife with bigots and thugs, or even about law.  It 's about individuals who see a wrong and try to stop it and end up mangled in the machine.

At twelve o'clock we'll all pretend that something changes, that things can get better, that it's not just a page in an arbitrary calendar and a clock clicking over.  We have to make it happen.  We are all of us fighting for our lives.  Let us lose no more heroic women like Erica and Heather.