What was said then for the Civil Rights movement in 1963 seems to be appropriate today for the Black Lives Matter Movement. James Baldwin gives us a sense of racial injustice and a manner in which to consider its hurts. God this book was beginning to end sad and moving and powerful and beautiful and so now writing this and glancing at the highlights (lowlights) of the GOP debates, I can securely say, I made the right damn choice tonight. I literally ran out of post-it notes as I read this 106 page thesis, laid at the feet of his namesake nephew. I needed James Baldwin's force, his poetry, his humanist hope, his infinitely quotable words. An Old Testament warning with a New Testament salve and a black rhythm. I needed tonight a poetic healing and a spiritual justice. Maybe, it was my despair over the way that 14-year-old Muslim boy was treated with his homemade clock. Or perhaps, even the promise of the New Testament. Perhaps, it was reading the Old Testament with my own teenage children that pushed me in this direction. Or perhaps, I could also say that Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain also brought me here. Or perhaps, it has been these last couple years of official violence directed at the poor and the black in many of our biggest cities (St Louis, Baltimore, Las Angeles, New York). You could say Ta-Nehisi Coates brought me here (after reading Between the World and Me). So I turned my TV off, tuned out, and read me some James Baldwin. I'm not exactly in love with the Democrats either, but the GOP clown car is just too long, too tiring, too damn depressing. I knew I couldn't face the Donald and his band of equally exquisite misfits.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophesy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: 'God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!' - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time I just couldn't watch the second GOP debates tonight. If we - an now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. Sad and moving and powerful and beautiful

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin