This week, I saw on Steve Bissette’s Facebook feed a story about a Black wheelchair-bound veteran shot in broad daylight on Seattle, WA’s waterfront on July 31. Harold Powell, Sr., was shot in the chest in front of dozens of witnesses. Gregory Timm, 32, is a white man who accused Powell, a 14-year Navy vet, of “stolen valour” and demanded the veteran “show his ID” to prove his veteran status. (The Sun City song, Let Me See Your I.D., about apartheid South Africa, immediately came to mind.)
Powell is recovering, and his family has started a GoFundMe campaign. It notes: “His injuries are serious, and the cost of emergency care, surgery, physical therapy, and long-term recovery is overwhelming.”
It would be easy to dismiss this as an act of one knucklehead. But my brain goes back to history.
The first thing to pop up was the Red Summer of 1919. Black people, especially the black veterans who were proud to wear the uniform when they got back to the States, were targeted for assault and murder. Going back to the Revolutionary War, Black people in the US were eager to prove themselves ‘worthy” of full citizenship by going to battle.
Other black veterans have been killed, not in battle, but in the fight for democracy and human rights.
Ignorance is NOT bliss.
So, I’ve been distressed by the federal so-called DEI cuts, which are based on the theory that the institutions targeted are too “woke.” Under the microscope, per Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, is the Smithsonian, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The museums are now to “celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” Just this week, FOTUS groused, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
I should note that I was a charter member of the African American History and Culture Museum and contributed monetarily to it before it was even built, though I did not get there until August 2024, when I spent two days there. The FOTUS assessment is incorrect. There is plenty about success and joy, but he misses the facility’s point. History should be an honest, warts-and-all portrayal.
As a librarian, I was upset by the firing of Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The rationale was BS. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” Except that the Library of Congress is a research library, and books are used only on the premises by members of the public. Anyone age 16 and older may use the collections. She was fired for being a black woman, just as General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was canned for being a black guy.
Add to this the attacks on universities, media outlets, etc., not to mention the seemingly random and cruel ICE raids, and I become increasingly distressed. Let’s not Make America More Stupid Again (MEMSA).
On Tuesday, August 5, we took the DC Metro from Alexandria, VA, to the primary goal of the 
About a week after my wife and I returned from Chautauqua in early August, we, plus our daughter, took the trains down to Washington, DC, to visit museums and do the tourist thing.
We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity is a physically