My Daily Kos mentors, Denise Oliver-Velez and Meteor Blades, back in the day. The best of the best.
Some folks say that RACISM and CLIMATE CHANGE are not winning issues for the party — but I propose that they are the most important issues. Everything that matters lies between the past and the future. The truth of the past and the truth of the future.
Almost ten years ago, I stumbled out of the ethernet and into the threads of Daily Kos. It seems like a lifetime ago since I was moved to publish my first diary in the precursor to the #Me,Too movement, just before DJT was elected. It was scary.
Here at DK, I soon found mentors in Meteor Blades and Denise Oliver-Velez, front pagers who reflected then, and continue to reflect, my lifelong passions for the critical social issues of environmentalism and racism. How these incredible people came to notice me at all is still a mystery to me, but I will be forever grateful that they did. Between the two of them, they helped me turn passion into action at a pivotal time in my life.
In 1969 I had just started Jr High in a pale suburb west of Denver. I already knew air pollution was a problem – we could see the “Brown Cloud” hanging over the city every morning. My older brother started a 9th grade Ecology Club, so I started one for the 7th grade; it was easy, but not very popular, I wasn’t as into it as I could have been, I had other problems. Even back then, us stragglers recycled newspapers, collected aluminum cans and sold bricks to put in toilet tanks to save water. We made some posters about littering. I’ve continued to do all that stuff in all my roles — as a neighbor, parent, and teacher — and paying attention with increasing alarm.
Meh, said America.
When Republicans tell us the horrors of the past weren't so horrible, it's easier to convince us that the horrors of the future aren't real. We believe the lies at our peril. Distorting the truth safeguards their power - ignoring it enables them.
50 years later I ran into some guy called Meteor Blades on a Democratic blog. He had a lot more to show me about Earth Matters. Half a century is a terrifying amount of time on the current path we’re on. I fear there won’t be much of a planet left for my grandchildren if things don’t change radically. We can’t keep hiding from this truth! He introduced me to organizations, facts, links, photos, and stories that could not be ignored.
During the 60s, I also spent many summers of my childhood in an exchange bible school program my dad’s church had with the Inner-City Parish in West Denver (it still exists!) We were never wealthy, but I understood these kids were poor, not like the children begging that I saw in the streets and villages of Mexico, but living a very different life than I did. It freaked me out a little.
Will we Make Racism Wrong Again in 2025? In 2026?
As a young child, I attended several all-Black church services in Denver, crossing “the color line” with my family. Most impactfully, I was at the huge Memorial to Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Denver Civic Center in 1968 immediately following his assassination. I was a short 10 year-old; just elbow height in the dark sorrow of the crowd. I could feel the grief, it seemed to gel together as we all held hands, rocking gently in rhythm, singing every possible vesion of “We Shall Overcome.” The feeling of being part of the 10,000 other mourners has never quite left me. It was also the first time I had ever seen my mother cry; I knew, somehow, it was a tragic, powerful event.
Not yet, said America.
In 1970, when I was 12, my parents took us kids to tour the Denver Black Panther Office that had been raided and shot up by the Denver Police Department in the days of crackdowns on “Black Militancy.” I’ll never forget the somber look of the tall Black men in berets, their dark eyes watching the few of us white Protestants filtering through the dimly-lit ravaged, bullet-torn section of a building that looked like nothing we ever saw in our world — 7 miles away.
Denise Oliver-Velez helped me find the exact date, location and details of that Black Panther Raid after I related the story to her some years ago – she knew some of those guys! Funny how I didn’t even connect it to my being a student at the U of CO at Denver only 6 years later, taking an Afro-American History class, and doing a final project on the Black Panthers.
Later that same semester, I got a job as a teacher’s aide at an “inner-city” elementary school 5 blocks from the Inner-City Parish, just off 6th Avenue, across from the Lincoln Street Housing Projects. A few miles north, I took night classes CU Denver. I had just turned 20 and I was hooked on those kids.* (Ironically, Meteor Blades had just finished his studies at the same urban university.)
In 1992, when I was 35, I got my first “real” teaching job (after getting a real-life education in many hard things, good and bad.) Now a parent of six, “secure,” married, experienced, more educated, I was going to teach in an “ethnic” (very poor) school in Colorado Springs - Lotta Black kids. Lotta Black parents. My boss was Black. My boss’s boss was Black.
Once hired and trying to set up my classroom, I immediately found such huge holes in the school district that I was literally stunned. I hadn’t seen desks that old since I had been in grade school. I’d subbed and taught in several school districts in the Denver area, and I had never seen anything like this. Except maybe…that first school in the ghetto? Oh, yeah. Now I got it. Lowest per capita income schools.
It took me a while to get my bearings, the needs were so enormous. Not just for Black kids, for all the kids at my school – “those kids” – you know. Mostly dark-skinned, all poor. (I’ve been hearing about “those kids” in white spaces all my life.)
I was gobsmacked at the inequity. My own children attended the same school district! I was outraged. I had some ideas, but before I could do anything, one of my own children was upset enough to approach his own principal and ask him if their school couldn’t help my school. Couldn’t they give us some of their old globes or text books or something?
Uh, oh! I got called into my principal’s office. His wife and the wife of my son’s principal were friends. This led to one of the most educational and honest conversations I’ve ever had with a Black person, a conversation that continued for the duration of our relationship.
I will do my best to summarize what he taught me:
“Racism and the Cog Railway” www.dailykos.com/...
- Don’t feel sorry for these kids. Empower them.
- Don’t make excuses for them. Challenge them.
- Don’t give them things they don’t have. Help them earn it.
- Don’t ask others for their sloppy leftovers for these kids. They deserve the same “new” stuff as everyone else. Find a way to get it for them.
- Greet each child personally each morning. “You never know what happened before they got here.”
That principal taught me well. So did my students. So did life.
Ten years later found me teaching poetry during summer school at the youth detention center, working to institute a high school Ethnic Studies program in the school district, working with the state social studies committee to get a law passed requiring Black, Hispanic and Native American History be taught in all Colorado public schools, K-12. We won some battles, celebrated victories and shared joy — but the job was never done and it seemed my heart was always broken. So many needs. So many indifferent people.
I will not forget the saying that drew me: HOPE + ACTION = CHANGE
In 1998, I had a brain aneurysm. In 2004 I had to give up teaching because my brain was so different, I couldn’t make it work right and teaching is really hard. It was devastating but art, love and grandchildren saved me.
In 2008, I was looking for something to believe in; this guy from Illinois who talked about “One America” had a formula that I thought had a lot of power:
HOPE + ACTION = CHANGE
I fell head over heels in hope with him. I worked so hard on the Obama campaign that entire year, I found new purpose. It was more than just “hope.” It was energy and power and so many people coming together, people who had never cared before. I was there every step of the way from the unlikely whispers of good news in the beginning, setting up the regional office in Colorado Springs, campaigning relentlessly, chasing down votes until the very last minute, and the joyful celebration when victory came. I can attest to the enormity of the moment. (No one believed it was possible only a year before it started happening. Let’s remember that — not just the bad stuff. Hindsight is perfect, but it can also be blind.)
Yes, we were looking for something to believe in, and Sen. Barack Obama had a formula that was supposed to work.
You’re still Black, said America.
Action? No way, said the GOP.
Meh, said America. Again.
And, gosh, here we are. On the precipice.
Is ACTION now = hope?
I admit I’m of a mind to believe that we are currently pretty desperate for hope itself, so perhaps just taking some action can spark the HOPE that we are lacking. Enough to RE-kick start that amazing power of CHANGE? Maybe.
I know, that my friends and mentors, the Honorable Denise Oliver-Velez, and Sir Meteor Blades, have been advocating for CHANGE and ACTION non-stop for much longer than the ten-years that it has been my pleasure to know them. They’ve been working for these things their entire lives.
With regards to saving our society and our country and our world these two have NEVER given up. They have helped to connect not just me, but tens or hundreds of thousands of people with groups and organizations that help us get engaged in so many constructive actions. I had never heard of INDIVISIBLE before Meteor Blades introduced me almost a decade ago. I’m proud to say I have marched in 6 protests since becoming a Kossack, and brought friends and family each time. I’ve helped with campaigns, local and distant.
I know it’s hard to hear the blunt truth that Meteor Blades and his Earth Matters diaries put forth, but I know most of us pay attention and that all of us appreciate the hell out of him. I know he has helped tens of thousands find ways to help the earth — or, at least, hurt it less. I know he has helped raise the awareness of so many of us that it can never be measured. I know he has suggestions for ACTIONS, big and small, that we can take every day that will help the earth.
Because of being so connected to Denise, I was able to learn about and and make the trip to see Kamala Harris back in 2020 — who had a quick conversation with me about Daily Kos! Because of how much Denise has taught me about Black history and Black music, omg, I cannot possibly say, but my world has been exponentially enriched, my own perspective humbled.
My passion has spilled over into my friends and family — as I believe it probably has for most of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who continue to follow Denise Oliver-Velez and Black Kos, the thousands who follow her on Black Twitter and Bluesky. It’s hard to keep up her “truth” day after day — harder today in the renewed ugly face of blatant, condoned racism.
I know my mentors are old. Because I am old and they are older than I am. They must be tired. I am tired. They want change. Positive change. We all do. We can not give up. There are thousands of us, and we know thousands of other people.
(What if everyone went out every day and picked up a piece of trash and did one “good deed?” Could we change the world? What if half of us did? Would it catch on? I don’t know. But why not try?)
What is the intersectionality between Racism and Climate Change?
The Truth of the Past
Truth of the Future
Why do they want to hide the truth?
Everything else lies between.
TELL THE TRUTH.
(That is an action!)
JUST DO SOMETHING!!!!
BTW — Just read ”You Who Choose To Lead Must Follow” by GoodNewsRoundup who ends an inspiring piece with an awesome list of ACTIONS to take. This IS a great place to come to share inspiration. Even in hard times.
