the best part of this coronavirus deal is staying home. of course i've moved so far out into the country that it's incredibly difficult to go to town - 40 miles just to get to a town of 20,000 - so i'm just plain not experiencing racism, tension, riots, demonstrations, anything like that. and that's fine with me. i'm tired. i've been fighting racial injustice all my life. it seems sometimes that we've totally lost - that the forces that want race war have the edge. but i also think it's necessary to back off, regain our strength, and hold our place as rightful citizens in this country.

i now have five acres of mountain land. i know its boundaries. i know every tree on it. i know where it's possible to get a car and where it's not. i know how to get to the national forest and the mescalero reservation. i stay off of both, though. the five acres is more than enough for me. it's got fresh air, lots of wood, plenty of animals. the wild lands on either side of it seem to go forever.

i would advise my white friends to just stay away from the protests. my reasoning is, you will be mistaken for an agitator. the right is accusing antifa of agitating, and being a terrorist group. the left and the city of minneapolis are accusing the neo-nazis of coming in from out of town to burn and pillage and stir up trouble. so if you're white and you're out in the street, everyone's got a different idea of why. are you going to stop and tell them why? are you going to make it very clear why? are you going to make sure you're not mad enough at anybody to get violent? are going to make sure you don't get baited into doing something stupid? i would just stay away.

second reason is, we white folks don't have a clue what it's like to be afraid for our lives in trump's america. not a clue. so if we protest in sympathy, it's really two different protests. one, for the people who have a clue. the other, for those of us who don't.

i protest racial injustice. one example is how it took them so long to find the killers in georgia. they would have been glad to go another month or two, except it became obvious who did it. same with minneapolis. he did it on video, and everyone saw it. it's not new that he did it. it's new that everyone saw it and got to see how he thought it was ok.

we need police, though. we need them to be fair and behave under common principles. we need them to protect us when the chips are down and be there when we need them. we need them to know that we respect them when they do their jobs right.

and we need full justice for brazen killers.