“It’s the Weekend” by Rich Miller

D-Day Media’s blog post’s guest contributor here is Richard “Rich” Miller, a retired Indiana-based attorney, husband, father, grandfather, and avid outdoorsman as well as a writer and essayist. Rich posts a weekly essay online through his Facebook account entitled “It’s the Weekend.” His timely narratives deal with a range of subjects, thoughtfully presented to engage readers in discourse and personal inner dialogue – always prodding without browbeating to evoke readers’ thoughts and sensitivities to events germane to our daily lives.

Rich includes with each essay a song that he selects and streams to correspond with his weekly topic.

Here is “It’s the Weekend” from July 10:

A verse from Harlem Renaissance author, Langston Hughes:

“Because my mouth is wide with laughter,

And my throat is deep with song,

You do not think I suffer after,

I have held my pain so long?

Because my mouth is wide with laughter,

You do not hear my inner cry?

Because my feet are gay with dancing,

You do not know I die?”

Last Friday, the rightful owners of the Black Hills in South Dakota were arrested for having the temerity to protest our European-American president’s celebration and fireworks while suggesting his magnificent tenure in office was worthy of his face being added to Mt. Rushmore to join other European-American interlopers from the rapacious past of America. This the latest affront to Native Americans beginning in the 16th century as today’s song addresses.

It was a Dutch agent in the late 1600s who paid the Chief of the Delaware Indian tribe the paltry sum of $24 worth of trade goods to chase the natives from their Manhattan Island homeland. In Trumpian terms…a great art of the deal like no one’s ever seen before…except our native tribes did…again and again.

Now, four centuries later, it is our system of haves and have-nots, with the haves being largely European-Americans, who continue to obscenely profit from their assaults on our earth’s ability to recover from the Industrial Age’s gluttonous burning of fossil fuels to enhance their bank accounts in the Make American Great Again economy that is destroying our water, our forests and their inhabitants, our glaciers, our polar ice caps…our very lives with the least of us (people of color and others anchored in poverty) being sacrificed first, so the wealthy elite can live without the protesters, rabble-rousers, anarchists, Confederate statue-destroyers, leftists, and so forth, as they enjoy the largesse produced largely by the back-breaking labor of the least of us….Enough is Enough!

As for our indigenous nations in North America…after the “Trail of Tears” and the massacres of the “Indian Wars,” fewer than 250,000 of the original estimation 10 to 15 million of our Native Americans are left…”You do not hear my inner cry?…You do not know I die?”

“Now they’re gone, they’re gone, they’re really gone.” Just because of the tint of skin.
We must come together and quit this effort of winning by dividing. To paraphrase a junior senator from Illinois several years ago…”There is not a white America; there is not a black America; there is not a red America…We are all a United America.”
Now, as always…

Randy Newman’s Great Nations of Europe. Enjoy.

By Rich Miller 7.10.20