Revealed to Us, Later

Twice we’ve tried a cat.  Twice I became asphyxiated.  I put a good face on it till I was forced into our local health center in Beijing demanding they give me an asthma inhaler now, even though I didn’t have a prescription.  I can’t breathe, you see.   No more cats.  I don’t think dogs will end well, either.  Yesterday we set up the terrarium.  Today we’re bringing home a lizard.

The debate now centers around whether or not he (she?  - This will be revealed to us later in life, we’ve been told,) will eat yucky but manageable mealworms or if he will insist upon, less-controllable, more agile, hence notably more yucky live crickets.  One gal at PetCo is adamant.  But my older one has done her research and there are many voices out there that swear by a diet of mealworms and nothing but mealworms.  Attempts to discuss or expose away the fear of hopping crickets is not successful and today though we were resolved to go mealworms-only to-start, we were helped by another young lady who also kept a pet Gecko.  She insisted that mealworms by themselves, were just fine.  Two-points then to the Poughkeepsie PetCo for having not one but two passionate, professional young woman who knew their lizards.   One suspects that particular skillset isn’t easy to replace. 

Herbert Aptheker was a Marxist historian from Brooklyn and his work, which I hadn’t realized was a classic, “American Negro Slave Revolts” was recommended to me among a number of tiles, by my former high school teacher whom I’d recently reconnected with.   The myth of antebellum docility is unpacked, decade by decade to show that the rebellions of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey where simply two noteworthy examples of what was essential a constant state of rebellion and agitation.  Slaves consistently resisted slavery. 

Unanswered ponderables swirled: what would the American Revolution been like if the British had thought to offer the slaves in the Colonies their freedom during that war.? What a different “revolution” that would have been with Washington fighting a rearguard guerrilla war against slaves in armed rebellion.  Saint Domingue hadn’t yet become Haiti.  The British didn’t end the slave trade for another five decades till 1833, so they couldn’t expect to emancipate in one part of the empire and not have word reach Jamaica or Barbados.   No wonder then, this seemingly indelible martial quality to American life, the south, the hothouse where the police state was born of necessity and gestated.

Sunday, 06/14/20