You teach me that some love stories are viscerally beautiful up until the very moment of their end, but that does not mean they are meant to last. They are meant to be experienced only as a precursor to the other things life has in store for us.
On June 6, the baby-boomer battles between left and right at a hallowed Long Island intersection collided with an outpour of younger people calling to end police brutality and systemic inequality. Over 250 peaceful protesters co-opted this battleground for a three-hour Black Lives Matter protest and unknowingly threw tradition by the wayside when nearly 100 of them crossed North Country Road — No Man’s Land — infiltrating the land held by the Patriots for nearly two decades.
As protests for George Floyd spread throughout the U.S., Salt Lake City, the quiet capital of Utah, has become boisterous with Black Lives Matter chants as another group of protestors demand justice for Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal, who was shot and killed by the Salt Lake City police.
The coronavirus swept the country, forcing me and almost everyone everywhere into quarantine – with shelter-at-home orders, remote learning for kindergarten-through-college classes and entire industries and small businesses shut down. I’m a creature of habit, but I’m adapting. Still, this change is different – scary, even – with health risks, uncertainty, rising death tolls and limited social contact with the outside world.
But life in lockdown has had one silver lining for the Taku family. It has forced my family – all six of us – to eat dinner together at the dining room table almost every night.
Irving and Neymar are similar in their diva personalities. They want all eyes on them and feed on the adulation of carrying their teams to victory. Their dribbling skills and flashy play draw crowds and their diminutive frames allow their agile, quick bodies to drift past opposing players with ease. But their lack of definitive success, mixed with their tendencies to showboat and reject teammates, make them luxury players who end up hurting their teams more than they help.
It is now brought to public memory that perhaps we are reentering The Gilded Age — an era marked by rapid prosperity, technological advancements and economic growth, its golden exterior of prosperity disguising the destitution within.
I remember sitting in my grandmother’s home in Jamaica, in the sweltering heat, confused as to why George Zimmerman was acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin.
I was twelve.
Since then, countless people have died at the hands of police — their killings preserved on dashcam or bystander video, while many others were never filmed.