“Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.” |  Ironically, the old Testament quote is lost:  “Like the coronavirus crisis, the riots following George Floyd’s death stemmed not from treacherous unknowns but from the Trump Administration’s failure to learn from even the most recent past.”

it’s perverse | “To speak of violence done by black people without uttering so much as a word about the violence done to them is perverse. And by violence, I don’t mean merely that of police brutality. I mean the structural violence that flies under the radar of most white folks but which has created the broader conditions in black communities against which those who live there are now rebelling.” – CounterPunch

OP-ED: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | “Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge” – The Los Angeles Times

two sided business card used in Georgia.

a different Georgia | Happened onto this article in today’s New York Times: “On the Black Sea, Georgia rebrands as a holiday haven from the pandemic.” – We have fond memories of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. In less settled times, we were fortunate enough to have been selected for an assignment with the International Center for Journalists in Georgia. On a July day in 2001, as we were boarding a plane to begin the journey there, the gate attendant at O’Hare Airport asked, “Where’s Georgia?”

It was 9/11/2001 and many in the US were insulated and isolated from happenings around the world. For 90 days, we lived in a Khrushchev-style apartment in Tbilisi; the walls along the stairs to the apartment were pockmarked with bullet holes — reminders of the 1989 Soviet battle with Georgians struggling for independence. Because everything is on youtube; we found this video to show what living in this kind of housing.  Remember this video is nearly 17 years after we were there.

And how Tbilisi has changed; take a look at this 2028 Forbes article: “Berlin Is Out, Tbilisi Is In: Georgia’s Capital Is This Year’s Most Exciting City.”

“America’s response to coronavirus pandemic | … ‘incomprehensibly incoherent,’ says historian who studied the 1918 flu” – The New York Times