My Heart is Broken

I have never had what I would call a true love, just one lousy marriage and other relationships I knew enough not to make permanent.  It is Valentine’s Day, a day for love, yet I am shaking. Saddened. My heart is broken. It has nothing to do my failed attempts at finding my soul mate.  What is breaking my heart is President Obama’s choice of an artist to portray his official portrait.

Kehinde Wiley is known for his two paintings depicting African American women holding a decapitated white women’s head.  One of the explanations is that he modeled his subjects on the classical European painting entitled:  “Judith beheading Holofernes”, a story in the Book of Judith where a beautiful woman seduces the general of an invading army, gets him drunk and decapitates him before he is able to confiscate and destroy her land.  Good for her!  It is imaginative and outrageous, but let’s be a bit more circumspect here: it is also racist. And our President chose this artist to paint his official portrait, a portrait of the first African American President of the United States who served two terms.

What does he leave in his wake?:  a permanent visual reminder of racial hatred and intolerance. He who had the ability in his seat of power to change race relations in this country left it the way he found it.

Broken.

President Trump spews hatred and intolerance.  His bigotry and prejudices are out there for all to see.  But no one can call him a hypocrite.  Still he is part of the problem, not the solution.

Since our leaders are inept and have the power, but not the wisdom or courage, to promote healing then it is up to us, We the People, to so.  We cannot do it on the scale of the leader of a superpower, but to paraphrase Mother Teresa, we can do “small things in great ways”.

Let’s begin now.

Let’s join together and lead this country.

Let’s join hands, hearts, voices and words and be the leaders our elected leaders cannot be.

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