Tag: BPP

Internal Medicine: The Necessity of Art (Part II)

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Art, Community, Culture, TraumaLeave a comment

 

Art in her many forms are necessary for the human spirit to prevail. The transcendence of survival, fear and necessity, even when all are depicted, is the very act of overcoming the hopelessness of mortality, humanity’s primal fear.

 

5171f811-5bf1-4a29-a8c8-87928c88b3a1
Details “Jerusalem” by Sohei Nishino: Exhibition at SFMOMA

 

Of the many medicines of this world, art heals. The embrace of art can purge toxins from the body and psyche, lifting off the weight of darkness, the heaviness of loss and the anxiety of despair. It gives us space in the world, whether self-defined, or etched into the mind’s eye through the gaze.

 

img_1534
Detail of “Traumanauts” carting of the dead: OMCA’s Black Panthers’ Exhibit

 

Just as witnessing pain and violence leave marks that we dutifully label trauma, art illuminates the surface and reveals the interior in unique ways that are impossible to measure, yet fully possesses unmistakable corrective powers.

 

img_1583
“Not Guilty” the post-verdict reunion: Abraham Solomon, 1859: The Getty

The NRA’s Convenient Gun-Reform Policy

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Community, Culture, HistoryLeave a comment

 

Let us recall the words of abolitionist Lloyd Garrison in this process of truth telling: “ I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.”

I just learned that the NRA’s current stance on gun reform is political far beyond the degree of merely upholding the Constitutional rights of Americans. In a landmark decision, led and advocated for by Ronald Regan, Don Mulford and the NRA, California changed the open carry gun law that had been in place under the Mulford Act in 1967. They did this only after the Black Panther Party started carrying guns in self-defense. By changing the law, the NRA worked strategically with state officials to limit the group’s ability to defend themselves. The Mulford Act changed the laws in order to directly disenfranchise Black American Activists, who were being lynched with impunity in the United States. In many ways, the Black Lives Matter Movement is a continuation of the work they started. (No guns, however.)

Read the history that the NRA has obfuscated from the public for the past five decades in The Atlantic’s “The Secret History of Guns.”

img_1545

Plus, here’s a photo of the only confiscated gun returned to the Black Panther Party by the Oakland Police. From the current OMCA Exhibit All the Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50

Well, why not regulate and uphold gun laws in this country so that we are all safer?