Forgetting Orlando……..an antidote……Blackish

Ditto re: the opening of the last post. Damiano comes first.

This morning as I listened to the gruesome details of the rampaging truck in Nice, France on NPR a commentator mentioned its similarity to events in Orlando. For the life of me I couldn’t put my finger on just what tragedy had happened there but I knew there had been one and that it had been bad. Instead I remembered that my grandsons had just returned from Orlando a week before to visit Universal Studios.

Claudia reminded me about the dance club massacre and I decided that we had had so many recent horrors that they had crowded out the Pulse Nightclub. It has been a summer of ugly headlines.

I found an antidote to some of this summer’s ghastly events last night. Claudia and I have been trying out various television series for the past few years. Some have proven sufficiently binge worthy to watch and even to pay for. Last night it occurred to me to watch “Blackish.”

I’d first heard the program mentioned a couple years ago before it was anything more than some short “teasers” which had been put on you-tube to generate investor interest. Somehow after all the black white conflict it seemed I should be watching it. I had heard a few weeks ago that they had set comedy aside to portray how a prosperous black family would explain the events of Ferguson, Missouri to their children. On Netflix this was the latest episode that we could have watched without charge. But I wanted to meet the family first and catch up with it from the beginning of its 2014 season. We watched six in a row and the first three in particular had both Claudia and I roaring with laughter.

Its full of self deprecation by blacks about black life. As a white guy I couldn’t have pulled it off. As my Mother told me years ago as a Kansas girl she loved to make fun of Kansas but she hated it when outsiders did the same. In this case I’m grateful to the creators of “Blackish” for sharing their humor about their situation with me. I don’t know if I’ll watch the rest of the season but I will make a point of watching the recent Ferguson episode.

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