It was raining a little outside my window early this morning like the phone showed it would be. But I went downtown with my sign anyway because maybe it would stop even though the phone had blue rain coming out of little clouds all morning. There was an older Asian woman selling umbrellas out of a cart just outside where I came up from the subway. She can't speak English, but her grandchild may go to Penn or Dartmouth. I wasn't outside for five minutes, I hadn't even taken my sign out of the big plastic bag, when I gave in and headed back downstairs to the subway and home. The Asian woman held an umbrella over her head as she stood next to her cart.
 

I was gone almost two weeks.  Wyoming to see my daughter and three granddaughters. Then the death of a friend in Cleveland and there for the funeral. I was back on Chambers Street with the sign this morning. You wonder as you stand there why society doesn't do everything it can for kids. Everything at whatever expense. We say that kids are the future and all that. Then there shouldn't be a need for charter schools. We don't do everything. We don't go to the mat for kids.

from Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth:



'We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.' 
                                               

'My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.

So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.

I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this.' 
                       ―Tupac Shakur, Tupac: Resurrection 1971-1996

 June 16, 1904. Still noted. Bloomsday.