Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Pastor V’s Shout-Outs by Vermon Pierre


Shout-out to:

1. Alabama Shakes and their recent album, Sound & Color. Man, that’s some good music making right there. It’s this blend of Gospel, Southern Rock, and Motown soul music that is truly unique. This blend doesn’t work well for some of the songs on here. But for the ones where it does work well (like “Don’t Want to Fight”) – whew wee!

2. Republica Empanada in downtown Mesa. I was part of panel on creative placemaking at the Mesa Arts Center on Monday night, and they had an after-party at Republica afterwards. Wow, those empandas were great! Like, seriously savory and tasty. I just might be willing to pack an extra set of clothes and my passport and make the trip all the way out to Mesa to try them out again.

3. Dave Pell and his article, “Control Balt Delete: Five Thoughts About Baltimore Organized Into a List Because the Last Thing Anyone Needs is Another Thought Piece About Baltimore.”
I appreciate articles that try to give a fuller analysis of current events. This is especially appreciated with the many recent racially-tinged events of the last year or so.

Pell notes, for example, that “kids living in violent neighborhoods don’t want fewer police and less protection, they want more of both” and that “the police in our most violent neighborhoods have a difficult, thankless, dangerous job that often fails to reward those who exhibit the best traits we could hope for.” Yes, yes, yes! At the same time, we must recognize that “where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides … The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.”

No comments: