omicheese

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Big challenges

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Everybody raise a glass to activist Opal Lee, one of the driving forces behind how we even got a Juneteenth in the first place.

Born Opal Flake in 1926 Texas, her home burned down when she was a small child and the family moved to Fort Worth. In 1939 the family purchased a home in a south side Fort Worth neighborhood --the first Black family to do so, which didn't sit well with some of the neighbors, and after only a few weeks an angry mob burned the house down. Despite these dual childhood traumas, Opal graduated from high school in 1943, and then eventually from Wiley College in 1953. She took a job teaching at an elementary school in Fort Worth, married fellow educator Dale Lee, and ultimately earned a Master's in counseling in 1968, from the North Texas State University (today the University of North Texas). She retired from her career in education in 1977 at the age of 51... and was clearly just getting started.

Beginning with a post-retirement career supervising a local food bank and its adjacent 13-acre farm, expanding it to a 33,000 sq. foot facility that today serves upwards of 500 families a day. More recently she also founded Transform 1012 N. Main Street, a coalition of Fort Worth area nonprofits and arts organizations aiming to reconstruct a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into the Fred Rouse Arts Center (named for a Black man who was lynched by a Fort Worth mob in 1921). But Lee's greatest passion was always aimed toward preservation of local Black history, leading into the founding of the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society. It was from this starting point that June 19th began to be more widely acknowledged and celebrated as a yearly event. Each year Lee and other members of the society made a point of walking two and a half miles, symbolically covering the number of years between the formal end of enslavement (i.e., the Emancipation Proclamation) and the time most Texans found out about it.

In 2016, now at the age of 89, Lee took the advice of the society to "go bigger," and walked from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. (a distance of roughly 1,360 miles), taking more than five months to complete and collecting enthusiastic signatures along the way, in support of the premise of at last elevating Juneteenth to the status of a national holiday. On June 17, 2021, Lee was present at the White House when then-President Joe Biden signed the bill officially marking Juneteenth as an annual federal holiday. Today Lee is the oldest living member of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation (NJOF), and is both a board member --and Honorary Chair-- of the National Juneteenth Museum. She was named by the Dallas Morning News as 2021's "Unsung Hero of the Pandemic," has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2024 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This past year, Habitat For Humanity built and gifted Opal a new house on the very Fort Worth lot where a racist mob burned down her family's home 85 years prior.

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NEVER GIVE UP

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Inktober Day 3 - Path

What happens when an angel and a demon cross paths with a witch?

Vehicular manslaughter

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I appreciate The Empire Strikes Back for being the only time I can think of when a character just shot their enemy as soon as they saw them without pausing or having a dramatic moment beforehand.

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I hate it when you take a disappointing sip of water, like bitch you’re supposed to be cool and refreshing, not like mild boring sludge harvested from purgatory by disappointment itself

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every moment of your life, from birth to death, constantly, while you aren't looking, there's some kind of weird shapes just moving around in the ocean. and the shapes are eating eachother sometimes too. and they might even dig holes. and all of this is happening during everything else that's going on. like think about the most important moment in your life. the thing that shaped you as a person. the entire time that was happening, far away, deep in the ocean, where no human has ever seen, there was some kind of wet sack with a weird protrusion flailing about in the water. maybe it even grabbed a fish. who knows. i don't. just think about that for a bit

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For me this isn't even about empathy or sympathy (though there's value in those as well), it is just straight-up a human rights thing. Once you have decided that there is *any* category of human that can be treated as less-than-human you've said that humanity is conditional, and so are the rights that come with it. You've already lost, you've granted the fascists their point because *you agree with them* that some people don't deserve to be treated like humans.

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You ever eat a piece of fruit so good, you remember it for the rest of your life?

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Shout out to characters who want to be used. Shout out to characters who are so desperate to be worth something that they'll endure anything. Shout out to characters who build their entire self worth around being useful, being a tool. Shout out to characters who don't care how they are treated, as long as someone pays them any attention at all

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[omicheese]

peace and love on Earth..

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The real difference between McCoy and Kirk is that when Spock turns into an unskipable cutscene McCoy is frantically mashing every button while Kirk is enjoying the view

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David Rodriguez Tovar. "The Thrill, The Fear, The Hope"

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only together