H does a bit of reflecterating

Tuesday morning, Drew and I awoke early to head into Detroit that we might wait in line to see Rosa Parks lying in repose at the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History. After having read articles about people waiting in line for seven hours in DC (to see the first woman to lie in repose in the Capital's rotunda - boo ya!) we were expecting a similar wait. I had a back-pack with water, a cheese sandwich and apples, GRE study tools, a book, my mp3 player, my swiss army knife, a flare gun, a small tent, enough quinine to anti-malarial-ize 2/3 of sub-Saharan Africa, a small gas cooking range, and a spare tire. We were only in line for about an hour. And Starbucks was there with free coffee for all. Don't give me that shit about the company being evil. Your argument sucks.

For being what it was (waiting in a line to see a dead civil rights leader) it was fun. There was the usual comradery one finds in large, sympathetic groups (it was sort of cold, it was early, we were fearful of rain, we all felt indebted to the woman), and one woman even cut us in line which only elicited a large laugh from me and the woman in line behind us. There isn't much to say about actually seeing Mrs. Parks, other than that she looked like a dead person. I did mist up a bit as I stopped at her casket, though. Back outside, there was the actual bus on which she sat, roped off. A contingent of Windsor police-men stood vigil and visitors and news people stood about. One man asked Drew if he was English. He responded that no, he was not from England. The man said, "Oh, I was just wondering because you look like one of those English Beatles." Later on, walking down Cass, a panhandler exclaimed that Drew looked just like the reincarnation of John F Kennedy. At no point did anyone liken me to Jackie K. or Marylin, or even Yoko (understandably).

Wednesday, I awoke early - yet again - to head back into Detroit to take the GRE. It didn't suck nearly as much as I thought it would, though my math score, as predicted, was pretty low. the test works in such a way that if you answer a question correctly, the next question will be more difficult. Conversely, if you answer a question incorrectly, the next question will be easier. It's trying to find your skill level and meet your needs (smart fucking test). I knew I wasn't doing too well on the math section when the question that came up asked me to determine whether column a was greater than column b or if they were equal and column a was 2+2, column b was 4 and I took three minutes to determine that the question could not be answered due to a lack of information. It's alright, though. I more or less killed the verbal section.

Meanwhile, as I took the GRE, Mrs. Parks' funeral got under way and proceeded for over five hours, the audience being addressed by more or less every single person ever. Jennifer Granholm, Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, John Conyers, Jesse Jackson, Reverend T.D. Jakes, Al Sharpton, Reverend Bernice King, Minister Farakhan, John Kerry, Kwame Kilpatrick, and approximately 83 other people. At one point I went to my room to take a nap for a few hours, and when I emerged the funeral was still going strong. I believe at one point, news cameras caught Cornell West leaving. At least it looked like West. Most of the US Senate was there. And apparently Japan sent two planes full of roses, which is better than two planes full of a lot of other things (A-bombs, for instance).

Taking into consideration the light that was shed on racial stratification as a result of Hurricane Katrina's fall-out, and the general state of the world (earthquakes, hurricanes, riots in Paris) it seems now is a great time to seriously address issues of racial injustice in the US. I don't have much hope that anything more will be seriously resolved, but the mood is right. I don't know nothing about birthing no babies, I'm just saying.