I am touched that you’re earnestly digging into the truths of my life, the mysteries I didn’t begin to untangle until Death was already sitting on my chest those last days.  I really am.  You seem to be proceeding without rancor, which is the most touching part of this whole exercise.  I deserve a little rancor, more than a little, to be honest, that much is beyond dispute.  I’m grateful for the dispassion, is all I’m saying.  

Of course, I have a few questions on this day set aside for platitudes about the great progress in Civil Rights, and, even though I am an eternally grinning skeleton with no further stake in the world of the living and nothing but time on my hands now, I need to ask them.  

Do you really suppose writing these things is the best use of your time?  I ask this because you are going to be a senior citizen soon and time does not go on forever.   Do you really imagine anyone gives a rat’s cuisse about the abandoned dreams of a dead guy from a mostly murdered family?  

Is there some redeeming message here for the reader in this Book of Irv or is this just more attempted self-therapy for you?  To put it more bluntly, is there a compelling reason you’re working for free on yet another project you seem to believe in?  

I don’t ask this just to be arch, it’s a serious question.  You’re a talented and sensitive person, you’ve always been that way.  But you’ve lived in the world long enough to realize that nobody but your grandmother, your proud parents and one or two friends really give a shit about that.  You’re a good listener sometimes, that’s wonderful, I applaud you for it. But, really,  beyond making the person you’re listening to feel listened to, what is the point?

Since we’re celebrating the life of the slain Civil Rights leader today, let’s take a quick look at the world before and after.  A very quick look, and then you’d better get back to trying to make order of this chaos in here, a much better use of your time at the moment than channeling even my profound musings.

For whatever reason, I didn’t find time or need to mention to you and your sister that, in addition to my work at the Human Relations Unit at the Board of Ed, which you know all about, I was a speaker on behalf of school integration after Brown v. Board of Education.  

You know all about that case, decided two years before you were born, old man, and how it supposedly struck down the pernicious fiction of “separate but equal” in education.  You taught in some of those Harlem shit holes almost fifty years after the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be desegragated with “all deliberate speed.”   Remember that one white kid who was there for a couple of weeks in 1991?  How Miss June said “look, Whitey, we integrated now!”?  

Anyway, I was part of a speakers’ board who was sent to speak to parents and teachers about school integration.   This was in New York City, in the late nineteen fifties.  The first time I spoke the audience received me like I was a Jew preaching Communism and miscegenation in Alabama.   They assaulted me verbally and started to charge the stage, they were already throwing shit at me. On my way out the back I took a rancid tuna fish sandwich to the face.  I had to throw away that tie and sports jacket.   We barely got out of there in one piece.  Your mother could not stop crying for days afterwards.  

After that they sent two cops with me, they stood on either side of the little podium where I told these frightened racists that we were entering a new era of social justice.   You were a baby at the time.  It’s one of the things I’m sorry we never got to talk about.  I know your sister was surprised when you mentioned it to her the other day.  I may be dead, but I still hear things.

Anyway, fast forward almost sixty years and we have Bernie Sanders about to speak at a rally someplace, Chicago maybe.  He’s disrupted by two earnest but very shrill idiots.  They burst on to the stage demanding the right to be heard so they can preach to the converted.  “Black lives matter!”, they begin to scream.  They are hysterical about it.  And they are right to be hysterical.  

Almost fifty years after the immortal Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is slaughtered, the same people who are denying that enormous changes in earth’s climate are taking place are snarling that blacks should shut up about being killed by police in disproportionate numbers.   What about all the blacks killed by blacks, they ask.   That’s their answer.  How can you complain about cops shooting blacks when blacks shoot blacks?  This is the level of discourse in our great democracy.  

You studied law, you know more about the devilishness of the details than most people.  You can set it out plainly, I’m sure.  But I ask you again: what is the fucking point?  Malcolm X was right when he told Alex Haley about progress in race relations.  You remember the image: pulling a deep thrust knife an inch out of somebody’s back and calling it progress is far from actually removing the knife and operating to repair the wound.  

God knows I don’t mean to stomp on the burst balloons of your idealism, far from it.  The world needs people of faith, belief, a strong vision of justice, of healing the world.  I don’t blame you and your sister for taking that lesson from what I taught you.  It was the best of what I taught you, the seek justice for the powerless part.  I wouldn’t wish it on you, though.  

Anyway, you have to get back to your cleaning and I’m just about out of strength at the moment.  Talking from beyond the grave is not as easy as you may think.  Speak while you can, that’s my advice.  And thanks for thinking of me.