You are such an interesting writer. I always understand what you are getting at even if I don’t travel the same path.

To start, you make some assumptions about the way many white folks assess things — and why we do — that are just not the case. I can’t speak for the likes of that buffoon Donald Trump or the moron’s lackey Lindsay Graham, but they are the extreme institutional examples of useless white masculinity that we would all be well served to put out to pasture, just let them die off.

Reparations are so loaded for Aftican-American activists, I know there is supposed to be a point in there somewhere about the dignity of black folks in this country, and acknowledgement that — without the extraordinary contributions of people who were enslaved and forced to do so — “we the people” would simply not exist.

So I’m going to speak to my truth and this is in no way intended to diminish your well articulated case: much as black Americans are every bit as entitled to all the perks and prosperity of being Americans as anyone, banging the drum about reparations is about as constructive as the Jews demanding to be compensated retroactively by neo-Nazis for the Holocaust. Good luck with that. They can do it, it is righteous and just, but nothing is going to come of it in any quantifiable way that will make any difference in anyone’s life today, and it won’t make what their ancestors went through — or the horrific circumstances of their deaths — any different or any better. Compensation now will not change the fact that that happened and some sad souls were responsible for it. And don’t get me started on the Native Americans.

Reparations won’t make it NOT have happened to human beings. And the white Americans who are capable of grasping and seeking their own salvation for the acts of their ancestors have and are doing so. Those who are incapable, what do you care? They’re not going to get on board anyway, and we are all just waiting for them to go the way of the dinosaur.

And this notion of being “made whole” by reparations, that baffles me. It assumes that anyone is ever made whole on this side of the vast divine. I don’t even think that is what we are here for. The Buddhist in me simply attempts to stay “wholly present” in the moment I am in, as that is the only place from which I can create — or change — the future. I can’t go back and change my experience of being raped and brutalized — and the people that did that are accountable for their own reckoning with God as they know it — but giving them real estate in my mind doesn’t change the facts of what happened. We forgive to save ourselves, not our perpetrators. And I don’t really spend a lot of time on it anymore. What I do spend time on is participating in any way I can in insuring that that is not permitted to happen in my life — or anyone else’s if I can help it — again.

So I really don’t know what you seek to achieve by sticking with the “reparations” meme, let alone diving deeper into it. You surely aren’t driving home a point to anyone who hasn’t already gotten the memo, and — it seems to me — the best way to transcend the horrors of the past, to find salvation and redemption for all concerned, to do better in the future.

Cause, man, we are all just works in progress. None of us will ever be a master work in “wholeness” out here in the physical world, we are all, by definition, flawed — some more deeply than others. The single best we can strive for is to be committedly exactly where we are with out eyes wide open, acting in total awareness.

You spend a lot of time deep in the weeds on the sordid, painful details of a past you cannot change when there’s so much out here that you might actually be able to change for the better.

And frankly, the fact that Kamala Harris is even part of our national discourse makes me think that a whole lot of people — black, white and otherwise — are working from some higher ground in the present moment. Just sayin’…