Memorial Day 2022. Tomorrow's "Day Off" should be ... sacred. There is more than enough sacrifice to memorialize this year. 🕯🤬🕯 No one in my birth family alive today has ever served in armed conflict. My father Charles, a life-long Californian, born in an orange grove, served in The Aleutians during WWII. I never asked him about those years, before and after he met and married my mother; Jackie'd left Missouri to work in an L.A. munitions factory. No.1 - I discovered this ”Alaska" memento buried in my dad's belongings. No.2 - He’d also kept a sheaf of photographs of other men on the base, along with his first camera. 🎞📷🎞 Both Charles and Jackie were life-long activists for racial, economic, social and immigrant justice. I remember them working for Jesse Jackson’s first run for the presidency. My dad died five days before Barack Obama announced his candidacy, my mother six months later, just four weeks shy of that Democratic convention. ⏳💪⌛️ No. 3 - Did my parents ever contemplate art as activism? That neither of them ever saw the images of their only daughter — work that now tours the world and exists in hardback as “Mom” — is a loss I sense whenever someone asks me, “How does it feel?” to see myself portrayed in ways that shock, disrupt and challenge our norms and expectations. 🔥📙🔥 How does it feel? What *does* it take to actually shock, disrupt and challenge Americans today? Dare we mythologize a fairytale past of brave armed sacrifice with flags-waving parades and yet another rollout of Hollywood war-lore? 💰⚖️💰 Thank you — to the defenseless children, teachers, shoppers, dancers, worshippers, yes, the list goes on and on and on ... for giving it up for their guns. 💔⚰️💔 I expect to be a casualty; I pray not to be a liability. How do we turn this around?