Strange Fruit Poem by Bert Bell

Strange Fruit

If you listen carefully to the lyrics of Billy Holiday's version
of the Abel Meeropol song, "Strange Fruit, " you will
realise it is a protest song about the lynching of African Americans
in the Southern United States.Black victims are portrayed
as "strange fruit, " as their dead bodies hang from trees, rotting
in the sun, swaying to and fro in the wind, and being eaten by crows.

Lynching was a method of social and racial control meant
to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into
an inferior racial caste position. They became widely practiced
in the Southern United States from roughly 1877, the end of
post-civil war reconstruction, through 1950, which was not
that long ago, and they have left a very dark stain on the face
of an otherwise great nation.The lynching may have stopped,
but the diabolical racism is still shamefully prevalent.

Americans are brainwashed from kindergarten to old age
to believe that America is the greatest nation on earth.It is not.
It is anything but.A man walked into a Subway restaurant
in the United States the other day with two holstered handguns
and a bazooka strapped to his body.That's right; a bazooka,
a rocket-propelled anti-tank weapon capable of horrific acts
of destruction.

There is not another country in the civilized world where a man
could do this with impunity.This would not have happened
during the Obama years, but in Donald Trump's America, it seems,
anything goes, and this semi-literate president supports white
supremacists and spreads division and hatred on a regular basis,
especially toward people of colour.

What mystifies me most about America today is how everyday
Americans seem blinded to the reality that is destroying
American Democracy.Nothing much has changed since Billy
Holiday sang "Strange Fruit, " and the ever-increasing demise
of the once great American Empire should be blatantly obvious
to everyone, but astonishingly, it seems not to be.

How can anyone not be troubled by the gun laws in the US and
the never-ending mass murders at schools, Mosques, Synagogues,
and even Las Vegas parking lots? Today, there are more than
644,000 active concealed-carry permit holders in the state of Virginia
alone.The question is, why? And why do peace-loving Americans
need to own AR15s and AK47s? These are not hunting rifles.
They are weapons of war that do not belong in civilized societies.
In 2019,15,292 people were fatally shot in the United States, excluding
suicides.Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men
in America today.So, Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" is as relevant
today as it was when she first sang and recorded it in 1939.