My mother was 17 when she visited my grandfather in the hospital his clothes were soaked with blood. It’s bad enough that the capitalist system has opposed Blacks acquiring assets, but the murder of Black men compounds the loss, depriving their survivors of assets these victims might have accrued. About a dozen rabbits, a source of protein, are strung up. My only photo is of him posing in front of a car. My grandfather, a laborer, supplemented the family’s food supply by hunting. There was an inquest, and the white man went free. One version of the murder was that my grandfather knocked on the wrong door.

My grandfather Mack Hopkins was murdered by a white man who said my grandfather had threatened him with a knife. Like many Black southern families, there exist cold cases. The first phase of my family’s Tennessee history was marked by abandonment, murder, mental illness and alcoholism. Mary moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my family lived from the late 1800s to 1941 during the first phase of their inhabiting the state a younger generation returned to Tennessee in the early 1990s. She must have been a resistor because her daughter, Mary Coleman, would weep when recounting the lashes Lucy received during her involuntary entrapment. See the full statement from the Science and Security Board on the 2018 time of the Doomsday Clock.My family’s history in North America begins in North Carolina, where an ancestor, Lucy Hardiman, was enslaved. They can seize the opportunity to make a safer and saner world. They can demand action to reduce the existential threat of nuclear war and unchecked climate change.

They can insist on facts, and discount nonsense. Leaders react when citizens insist they do so, and citizens around the world can use the power of the internet to improve the long-term prospects of their children and grandchildren. But there is a flip side to the abuse of social media. The world has seen the threat posed by the misuse of information technology and witnessed the vulnerability of democracies to disinformation. The opportunity to reduce the danger is equally clear. The warning the Science and Security Board now sends is clear, the danger obvious and imminent. It is two minutes to midnight, but the Doomsday Clock has ticked away from midnight in the past, and during the next year, the world can again move it further from apocalypse. The failure of world leaders to address the largest threats to humanity’s future is lamentable-but that failure can be reversed.

The story of civilization complete set