On Baltimore

Weeks like this one can be hard on us tender hearted folk. Watching the 24 hour news cycle with coverage of the earthquakes in Nepal, people sleeping outside because they're terrified of being buried alive under the rubble of collapsing buildings, the coverage of the Nepalese people digging out their neighbors with their bare hands, the coverage of a man who was grievously injured while in police custody and his subsequent death in Baltimore, the coverage of his family in mourning, the coverage of an entire community of disenfranchised people rising up and showing the world the symptoms of their anger and their pain...well, it can tend to hit us tender hearted folk right in the gut. It makes us catatonic in our grief for the entire world. It makes us want to do nothing more than sit all day with our big feelings and have someone else bring us a drink because it seems like the only thing to be done.

Because we don't know what to do with our grief, we sit around and watch the world burn and we watch the fallout. We watch people we love, whose opinions we respect and value, condemn the rioting and the looting in Baltimore as if that's the only conversation to be had. We watch as it seems like our communities are content to roast marshmallows around the fires of our brethren as if their grief, their pain, their exclusion doesn't matter because Baltimore is aflame and they did it to themselves.

I long for a world that doesn't just discuss the symptoms of the deep rooted illness of systemic racism. I long for a world that seeks color blind justice. I long for a world that recognizes that justice does not look like our current system. I long for a world that recognizes that we are trapped within the cogs of a system that continues to churn out death, pain, grief, poverty, inequality and injustice for all. I long for a world that can think critically about how we go forth together and change the conversation. I long desperately for a world that seeks to eliminate the trapdoors, which inevitably open under the poor, the black, the immigrant and the uneducated. More than anything else, I long for a world that is no longer content with scapegoats and damage control. I long for my daughter to see a community that prays to have their hearts and their eyes opened before anyone else has to die. I long for my daughter to be apart of a community that recognizes that most police officers are serving their communities the best way they know how but they, too, are victims of an injustice system that does not educate and support them. That they, too, are victims of a system that perpetuates a culture of racism and violence and that sometimes they become entrenched in upholding its tenets without even realizing it. I wish for my daughter to belong to a community that is no longer us vs. them and one where public servants really are encouraged to serve their communities instead of imprisoning them.

My wish last summer after Ferguson was that we would stop talking in circles about who is at fault and we would stop telling our brothers and sisters that their perceptions can't possibly be reality because we don't experience the same reality. Today, almost 10 months later, my wish remains the same.