Minneapolis is burning and with it, our collective soul, straight into hell via that proverbial hand basket.
I defer in my ruminations and response.
I hate the news for precisely this reason.
My editing application is indicating that “hate” is a word taken rather harshly. Might I try a more diplomatic or softened term? I’m smirking now. HATE is the perfect descriptor as I ponder the irony.
I grapple with my seeming apathy. Is it irresponsible to forego staying abreast in an attempt to escape the depravity and continual derisiveness?
I defer in my ruminations and response.
But alas, Social Media is our connection these days. Long-distance family and friends, remote work, and Pandemics. It isn’t long before the news reaches me despite my attempted oblivion.
A grown man, calls out to his momma in his final breaths as he lays prone and pinned, dying in the street. And while I can’t bring myself to look at the video, I read the words. There is a visceral pain in my chest. It swells and chokes its way into my throat, audibly pushing its way through my teeth. It comes out in a gasp, taking my breath from me too.
“I want my mommy.” I know I’ve uttered those words even as an adult—the universal love of our mothers delivering us in our moment of despair.
Cutoff by the momentary absence of respiration, the despair finds another path, and I weep.
I defer in my ruminations and response.
There are protests and calls to action. Our apathy subject to judgment.
There is even a company-wide communication from an influential leader in the generations-old family empire rooted in Atlanta, Georgia. A white woman, most assuredly of some level of material comfort, compelled to share her personal story of an African American son in law and multiracial grandchildren and the impact of this more recent tragedy for them. I would call it courageous, but is it? I am a Senior Manager in this same company, having experienced a modicum of success and yes, a white woman. How easily does courage come to those without the soul-crushing experience of relentless obstacles? But I recognize and appreciate the outreach for what it was; her story meant to be a segue to tools and resources (being true to her Human Resources role), and a myriad of ways to take action to support and help prevent such outrageous injustices in the future.
I peruse the many links of causes, campaigns, and lists of actionable items, arresting any judgment of my apathy. And yet, something doesn’t feel right about it in my gut. It feels paltry, trite, condescending. Will it only perpetuate a mentality of “us” and “them.” How would it even be received? Am I going to grandstand my actions? That particularly feels wrong, for me at least.
Recent events are only a long list of many. How many cities have burned over not decades, but centuries – how many souls violently taken from us. This global scourge has been with us for eons, albeit this nation adds a peculiar twist with generations tied inexorably together quite literally in our physical manifestations and institutionalized. A nation built on the back of that coerced, insidious, ancestral relationship.
I defer in my ruminations and response. Not out of apathy, but out of a desire to get it right. No, not even that is correct. Out of a desire to impact in a way that resonates with me. It doesn’t have to be right. It only has to be honest, earnest.
I have always connected to the power of the written word. That is the only place I know to start, with the power of my own pen. In the honesty and transparency of my own story, my own self-examination.
I could tell the story of an overtly racist grandpa with his grimace inducing jokes or accounts of a great, gray grandmother, her ruminations of “That God Damned Lincoln…” and reinvoked delusions of Antebellum southern life. I could relate a much later discovered story of a Mississippi River steamboat confiscated by Union forces after its lent support to the Confederate cause.
I could relate a more recent decade when my grandfather passed, and an elderly black woman was hired to help keep house for my aging grandmother. This woman was older than my grandmother. She was a very slight, quiet woman with beautiful skin and the greenest eyes I had ever seen. I believe it was my father that informed most curiously that this woman was highly educated, with a Master’s Degree. In what, I can’t remember. I do remember wondering why she was reduced to keeping house for a living, and why at her age? Most striking of all was her downward cast gaze when anyone in the household addressed her. I remember feeling shame and embarrassment at that moment. I remember wanting to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “Don’t you dare defer to anyone in this household!” “You are more educated than anyone standing in this room!” I kept my silence. What did I know, I was just a dumb teenager, and this wasn’t my home.
This is not text from a history book or some fictional novel. This is my familial ancestry in the American South…it is our history. One I ruminate upon when racial injustice rears it’s ugly head as it has again in this past week.
It serves as a reminder of what I choose not to be and why I have no desire to live in the South. The undeniable history, it lingers and is palpable. Not that any locale is free from injustices, but if tolerance and respect are more the order of the day, then that is where and who I choose to be.
I could say this is your fight, and I stand in solidarity with you. But somehow, it still smacks of “us” and “them.” This fight belongs to us all.
It doesn’t go unnoticed that today, Tesla launched two American astronauts into space on their way to the International Space Station. I was born the year of the March from Selma to Montgomery. Four years later was the first Moon Landing. I remember my mother taking my tiny toddler hand and leading me outside to show me the Moon. “Men are standing on that Moon at this very moment,” she exclaimed. So much promise for the future of mankind. We find ourselves here again, and it begs the question, what lessons will we extract this time?
I don’t exactly know what it is I’ll do to engage the fight. Whatever it might be will likely be quiet and unremarkable.
The only change I really know to affect is within myself. It is within all of our selves. One individual at a time, if need be or in strides, uplifting each other.