A Police State of Mind

Among the tragedies that take place on a daily basis, not much breaks a human like the loss of innocent life. The past month has broken the hearts, the minds, the spirit of people in a way that no single innocent life could. As Americans, we were raised to believe that there are people in place to protect us. We were given the understanding that when all else fails, when nothing but sunrayed silhouettes stand between a teenager and a demon wielding a .45 handgun with the desire to splatter the breath from your lungs, laws made by men billowing promises near campaign coffers could save you, or at least give murderers what murderers deserve. We are witnessing the fever pitch of a decade of police militarization, of black humans being routinely gunned down by police, of protest being made to look lawless.

The voice inside me that insists that justice will be served has fallen silent the way doctors fall silent when tumors grow larger than the hope one can harbor. We are experiencing the broken stare of empty eyed humans unable to articulate and understand any of the sadness that has come coursing through our collective veins as our nights are haunted with hungry shouts and whispers of words like "I can't breath" and "no indictment".

I could go on to retell stories of what put America in this dire and scathing predicament, but you, as well as well as every American, have heard these stories and have chosen a lens in which to attempt to understand and justify these unfortunate events.

Fire now fills the streets of St. Louis, New York, Cleveland over the haplessness that every Black human must feel to a degree right now. People still cling to the hope that peaceful protests and education will wash racial tolerance over the eyes of the ignorant in our country as Mike Brown's blood was allowed to wash the sidewalk for four hours.

Trayvon Martin's peaceful protests over the summer were a nice soundbite for news networks, but it didn't do a damned thing for Black America beyond maintaining the perception that they remained a people violent enough to flood the local news byline, but a bit too docile to do anything about how raw a deal our society has given them. The Black Community has perpetually been a people forgotten when pertinent matters like Kim Kardashian or the The Walking Dead arose.

 

So many are focusing on the audacity of looting, on the racial subtelties of calling these humans animals, on whether Brown or Martin or Garner deserved to die. This drivel shows only the remorseless justification White news networks have massaged into unthoughtful eyes. We do not attempt to vilify Native Americans who fought men in uniforms, gunning them into genocide, so why do we, as a people make concessions for those in power destroying a people that we stole from Africa hundreds of years ago? We must remove ourselves from the present moment, be suspended in the history of right now, and fix the mistakes of our fathers, our brothers, ourselves.

People say the system is broken, that somewhere down the line we lost our way as people. I whole heartedly disagree. This path of control, of exploitation, of massaging news stories to obtain a reaction from the ignorant is well worn, and has been walked on by those in power since our ancestors bore our nationhood from the blood of Cherokee, of Apache, of African.

Should one allow the human spirit to be put to sleep by the tears sprung from destructive people doing destructive things?  The path to love an acceptance from those who have chosen hatred is never an easy path, but it is one that must be stampeded upon. Society must turn its back on yesterday, forget that millionaires in the media and Congress have forsaken Black America, and must rise through conversation, rise through peaceful protests, rise through the glimmer in our eyes that shine notions like You will never break humanity's indomitable spirit. 

Just a thought.