Posts Tagged ‘equality’
Can’t Breathe
Anger boiling over in the form of roiling balls of flame with no visible public servants on hand to contain the rage as daytime turns into night makes for a disturbing meditation in the moments before nodding off to sleep.
It is hard to breathe through our masks.
It is hard to breathe through the smoke.
It is hard to breathe when being choked.
It is hard to contend with the fact that all I was going to do was breathe in our forest air yesterday and beam love to the world, yet the Pentagon needed to put military police on alert as protesters ignored curfew orders and ignited numerous new fires.
Morning turns the tide and reasonable people emerge with brooms and trash bags to pick up debris in an attempt to hasten the healing of the damage done overnight.
It’s an interesting dynamic to watch the venting of angst built up over multiple generations and centuries of time followed by the immediate effort to clean up the present damage which will actually require generations of repair to remedy.
How many years of treating people of color (and women and LGBTQ and homeless and impoverished and mentally impaired human beings) with equal respect to their white counterparts will be needed to complete healing that is the dream of healthy well-meaning communities of enlightened citizens of the world?
I’m not sure I can breathe that long.
.
.
We’re Humans
Sometimes I imagine that it’s possible a time will come when everyone will understand the same realities. I suspect the ultimate truth will have something to do with love and the fact that “we all do better when we all do better.” (Paul Wellstone quote)
With the recent run of media reliving the Apollo 11 moon landing fifty years ago, I’ve been enjoying the glimpses of the worldwide reaction over the accomplishment. During the subsequent promotional tour that NASA scheduled, the astronauts reported a common reaction from people of all the countries they visited.
The throngs of well-wishers weren’t just focused on what the astronauts did. The common chant was, “We did it!” It was commonly seen as something that humans did to escape the bonds of earth and set foot on a different celestial perch.
Here’s to a day when all humans finally realize we truly are one.
.
.
Relative Something 