It feels like the world is on fire. Words feel risky and dangerous right now but that is where I go to sort information, ease anxiety and honour emotions. I am afraid of saying the wrong thing no matter how well intentioned. The rage and grief are almost too much to speak to. This is an old story. A weary story whispered and shouted and imprinted and sobbed and ignored for way too long. A malevolent legacy passed from broken and brutalized backs and hearts to innocents. Imagine how you feel about your children – the overwhelming love and protective instinct you have for them. And then imagine having to warn and train your child, your blameless child, that this grievous weight is theirs to bear because no system, no society, no justice, no ally, has consistently and meaningfully stepped forward to lift it. Because this is more than a police issue. To concentrate all the blame on the police reduces this to a small and tidy conversation. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all of us could just point at the police and remove ourselves from the fire? Give ourselves a pass and not wonder how a little child, who knows no prejudice, grew up to be a person that could kill a man with a knee on his neck and his hand in his pocket, staring straight into a camera and ignoring the pleas for life. What kind of systems created and perpetuated that kind of arrogance and disregard for a human life? Who was looking the other way while that little boy became that kind of a man? And who continued to look away once they knew who he had become? Yes, if only we could just blame the police.
This year, seems like a reckoning born of blindness, complacency, complicity and blatant disregard. It started out benign and quickly metastasized into a revolution of illness, virus, injustice, sadness, poverty, rage, boredom, fear, desperation and death. Events since March have unearthed and exposed all the systems and policies that work, and all the abject failures. It has shown us the faces of bravery and suffering and has pointed clearly at those who have suffered more unjustly and who have had to be braver than the rest. You look away at your peril. Silence and denial and protestations of progress are a privilege we never could afford. 2020 is holding up a gargantuan mirror and forcing us to see that we’re not as pretty as we think we are.
In the poem, Servant of Servants by Robert Frost he says,…“I can see no way out but through”. We could cut and run. We could abdicate. We could leave it to the other guy. We could avert our eyes…again. But that has gone on long enough. Our brothers and sisters, justifiably, no longer have faith in us to do the right thing. For those who have been doing the work, it is a stinging rebuke. Where we are in 2020 should break our hearts. Not because of our own pain but because of the collective, unrelenting, unrelieved pain of those who have borne these burdens over and over, and still.
Brene Brown says, “Our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be brokenhearted”. We will never be the kind of ally we need to be if our hearts are not broken, not just by the knee placed on the life giving artery in George Floyd’s neck, but the knee placed on the justice, political, health care and education systems that deny equality and dignity to communities of color everywhere. Make no mistake. Pointing at systems is like pointing at the police. Systems are made up of people, people who do the right thing and people who don’t. People like us. We work together, live together, vote together and plan futures together. Systems exist because people support them and benefit from them, but, when they don’t benefit everyone we must care enough to examine and dismantle them.
The fact that this video did not surprise people of color should shame us. The fact that it collectively broke our hearts, is a reason for hope. People must now decide if they are brokenhearted enough to be wholehearted in how, and who, they love and fight for. Will a broken heart make us brave and resolute and supportive of only those systems and policies that benefit and protect everyone? Can we be courageous enough to speak up and stand alone with our whole heart when it matters, and when it might be to our detriment? I believe that people have been shocked and mobilized but this is not easy work and it could be a twelve round brawl. It will be work that needs to be sustained, and those with whom we fight cannot bear us getting weary. The last week has people moving into, or returning to encampments from which they may not easily be moved. As we try to sort through the stories of this week, our brain, in order to protect us and help us process information, looks for good guys and bad guys and who is right and who is wrong. It is up to us to remove ourselves from that survival mechanism to allow our heart to have a voice. This is not about protests and riots and looting and fires. It is 400 years of so much more. It is important enough to risk a pandemic to say, enough. A seething, grief stricken volcano has erupted, pulsing with power and rage. Right now the lava is burning its way through the streets with the desperate hope of changing the landscape. The prayer is, that when the heat dissipates, what remains is a rock solid base that can bear the weight of the rebuild. It is up to us now to educate ourselves with information beyond the news cycle, and show up brokenhearted, wholehearted and ready to work.
It’s 2020 and we’re late and unprepared, but it’s way past time.
Something to Shay 