Unless you live in a cave, you have probably seen the news recently. We, as a country, are destroying ourselves. I mean forget about nuclear threats and terrorist attacks from other countries, we have acts of terrorism from our own people happening on our own soil. The KKK says they are making a "comeback" like high-waisted shorts or Nautica. A black man is found hung from a tree in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Black men are dying by the day at the hands of police officers. Two children are caught in the crossfire of gang violence in Minneapolis, one of them didn't make it. Videos of violent interactions with police officers pop up on social media feeds every few minutes. America, what is happening to us?!
It feels like everything is moving forward. Technology and its speedy advancement never ceases to amaze me. We are building better energy sources, and forms of transportation. We have the cloud and all of it's magnificent capabilities. We have iPads and iPhones, electric cars and smart TVs. It seems that we are in such an advanced time, but in reality we haven't moved forward socially in a while. In fact, it feels like we have seriously moved backwards. We are in the era of rights for the GLBT community which feels amazing and progressive but yet we still don't have equality of races and ethnicities. Racism is still so prevalent, and it has seriously infiltrated our justice system.
Our law enforcement system, our police officers, are still in drug war mode. They are so militarized and stuck in the mistake we call the war on drugs. Welcome to the business of mass incarceration. Unfortunately the training that officers go through still has the remnants of this militarization and they are trained to shoot first, then figure out what's going on. On top of this, the laws in place don't hold them accountable so we're left with a police force acting more like soldiers in a war zone than protectors of the people and the law. We need to push for the laws to be changed so that officers can be held accountable for their actions.
There has been this pain in my chest that won't go away. Every time I watch the news or even go on social media it gets a little worse for a while. Sometimes it turns into tears, sometimes it doesn't. Over and over in my head I ask why are we so broken? How can we possibly ever be okay again? What will it take?
We need to come together. Forget the gangs, forget who you worship or where you are from, we need to come together across the divides and fight for justice. Justice for black lives, for Muslim lives, and for Mexican lives. We need to fight for gay lives and transgender lives. We need to fight for the lives of women. We need to fight for the lives threatened by this scary world. We just have to keep pushing forward and putting our country back together. It's not going to happen overnight but change WILL happen.
