You are not a hashtag. You are not a trending topic on Twitter. You are not the criminal records they will show on TV. You are not an overused article title of a white cop shooting a black man. You are not the excuses of those police officers, with their knees on your back and their abuse of power sending bullet after bullet into your body. You are not what they say you are.

You are a father. You are a son. You are a friend, an uncle, a neighbor. Your name will be forgotten by the news anchors and the lawyers. But your impact will continue, imprinted on the path that is being paved for justice. The sound of your son sobbing out your name will bounce around in everyone's heads until they are far past uncomfortable. Your name chanted in the streets of Baton Rouge will keep the people who failed to keep you safe, awake until they cannot hear their own thoughts. You may no longer be in pain, but your wounds will not disappear anytime soon. You have made an impact. You have made the cries of justice so loud that they cannot and will not be ignored any longer. You are seeping into our walls. You are next in line at the grocery store. You are here. You are everywhere. You are inside everyone. You are making a change.

You do not know me. You would not know me. Our paths would never cross, and I will never be able to relate to you. I will never be selected for a random search; my race will never be a factor. The way I look will never spare a second glance in a high-class store. I have never seen real violence; I have never experienced anything more than a cop pulling over a Range Rover for speeding or rich kids getting busted with drugs. In places like mine, deaths like yours do not happen. I live in a make-believe world where the pictures on the news are just images on a screen. I never thought that I could reach through and touch you. You are real. People want to pretend you are not real. Like this is not happening.

I promise you that I will never again pretend that I did not know you. Because I knew you. We all knew you. You were everywhere. Just because we could not see you does not mean we did not know you. I will not speak over the voices of the people who matter most. I will stand beside them and I will stand next to them and I will be everywhere, and I will help them to stand up stronger and speak louder. Loud enough that it makes every single person in those make-believe worlds uncomfortable.

I am sorry. I am sorry because this will happen again. It will happen again and again until someone points their finger at the person with the power and not the person who is six feet under. There is no excuse. But we have seen this before: there is a video of an innocent man being murdered but he is a cop and they took an oath and we cannot punish them. They are a level above everyone else, and they use those pedestals to kick those who are already down. And not all cops are bad; there are plenty of cops who are doing just what they are meant to do: to protect us. Until we can see the ones who are not protecting all of us for what they are, we must assume all cops are bad. Those that the police choose not to protect are forced to protect themselves.

People, like the cop who murdered you, continue to rise higher and higher when their actions go without consequence. Their pedestal gets bigger, and they feel more and more like no one can touch them. Their God complex reacts dangerously with their own morals and internalized racism. We must pull them back down and snatch their pedestal from under their feet. They have to look you in the eyes and realize that they are not better than you. They are people. And when they pull the trigger, they become cold-blooded murderers.

I am so sorry.