Where do we go from here (this time)?
Where do we go from here? (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here-chaos-or-community; https://touro.instructure.com/files/239265/download?download_frd=1)
Well did we get anywhere last time?
The more I think about it,
the more I wonder if integration was ever successful.
Certainly it was in many practical and symbolic ways.
Nobody in my generation forward can imagine bathrooms and water fountains separated by race or legally and forcibly requiring black people to be in separate areas, diners, cafeterias without confounding sadness and delayed rage that anyone would think that is even contemplatable in today’s time -
But more to the point…we grew up with black kids in our classes, side by side, unlike my mother.
And so we knew them. At least some of us did, for a little while -
But we still never lived near each other, and I never understood them like they understood me nonetheless.
Then this and these spaces, these ways of being, these assumptions of locations and behaviors and misunderstandings and alienization of knowing who each other are and what we are and are not capable of…
Becomes to seem like the natural order of things.
We are such creatures of habit sometimes…
The cruelty it allows and expands sometimes seems as if it should make Jesus take his forgiveness away from us.
The windows which we collect our dreams along with our hallucinations to peer into are the imaginations we hold dear and unique to us,
yet with universal glimpses,
while those that are created for their own benefit through comfort and begging restriction from wholeness…
from our true being,
flawed and seeping with raw and tender glamour -
for we all fall and know it when we do -
This is the nightmare which so many cling to so close as to need it to breathe.
They see it as deliverance;
They see it as a song they once knew
and no longer have a throat to sound out
what their heart once fluttered with.
Does the sky bend when we die, or is our brain receiving the last flood of electrical impulses just before ceasing its last neuronal activity?
Perhaps this is what it means for a generation to die,
a nation to collapse,
a global spirit to shift,
a broken, shattered illusion
of blood and skin
torn from bones
stacked of other families underneath.
Respect is earned they say, not freely given.
How do we earn the respect of those we’ve trampled for ages,
and those we’re currently beating down for that comfort
so desired like perennial sugar and honey - all illusions?
Transgender people were just recognized as existing a few years ago. Now they are systematically being expected to acknowledge that they shouldn’t be here.
We’re in the next age of bleeding to see where we end up.
It all depends on everyone who allows themselves to see clearly,
to speak freely on what they saw,
and to keep going.
Whatever happens to those people,
the others are the ones allowing silence -
allowing trampling -
even giddy about killing our children.
They must be stopped.
But it will be messy.
This is what makes one believe and curse God all in the same moment.
But in it will come moments, glimpses, of the best we have to offer not knowing where we’ll end up.
Where do we go from here? We’ll figure it out together,
We who find each other
In the cool, dark midst.