girlonahalfshill

I’ve been silent on this. I’ve been aware of being too quiet. It’s not because I don’t care. I don’t have an “excuse.” I grew up in Sebastopol. I didn’t grow up around racial diversity and I didn’t even have a connection to my own diversity.

I woke up in 1999 when I learned about the tragic shooting of Amadou Diallo. I’ve never forgotten his name or his story. It is a large part of my dream to finish school and become a public defender. It is part of how I’ve raised my sons… And it’s a story that has never stopped being relevant. It wasn’t the beginning of any story. It’s just the point where I caught on…

As hard, as hard as it is to listen across the divides right now, as justified as we feel shutting one another out… I don’t think that’s how we get out of this folks. We share this country with one another. We can’t and shouldn’t even dream of the elimination of our others.

The only way out of this is through it and we don’t get to choose our fellow passengers for the trip. We are angry. We are hurt. Too, too many vulnerable people have paid a price that was far too high, that should have been more than enough to have bought and paid for understanding and empathy and justice and yet we are still HERE.

I think, I think from my privileged, limited vantage point – that we on the left are demanding that people face their ugliness… but that’s rarely how people grow. That’s not how they expand, not as a group, not en masse. We are calling them ugly and asking them to own their shame. It seems like such a small price to pay for the destruction that has been wrought on generations. And we feel responsible and complicit and we are trying to distance ourselves from all of that. So we hate those who hate.

We need compassion.

It isn’t the antithesis of being fed up. We need to be fed up enough to dig deeply into our compassion for one another. I think it’s the only way.