Protests are legal and at times necessary. Rioting and looting are not.
But we do need to understand the pent up hurt that can often drive extreme behavior.
The Preamble to our Constitution: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
So who are the beneficiaries of “a more perfect Union”?
Excerpts from “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes:
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek –
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
~~~~~~
The millions who have nothing for our pay –
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again –
The land that never has been yet –
And yet must be – the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine – the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME –
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
~~~~~~
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
We live in a socially complex society with: income disparity, structural racism, white privilege and implicit bias. The result? Hurt. Deep hurt.
We can see it, but we can’t feel that hurt.
Or can we? Maybe we can, though for most of us it won’t be felt with the multi-generational depth that exists for people of color. I initially was inclined to say, “All Lives Matter”. But I was then jolted by memories of my personal experiences of being the “social outcast” throughout my childhood. I was raised in a blue collar family, my father a long haul truck driver and my mother a waitress, neither graduating from high school. During my era of grade and middle school I was taught that I was “upper lower-class”. Growing up with that stigma and being the “outsider”, I was never part of the “privileged” class but always a social outcast and shunned by many other students. I can say from firsthand experience that there can be resentment and underlying that resentment are scars of deep pain. But for me that stigma only goes back one generation. For blacks it goes back many generations, back to the time their ancestors were brought here and sold as slaves.
And I have seen firsthand, racism in action. Many years ago I moved from Montana with my ex husband to his small farm in Tennessee. His sister owned a substantially larger spread adjacent to my husband’s farm, complete with a pillared mansion and black workers. That fall I enrolled my son in the area public school where he was the only white student. White students throughout that area attended private schools. My sister-in-law advised me that she would pay for my son’s tuition so he could attend a private school. I pointedly let her know that money was not the issue. And there were cross burnings not far from our home. Of course, we quickly moved back to Montana.
Maybe by understanding the deeply rooted pain and still generations later, the stigma for people of color that continues to afflict them via income disparity, structural racism whereby it’s embedded in employment selection processes and housing opportunities, and driven by implicit bias where we choose to associate with those who are just like us, we can get beyond the racial divide and not just understand but feel their hurt.
Excerpts from President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address ~ Nov. 19, 1863: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure…It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Yes, government is of, by and for us, all of us, The People of the United States of America.
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