A person's a person no matter how small - Dr SeussIt is early on a Tuesday morning and here I am typing away to you. I am confused. Confused by what happened in Ferguson, MO, confused about the national conversation, confused about everything.
You already know what has happened in Ferguson, MO. You already know what happened in Cleveland. If you are looking for answers here, you aren't going to get them from me. I'm afraid all I have are more questions.
A questions that has yet to be asked in this mess is; why is a black person's life only worth anything if they are killed by a white person?
I don't see protests for injustice when there is black on black crime. Why do we need to classify it as black on black crime? Why do we need to classify it? A human being took the life of another human being, yet we aren't protesting in the street. Outside of the police shootings crime happens daily, in those places you only talk about but rarely go. There are hundreds of thousands of cases that are open right now that are more violent, heinous, and disturbing than what happened in Ferguson, MO. Still no one is protesting about those because people write it off as that the victims were just victims of their environment.
What is happening in Ferguson has been smoldering for years, and this shooting was the lightning rod that lit the powder keg. There isn't just perceived injustice in this city, it is real. I have seen it with my own eyes. I lived not far from there when I lived the St. Louis area. I left there for two reasons, I missed home and I didn't like the racially charged atmosphere that was there. It was on both sides.
I had a friend who lived in Ferguson, I would visit her and we stopped at a Denny's in Florissant and you could hear people on one side talking about the crooked cops, and the cops on the other talking about at the <insert you favorite racial slur here>. White dudes who hated black dudes, black dudes that hated white dudes. This was back in 1999-2000. The most ridiculous thing I heard while living there was; if you were a black guy driving through Missouri, fill your car up in St. Louis and don't stop til Kansas City. It was crazy.
But what we are missing is that we need to stop meeting violence with violence.
Somewhere in this whole mess we stopped respecting human life. As a species we are a flawed bunch. We have contradictions that make no sense; but we also have each other. No matter what we think, a human was killed by another human. That is a tragedy. It always is. But I ask the question again; why does a black man's life only mean something if they are killed by a white man?
Dr. Seuss was right. We need to realize it.
