I've been posting alot on my new pop philosophy page on Facebook, because I like the instant interaction and because I'm on there all day anyway. All posts are public over at Niqsanddimes so feel free to catch up and share.
I'll try to keep the blogspot updated. That said here is a recent post (composed on Facebook, but shared here):
As we talk about Baltimore and the rest of the nation. I really want folks to realize that the residents of these communities are not a "problem" to be solved. They are people. They are not at fault for the conditions that they have been living in. They did not ask for every house on the block to be boarded up, when there are homeless sleeping in the street. No amount of sagging pants and baggies of crack should be enough to blame these folks for a system they did not create. These are (at best) symptoms, or (at worst) traps to shift the blame to those suffering.
It is offensive to suggest that "if they just" went home, didn't make eye contact, didn't breathe, didn't be human or make mistakes, that somehow the system would disappear.
It is offensive, for Baltimore to have left that curfew up for another second after the main objectives of the moment were met. It is offensive and wrong to suggest that they cannot monitor their own communities regularly. I don't care what the crime rate says. I'm telling you what I know. People may not be doing everything right, but we have to stop looking at each other as broken beyond repair. We are people going through something, being constantly assaulted with neglect, hate, meddling, violence that we did not create. If you put any one in the same boat the same "ills" would crop up (and history has shown this to be true in the US with the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and the crop of eastern Europeans in the late 80s/90s).
What is sewn will be reaped. Its simple.
If people are cut off from hope and opportunity, if upward mobility is denied to them they are FORCED to wallow in the dust from which they were created. When we were meant to rise, to soar each according to their will and purpose. There is no infrastructure to support this for some folks, but there is a layer of society built on their rotting bones. Bones of the people in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, all across the nation. People of color, women, children, the poor, and any intersection of the former.
The violence should end, before we demand people clean their own wounds. Freddie Gray is gone. Because of violence he didn't create. All the names we call out are gone because of violence they didn't create. Cities have burned because of violence we didn't create. Because of what was done to us. All the thrown rocks and hidden hands won't make this untrue. Let us go in peace. Stop assaulting us. Stop making up reasons (liberal, conservative, well meaning or otherwise) to strip us of our humanity. Stop taking humanity away from yourself. Stop thinking we are being fixed by ire, by corrective gazes, by handouts followed by judgements or preceeded by pity. Give us our due. Give us our inheritance. Give us what we worked for and stored up. Give us what was stolen. Take hands off of it. Take hands off our equity. Take hands off of us. Stop stealing from us in the night and pretending to be for us in the day. Let us breathe.
Let us breathe.
