Feeling Ferguson

Yesterday a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict an officer for the killing of an unarmed black youth. Personally, I am tired of innocent people dying at the hands of the people that are supposed to protect and SERVE. I am left to conclude, after countless news stories, that the profession of police officer is attractive to narcissistic and power-hungry people with pent up anger and aggression. Generally. I know there are people that go into the field hoping to protect and serve ALL and generalizations and stereotypes are what got us into this mess, so let's drop them all together.

A white police man killed an unarmed black teenager. That is the problem and it's a real one. There is a lack of understanding on our part, as white people, about what it is like to be a black person. The anger and pain that the black community is feeling isn't just because of Michael Brown's death. It seems simplistic to say, but the looting, the burning, the overwhelming anger comes from the culmination of mistreatment of blacks at the hands of whites - violent deaths and traumatic shaming, among others. The pain of their ancestors is passed down through the generations, and added to it are the oppressive stories of people they know personally, and the fact that it doesn't seem to stop. They are a terrorized people, never knowing when life might turn on them. Will it be while walking through their own neighborhood, into a store, sitting in school?

I don't profess to be any kind of expert on race relations. What I do know a lot of, though, is love and humanity and how we feebly, often poorly, attempt to share a world with people that we don't completely understand. It is unfortunate that our shared humanity doesn't take precedent when we look at each other. We see differences before we see similarities, we judge right and wrong based on our culture, religious beliefs and upbringing - we forget our shared humanity. But rather than wrap the sad Ferguson outcome in a ton of philosophy, I'd like to share where my heart is today.

• I'm sad that a mother lost her son.
• I am tired of police brutality.
• And that too often the two go together.
• The cycle of violence needs to stop and all parties are ultimately responsible for the laws they break and crimes they perpetrate. If our system can't hold a person responsible for their crime, karma will. Something will.
• I can feel the grief of an entire group of people, not because I am immersed in it, but because I can imagine what the continued oppression would do to my kids and I if we lived it.
• Imagination doesn't compare to living it.
• What can I do? What can you do? What can we do?
• I don't want to read another race relation quote from MLK, Jr., Nelson Mandela or Maya Angelou on Facebook that isn't followed by a personal statement. Yes, they are posted by well-intended white people. Let's stop having hard conversations using quotes in place of words and lets speak our own minds. How does Ferguson make YOU feel?
• Facebook can make anything of importance seem one dimensional and artificial. 
• I think it's hard for white people to speak about black lives - we don't want to piss people off by saying the wrong thing. We really don't have a clue what to say, but until we admit we don't know (our regurgitated quotes can't save us from our ignorance), we won't learn and we can't grow.
• I'm not claiming that I know that Facebook is where the conversation stops for people posting quotes. Hopefully, we white people are sitting down in groups asking how we can create change - formulating a plan and putting it into action. Maybe we are sitting our children down and telling them the story of Trayvon and Michael and the countless others and how unfortunate it is to be black in this country. Maybe we ask them what they can do to create change.
• What can I do? For the love of all people, what can I do?
• I must find a way to meet anger with compassion, brutality with understanding (grasping at grace with this one), fear with love, and hate with courage.
• It will be hard for me to ever understand why Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. I don't care to debate the so-called reasons, they will never convince me. How can a man shoot a child that posed no threat to said man's life? I don't know, but I do know that the breed of man that could do such a thing is deeply misguided - which is unfortunate for all of us. That said, I can have compassion for his upbringing/learned hate and fear, but in our society a person pays for their criminal misconduct in prison. He will not be and that is not okay.
• I can't expect our nation, with its undercurrent of fear, to make changes immediately when faced with the fallout of an obvious wrong action. I do expect that we will not let Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin's memories fade when cable news finds another top story. 
• Their deaths have led us to a potential pulse point in history - a very important place in time when we have an opportunity to learn, grow and change. We must raise our consciousness around race, violence and its effects in order to turn the tide. We have to admit that we all fail our human family when we turn the other way, judge a child, or allow violent and abusive behavior to continue. 
• We fail our children when we don't listen to them or believe them. The bullying, shaming and abuse perpetrated against our children in school, at home, out in the community - it happens and it is real. We need to stop these hate-driven crimes if we see them. *every child = our child
• Our personal history of pain gets in the way of everything we do and until we work on peace and love within, we will be incapable of sharing it. This sounds like a platitude, but it is the greatest and most profound spiritual teaching that I know of. Where you find anger, fear, insecurity you will find aggression, judgement and unhealthy competition, all of which lead back to Ferguson.
• I don't have the magic fix for the issues in Ferguson or Florida or Michigan. The best I can do is be love, see our oneness, act in the face of brutality and care for my community. I can also vote, write letters to politicians, organize a peaceful protest or vigil and use my voice.

As a nation, we have a lot of things backwards and there are many things I would like to change. I will say, though, my greatest wish would be to live in a country that truly embraces a life of freedom and justice for all. It is our unalienable right, right?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.