Waking Up.

What are you waking up to? How will you make today different? I’d been plotting each day of the quarantine in this way.  What would I bake today?  What family game haven’t we pulled out yet?  What’s the next book on my shelf?  When will I fit in time outside of caregiving to do my work?  Silly, silly things.  

And then – crash – we pivoted.  And it wasn’t because of the pandemic.  It wasn’t because of the way it has ravaged our black and brown people the most.  That wasn’t enough apparently.  That was sadly only hitting a 2 or 3 on the scale of attention.  The nation had a reckoning when we watched a video of a police officer killing George Floyd. For nine minutes we watched, we heard, we screamed, we cried as the police took his life.  And then we starting waking up.

In the past two weeks I’ve gained new perspectives and I will continue to listen, to grow and to be a better neighbor, friend, and human.   I see the racism inherent in me as a white woman.  I see the seed of racism in me questioning why black boys keep killing black boys.  If generations of my blood were given the message of less than for 400+ years, I’d probably believe it.  I’d think less of hurting my own brothers and sisters.  I’d never believe I had a fighting chance.  If every time I pulled myself out of poverty, out of a racist belief system, out of violence, and out of less than - someone came and knocked me down ten more flights – I would get up a hell of a lot slower or not at all.  I would start to take from those down with me because if I didn’t matter then they didn’t matter.  It’s not a hard concept to understand when I actually stop to hear it, to feel it.  To know it’s not just that one kid trying to fight a hard life, its generations and generations of people trying to fight a hard life. Thank you to Kim Jones and countless more BIPOC who are sharing your voice and lived experience.

NOW I get why there are still gun shots happening in my neighborhood at the same time that thousands are downtown protesting for Black Lives Matter.  I get why more police on the streets will never stop the shots from happening.  I see the slavery that is mass incarceration.  We’ve done this all wrong.  It all starts to come to life and it sucks that it has taken me and my ancestors so long to even start to wake up, to listen, to learn, and to take action.

So far my actions have been to dig in and see my bias, to see where my programming is wrong.  I’m doing my best to change and to root it out by speaking this uncomfortable truth, to do the very least to read books and articles to re-educate myself, to listen to podcasts and watch documentaries about both the hard truths and the beautiful stories of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in Ameria. I’m talking to my children about all of it.  I’m sitting with the mantra of no justice, no peace.  I’m joining and donating in ways I don’t need a pat on the back for.  There is no option.  We are in this.  Keep bringing the hard stuff 2020 because the fire needs to get even hotter as we churn.