As we watch yet another American city looted, cars set on fire, businesses gutted, one thought beats a constant in my spirit: black lives matter. My heart cries out, all lives matter!
Every life is precious, even when that person is not a model citizen. We need to get over ourselves. Bad dude or not, they matter; knucklehead or not, each one has value, thug or not; using, selling drugs or not; behind on child support or not, the list goes on, every life matters. When they aren’t following the laws of the land, or even Him, all lives matter to the Father in heaven who created each of us. If His eye is on the sparrow, (Matt. 10:29) and it is, don’t think for a second it is not also on every one of us He created. He has a plan and a purpose for every one of us, no matter how off track we are at the moment.
As I sit in my comfortable home, mothers across this country weep for sons who are no more. Sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, cousins, sons and daughters weep. How can I not cry with them?
Dead sons are not a new phenomenon. Throughout history, women have wept for lost sons. However, this travesty playing out day after day, month after month, in HD, as sons die not on far-flung battlefields, but at the hands of the police in the very community where they live, this is a cause for national mourning.
These are America’s sons, not some oppressed foreigner in a strange, strange land; these are America’s sons and the sooner we grasp this as a nation, the better we will all be.
The sheer frequency of unexplainable, disturbing, gut-wrenching deaths of African-American men and boys indicate something still terribly, terribly amiss in this country, 150 years after the end of the Civil War.
This deeply disturbing pattern of abuse and disregard for life, which is triggering the riots and demonstrations in cities across America, is systemic, widespread, a cancer eating away at all we believe we hold dear. It only now is being revealed, with the widespread use of cell phone videos and the advent of police body and dash cams.
No, disregard for life is not new, but so ingrained in some whose sworn duty it is to protect and serve, they don’t even recognize it for the evil that it is. Familiarity breads contempt, the old saying goes. Another bad guy bites the dust, c’est la vie, or coldly, for far too many who think of themselves as good people: good riddance.
Few of us have the ability to get inside the mind of those rioting. But I understand hopelessness; and I see the hopelessness, poverty, disenfranchisement and nothing-to-lose anger.
I recognize the blatant injustice occurring day in and day out in this country, America, the shining star, at one time revered around the world as the land of the free and the brave, reduced to the land of the have and the have not. We have become one more country in crises where far too many are oppressed, a place where simply being stopped by the police can end your life.
It is sickening.
Smug in our ivory towers, secure in who we are and what we have, safe in our comfortable homes, shall we turn off the news, shake our heads and sit down to our fine meal? How many black men, young and not so young have to die at the hands of the police before we say enough is enough and push back our chairs and say no more?
How long are we willing to not address what needs to be addressed? The frequency of what is happening alone begs that something be done.
Why wait until chaos reigns to institute change?
Make no mistake, the violence going down in the city of the week, Baltimore, is not isolated to that city or to a Ferguson. Wilmington too simmers, a pot on the verge of boiling.
Before the glass breaks, the streets fill with angry black youth and smoke billows from yet another Wilmington tragedy, what are we doing about our very own Freddy Grays, right here in our beautiful city?
