The way forward

This year, this global pandemic has us on our knees at the same time. Whether in prayer or surrender, we’re all calling on the goodness of each other, on a greater power outside of us and within us, for the health and well-being of a loved one, for an income to feed our children, to pay our bills, for our small businesses to withstand this inevitably devastating economic collapse.

Communities have shown up for each other; state and local governments protected and provided for their constituents – even against the backlash from some; people in urban, rural, and suburban areas joined the national uprising for Black lives and against police violence. We didn’t show up perfect. We didn’t show up as experts. We just showed up. We proved our capacity to care for and love our neighbor as ourselves.

Going forward, we must hold onto those images of who we are and continue to show up for, provide for, stand with, and protect each other. Because there are other images.

Domestic violence. Community violence. State violence.

Police killings of unarmed Black people – including children: 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 22-year-old John Crawford, 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, 46-year-old George Floyd, and countless others, some whose names we don’t know. May we never forget them.

And then there are grown White men who call themselves Proud Boys attacking random people on the street and burning a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign they’d stolen from a church. Those images were reminiscent of White men generations before them slaughtering the Indigenous peoples of this land, hunting down enslaved Africans who dared to escape to freedom, and during Jim Crow pulling Black men, women, and children out of their homes and burning them.

I’m reminded, though, that even as I’ve had to unlearn the lies and propaganda taught to me via official US history and cultural fabrications, so many are now on the path of unlearning, and relearning the truth about our collective history.

In the United States, we are 331 million. A fraction – about 20 percent – showed in the recent general election that they have no interest in truth. And that’s OK, truly. Because 250 million of us sent a message. I believe even a non-vote was not a vote for Trump: It was a statement that we as a people have to be better about hearing the voices of those who have gone far too long unheard, particularly those who resist the labels – progressive, liberal, conservative, right-wing, left-wing, Democrat, Republican – placed on them.

It’s really not complicated y’all: We all need to feel safe, to be safe; we all need quality food and clean water; shelter; clothing – to have our basic needs met.

Excerpted: ‘2020 Has Shown Us the Way Forward’

Commondreams.org