Renegades

I have lost count how many times I’ve said in these LONG six months how much 2020 has fucking sucked at an absolutely biblical level.

In the midst of a historic international pandemic, you’d be hard pressed to predict anything happening to put that narrative on the back burner somehow.

Then officer Derek Chauvin said “hold my beer!”

Little did any of us know that our country was going to explode into this inferno of sadness, anger, rage, and disillusion.

But make no mistake…this is our generation’s Civil Rights Movement.

In the past two weeks, I’ve run the gamut of emotions over the murder of George Floyd and it being the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to racial injustice, systematic racism itself, and police brutality.  Thankfully, I am not alone.

Never in my lifetime have I seen, with such furor, such frustration, such passion, people of all creeds, races, ages, sexual orientations, etc., rise up and stand for our black friends, family members, colleagues, and strangers.  Enough is enough.

These historic events have forced me, and other white people like me, to really dig down and look at what has been a very privileged life for us.  Personally, it hit me like a gut-punch how long I’ve sat on the sidelines avoiding conflict to a fault, avoiding uncomfortable questions and conversations, and betraying an entire race by being silent.

No. Fucking. More.

I refuse, for a single breath longer, to sit idly by while others are oppressed, taken advantage of, ignored, looked down on, and devalued.

I was raised by parents who are both liberal in their thinking in comparison to what sometimes can be the North Country norm when it comes to race.  I distinctly remember asking questions about black people, gay people, and disabled people when I was little, and every single time my parent’s answer was the same.

“They are people, just like us.”

My father was a correction officer for my entire adult life up until last year.  He worked at Upstate Correctional Facility in Malone.  It was the first prison in New York State to be built as a supermax prison.  These prisons are designated for the “worst of the worst.”

It’s well-documented that the prison system is a cesspool of racism and abuse.  A place where whites can exert power over Blacks, Latinos, and others who are viewed as sub-human.

But my father and others like him were in the minority adhering to that “they are people, just like us” rationale.  He treated inmates, regardless of their crimes, with respect in his daily interactions with them.  He didn’t befriend them, or let his guard down, but he also didn’t demean them.  In return, he received their respect as well, to the point where I absolutely feel if any sort of uprising or violence occurred there, he’d be spared and protected.

That’s the thing to take away here.  If you treat someone with respect, you get it back, you get an ally.  If you shit on someone for 400 years, that shit is bound to hit the fan, and you create an enemy.  The sad part is it, we’ve been here before.  That shit hit the fan in the 60s, OVER THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES!  It’s 55 years later and we are still fighting the same fight.

We cannot go on like this.

That is why you see rage, rioting, looting, protest, and discord.  Condemn it all you like, it is the language of the oppressed and unheard.  Whites threw tea overboard in Boston,  we fought a war to throw off the chains of England, and we intervene in other countries because of human rights violations. But we blanch when its our own country where those violations are happening to our own citizens.

When we chant “BLACK LIVES MATTER” we’re met with a misguided response.  “All lives matter.”  I am PERPETUALLY confused why people think when we say BLM that we are somehow saying “your life doesn’t matter” or “white lives don’t matter”.  All lives do matter, but not all lives have had their necks knelt on for four centuries.  All lives matter literally can’t exist until we start valuing black life the same as others.  So far, we’ve failed MISERABLY in this regard.

Those of us standing up to systematic racism, are renegades.  We will no longer sit idly by while people and government continue to willfully devalue other people.  We are seeing how things work when there is no moral compass at the top, and standing up and fighting for change is the only choice.

We need to use our voice, our ballots, and our hearts to make our world better for everyone in it.  The fact that I need to hold a sign at a protest that says “legalize being black” should not have to happen.

But I’ll do it until we fucking get there.