Inhale...

So we get angry and we lift our loud voices and our reinforced righteousness. We denounce our oppressors and our detractors because they don’t recognize our value.

Stop

We walk until our feet are tired, our voices hoarse and cracking, our tear-stained faces numbed and frozen in grimaced anguish because another one of our sons, brothers, husbands, men was erased and the sum total of his life- a statistic, or a horrifying stereotype, or at worst the punch-line of someone’s sick joke.

Stop

We spray the general consciousness with our blogs, our epitaphs, our vitriol, our understanding, our devil’s advocacy, our prayers, our songs, our collective grief, our hopelessness, our unyielding sadness, our overwhelming fear.

Stop

Just Stop

Because while we sit and spin and stew and feed into the pervasiveness of these new injustices, while we answer the rally cry to ‘burn shit down’ and block the streets, and show them that ‘we’re not going to take this anymore’ with our orderly disorder and our yearning for equality, the world keeps turning, unshaken by this temporary flutter in the signal.

We follow the far left or far right pundits salivating for their fifteen minutes, none of them really giving a true damn about genuine change because the discord pads their wallets.

Get ready

All this while the real enemy sits in complacent slumber unmoved by the picket signs, the disenfranchised chants, the thickening wall of despair that lines the streets we march.

They relish in our conquered mindsets, our hollow threats, the knowledge that there really isn’t a simple solution. Fix racism! Fix injustice! Fix brutality! Fix the system! Fix, fix, fix…how? Or better yet, why? Acrimony is good for their economy. Those who truly understand, know to rise above the fray. Those who don’t remain distracted by the small battles they feverishly adopt in hopes that a win will somehow change their station. Silence isn’t necessarily a betrayal or consent. Silence can be the conservation of wasted energy that can be channeled into significant action.

Get ready

The true battle is so much larger than black and white. The few cowardly men who swing their batons, and brandish their guns, and hide their stink and rotting biases behind a state sanctioned license to kill are not the enemy. They are a symptom of what is wrong- with ALL OF US. Disrespectful, Uncivilized, Impatient, Greedy, Fickle, Dangerous, Damaged. The difference between them and us is that they can freely exorcize their demons on a public that is seemingly unable to protect itself. The real enemies though, are the people who give those cowardly few the power and the autonomy to kill indiscriminately, without remorse, without regard, without consequence.

Go

We are so busy trying to collectively hold on to the small freedoms we believe this life entitles us that we don’t realize our lives matter far more than we’ve been shouting. They can’t hear us or more to the point they can’t understand us. We’re not speaking the same language. The dialect of the powerful is far different from that of the powerless. And this is where the shift has to happen.

Go

We have to stop pointing fingers just as much as we have to stop laying down to be run over. We have to start speaking the same language as the powerful. Then, and only then can we institute REAL change. We have to stop letting false prophets speak for us, stop letting them divide us, stop letting them distract us. We have to get a firm and unyielding grasp on what is truly important and we have to stop letting others corrupt our knowledge of what is truth and what is fiction. We can’t let someone with an agenda convince us of what to believe. We have to seek the truth for ourselves and we have to stop marching blindly behind those who are hell-bent on leading us off a cliff. We have to open our eyes and determine our paths for ourselves.

The violent loss of any life comes with heartbreak. That is not what this is about.

We have to stop and look at what’s going on around us. We have to stop getting distracted. Get ready to do things that are necessary to bring about real and lasting change. Get ready to walk away from people and things that don’t serve our well-being. 

Go! Act now. 

We have to become the law-makers so that we can change the laws that don’t serve or protect us. We have to become the enforcers of those laws so we know that that enforcement is just and fair and free of malice. We have to become the pundits- free of tainted, self-serving motives. We have to become the decision makers, the policy influencers, the big money, the game-changers, taste-dictators, the doctors, lawyers, teachers, the truly righteous band of humanity that out number the putrid among us who infect goodness with their cynicism and bile.

This true and lasting change won’t happen in the midst of our fit of inconsolable anger and it most certainly won’t happen while we exercise our civil disobedience. We need to rage, cry, shout, pray- we need to expel the paralyzing grief, but then we have to act so that these days don’t become the liner notes to another tragic story. Most importantly though, we have to become and remain unified. Not only in times of peril to march and make big noise, but always. To uplift each other and support the generations coming behind us. We have to clear a path so that their way isn’t littered with the bodies of more unrealized promise.

I AM TIRED OF HOLDING MY BREATH

#STOPBEINGDISTRACTED #IWANTTOEXHALE