Can our children still believe in us? Can we?
"A lot of people refuse to do things because they don’t want to go naked, don’t want to go without guarantee. But that’s what’s got to happen. You go naked until you die." - Nikki Giovanni
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I think we bled out.
This can be the only reason our hearts no longer beat when we witness the pain of others. So, here we are with our souls existing between two worlds, straddling between being alive and dead inside.
What do we call it when we ignore the ache that invades our soul when someone loses their life? Are the numbers so large that they make us numb and forget that each one is a person- that most are children? Is it our comfort or our fear that silences our voices? What prevents us from shouting at the top of our lungs, as we see children leaving this earth in the tens, hundreds, and thousands?
Is it that only the children we birthed, we have held, we have touched—the ones who look like us—are the ones we care about?
Did we forget when children are taken from this earth, it is what this world could have been that is also stolen? Gone are stories, futures, families, celebrations and possibilities. Gone are the giggles, the joy and the dreams that we needed so desperately on this Earth. Gone are the eyes carrying so much hope.
They were the ones who still believed in us and wanted to save us from ourselves. They were the ones who still believed that they could change an unfeeling world before it changed them.
I am the one who lies awake in tears, wondering, “How can I so deeply miss these children I never met?”
My brain tries to convince me it's impossible, yet my body reminds me it's impossible not to feel them.
Have we decided not to hear voices because we cannot understand the words they speak? Can we not value their bodies because we have never embraced them? Can we not connect with souls that exist in different lands?
Or it is that brutal truth that we very much can, but we have chosen not to.
We have chosen not to do, feel, change, grow, love, honor, protect, and fight.
So we become complacent with a world where our newest ancestors were so young that they could be held in our arms and never learned to speak. They waited for our words to turn into action. We just watched. And the justice we were supposed to bring never came.
They now look at us from the afterlife and wonder why we are weeping.
What have you done to keep alive the dream of liberation?
What have you done to protect the children?
Not just the ones born to you, but all the children?
- Toni Cade Bambara
They've been taken from us in so many schools across the US, in the deserts of Sudan, in the villages of Congo, among the olive trees in Palestine, and in the rocky terrain surrounding the Rio Grande.
Yet there is no wailing in our homes, no screaming in our streets, only deafening silence and the gaping hole where our humanity once lived.
We must have bled out. We are alive but our bodies are now rotting with the stench of shame of a people who value comfort more than children.
We lost the courage to speak up for them. We were too afraid to speak against the pillars that we uphold and make us believe power is not in human life but rather in imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy.
In doing so, we hold many unaccountable—those hungry for more, those who cannot see beyond themselves, those who believe different is wrong and those who have never believed in the collective.
And over time, our eyes widen to see our worst enemy staring back at us in the mirror—we who now only know how to take for ourselves and have long forgotten how to give from ourselves.
We must not let it continue. Even if we don’t survive.
We must not let them continue to take us hostage, asking us to take apathy in exchange for our greatest power—
Love.
“How do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It’s about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances”
- Toni Morrison
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