"Poor Fellow, My Country..."

Protester wearing shirt reading, "God is Love" - Minneapolis, Minnesota

It's time for a pause... 

As you know if you visit here with any regularity, I try to keep my focus on my message, that it's okay to be gay and that you can be happy - something I myself didn't believe until I was nearly 40 years old.  And, if you've ever looked to the right, or clicked on my profile, then you'll also know that I'm a person of color and what's happening in our country should worry you as much as it worries me.

I know exactly and personally how we arrived here...

Just yesterday, my son and I were on our front porch and as I was teaching him how to paint our front door, two police cruisers from a suburban police department pulled up on our street and as 6 uniformed white officers emerged, I felt afraid. Surely, they weren't coming for me... they were far outside of their jurisdiction, but why the show of force?  As I tried not to look, I couldn't help watching their movements reflected in the door glass as I kept painting and talking to my son. As it turned out, they were apparently delivering some personal effects to someone at a home across the street from ours.  I still wonder about the backstory there, but it's not important to what I have to say about what's happening now.

Even when I realized that I shouldn't have felt threatened by the apparently legitimate actions of those police officers, I was afraid, afraid that just as easily, that moment in time could have turned into what I as a black man know can happen.  Maybe my son and I would have been witnesses, or maybe we'd have found ourselves in the midst of it, our lives at risk while innocently going about our own business at home.  Yes, fear is "sometimes" a lie, but for black people, most of the time it's all too real.  "We can't breathe" even when someone's knee isn't on our throat, even when we're at our own homes, even when we're doing nothing more than going about our daily lives, We can't breathe!

I warn my children all the time (just as my parents warned me), that because of the color of your skin, you will be policed differently, you'll be viewed in society with suspicion and that to have a chance of being seen as "equal" you'll actually need to be "better than."  Think about that!  I know most of you who visit this blog are not black, so you probably don't think about such things, but ask yourself this:

"When is the last time you saw the police murder an unarmed, handcuffed and restrained white person online?"

"I can't breathe!"

"Fear Eats the Soul"