Yesterday didn’t fly past me entirely; I honored Dr. King in my own way.
And I thought about how “first, they came for..” which is likely on all our minds these days.
Today, I looked up some things I’ve wondered about or have forgotten or ought to re-measure here in the midst of what seems like too much chaos from too many directions to track.
I’d thought Dr. King was at least 40, but no. He said he felt like he would die early, and all things considered, maybe he felt he had exceeded that earliness but it was just 3 months after he turned 39 that he was gunned down.
His children were 12, 10, 7 and 5 that day.
If we’ve ever wondered what Praetorium guards were like, we can look to (not familiarly related) Rodney King’s tormenters for a sickeningly good idea of it. Had he not been 25, he wouldn’t have survived and we’d likely never have even heard of him.
Trayvon was 17. (Emmet was 14…)
Fast forward a bit to George Floyd. He at least made it to 46, but his daughter was 6 at the time.
Breonna Taylor was, like Rodney’s age group, 26.
First, they came for the red people. And then for the brown and black people. Eventually they came for the tan people, for the yellow people..
They came for the Italian people, and for the Irish people, and for the Catholic people..
They always come for the Jewish people, and they always come for the colors.
Now, the only people who are mostly safe (unlike the 4,450 19-and under Gen Z- ers dead by gun violence in 2023 alone and the children in America who now die by gun violence more than by any other means), are the masked, armed, no-name Fed-sanctioned thugs (of both genders) in the streets.
Ugh.
I know, and I knew all through this, that Dr. King would pull out the social justice progress that has been made and show it to us. I know, and knew all through this, that he would say the very same were he still with us: Hope. Peace. Non-violent protest. As would John Lewis, “make good trouble.”
I was initially pissed off at Kaepernick for his own making of good trouble. If one nods to goodwill above all else, though, and does some homework, one’s eyes can be opened more and more.
It feels like we haven’t come far — have maybe even gone backwards — since April 4, 1968. I hope the man who was forced to leave us and his children that day would disagree, and show us why. Even were that possible, we know the work has only begun. (We need only to look at red people to know how true that is.)
That reminds me of St. Francis who, when dying on the ground under a borrowed cover after serving others his whole life, said to his Brothers (and to us), “Let us begin again, for until now we have done little to nothing.”
Through the chaos and every day, yes, let us begin again. And again. There are no other decent options.
❤️
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Under the mask.. 