Black Lives Matter

Disclaimer: This post is political. Writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. I live in the real world, and that world affects my writing. If you have a problem with political content in books, you obviously have never read mine, because I write gay romance, and by and large, that's political by default. 

I haven’t been loud in my activism this week. I know the value of being quiet and listening when an oppressed community is hurt. But I also know that quiet activism is sometimes seen as silence. 

The core message in my community growing up, struggling with an epidemic that was killing people like me, was Silence=Death.

For many Black Americans, for many communities of color in all its diversity, that message, I’m sure, has a different meaning that is no less profound than the one I grew up with. Because our silence is killing them. 

As a nation, we have used our power and privilege to downplay and gaslight and sow doubt into the very idea that the pillar of our society, our concept of justice and order and law is and has been tarnished and corrupted from the start. We see that now in the brutality on the streets towards nonviolent protesters, towards journalists, towards children.

Just weeks ago, police were able to ignore almost any provocation from heavily armed protesters who objected to stay at home orders. 

Now they react with brutality towards the people they’re meant to serve. 

A man was executed on the street by a vigilante wearing a uniform of service. And the good men who are supposed to step in and prove the system works and that all cops aren’t bad cops? They watched and did nothing. And this isn’t an isolated case. The list of names goes on, and in terrifying ways. A young man jogging. A woman asleep in her bed.

People are angry. I am angry. I want to believe this is not my country, that this is some new infection, but the reality is, I’m afraid, that racism is an old disease, the kind that takes root and refuses to go away. The kind that has to be cut out and removed in ways that will be painful and will take a long time to heal.

In times like this, it would be good to have a president. Someone who could lead and drive a process for reform and healing in an already tumultuous time. 

What we have is an infantile coward who insists on pouring gasoline on flames so that he can play with the lives of our troops and our people as if they were toy soldiers.

The brutality we’re witnessing can never be allowed to be acceptable. It can never be ignored. It can never be forgotten.

This is what America has become. Our country is on fire, and I am weeping.

Black Lives Matter.