Thoughts on Ferguson

There are concepts which most of us can’t verbalize. But we do recognize them when someone else speaks them aloud. They are a verbalization of our hopes and dreams. They are words like “I’ve been to the mountain,” or, “Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

Very few people are as articulate as Martin Luther King. For many hundreds of years, white people have oppressed, enslaved, abused, degraded, raped, tortured, murdered and done everything possible to tear the very soul out of people of color. But it hasn’t succeeded. The instinct for fairness, justness, and the sense of a shared humanity, cannot be suppressed through threats, bribery, pain, or “the rule of law.”

And now we have Ferguson, Missouri. Nothing is new here. Nothing is surprising. Nothing is any fairer than it has ever been. And nothing is as infuriating as the current inability to sweep away the injustice.

So let’s say it plainly. Ferguson, Missouri is nothing more than ongoing American racism. It sucks as much as it ever has. And only a fool would believe that this will be the end of it.

Okay, call me a fool, but I believe that the younger generation places little stock in the racism, religiosity, regionalism, nationalism, or any other remnants of ignorance out of the past. But that doesn’t mean that those who harbor hatred are going to go away tomorrow. It will take a while longer. But the future is upon us, (if we can survive the current rape of planet Earth and somehow fix it).

And I also believe that the future holds much for humanity. We are just coming out of our adolescence. That which is to come, we can only imagine. But one thing we can be sure of. The future does not belong to the bigots, the haters, and the unimaginative. It belongs to those who know of reason, humanity, tolerance and even the love of one's fellow human beings.

We must believe that the victims who have paid the price with their very lives have not done so in vain. The alternative is far too unthinkable.

So decide for yourself. Are we on the threshhold of a world about to drown in the muck of intolerance? Or are we about to enter a world made brighter by the sacrifice of so, so many.

My hope is that we are emeging from the darkness and ignorance of the past