Can you breathe now?
To the Editor,
The longest 8 minutes and 46 seconds ever seen and recorded in 401 years by millions of marchers with very tired feet and very weary souls, hearts heavy with yet another life snuffed by slow, torturous, deadly force by men in blue “in breakdown.”
NO MORE we say, NO MORE, speaking as Planetarians not just Americans, thrusting feet from our necks with a roar of NO MORE in a bloody rebirth of a possibility for America to at last become the dream awakened, to finally remove the foot from its collective, administrative, racist neck.
The futile boasting with tanks in the streets, rubber bullets and tear gas only adding to the centuries of grief, tears of rage, exhaustion, occasional joy, tears of humor, waking us all up, our hearts and minds no longer in denial, opening ourselves to listen to the other.
It is the time, it is the season to embrace reason now that more oxygen is getting to our brains, with necks freed from knees and feet, we burst free of the chains and toxins of fear.
It is over. We know it, we feel it. We dance.
It is a beginning.
Together we can take the next step toward expanding our woefully incomplete stage of evolution, stuck as we’ve been in this backward-seeming stage. We’ve now turned, at least in the streets, away from the Precipice of the Hatreds, away from the Otherisms, the twisted energies and insistence of ignorance convincing us all to commit suicide by toxicity, using “stinkin’ thinkin’” as public policy to justify why we’ve tolerated with barely a white whimper, the feet on our necks, never grasping that the other world is gasping for just their tiny share of breath as we pretend, promise, and pontificate, softening our feet just a bit while promising
more oxygen to the brain.
SOON, SOON, SOON COME, REAL SOON, WE PROMISE!
SOON is today, both the ending and the beginning.
Judith Trustone
Swarthmore
