Tears - It Cuts Deep

When 911 happened, a group of co-workers huddled around a grainy black and white television set in the office to get all the news and see replays of the horrific activities of that day.  All, except me.  I went to my office and closed my door.  Up till this moment, I haven’t seen much of the images from that fateful day; didn’t watch television and didn’t read the newspaper for many days.

I turned away when they showed the pictures of the babies who were killed in Sandy Hook and the people who were gunned down in the South Carolina church.  I shouted at the television set when they kept replaying the gunshots and the screams from Parkland’s Stoneham Douglas School.  I watched through my peripheral vision over and over again, the killings of Black men, women and boy child Tamir.  My heart breaks each time I see a picture of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.  I seethe in anger.  I rage.  I march and I protest, but I protect a little bit of me.  

I mostly deal with this kind of pain and hurt by going within myself and shut it out and shut down.

However, I have been engrossed in the killing of George Floyd.  I watched the video of the knee on his neck, the look on the face of the murderer and listened to the cries of Mr. Floyd, but not in its entirety.  The television news programs on channel after channel will not let up.  They keep replaying the video over and over again, and when they learned it was almost nine minutes that the criminal had his knees lodged in Mr. Floyd’s neck, they played it even longer.  I can’t hear or see it anymore.  I don’t want to feel.  I don’t want to hurt anymore.

I want to honor and mourn George Floyd and all the fallen, gone for no reason but that they were Black.  No reason.  No godly reason.  The day after the nine were killed in the church, as I was driving to work, I kept looking at anyone white driving by me and asked in my head, “Why do you hate me?”  I cried all the way on the half-hour journey to work.  This is personal.  This hate cuts deep.  George Floyd is each of us, one by one.  The knee is in our collective necks, but he bore it, he paid the price.  Tamir, Trayvon, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Oscar Grant, Walter Scott and countless others paid the price. 

I have no outlet for this one.  I will not march or protest.  The chance of catching COVID-19 again has me frozen in fear.  I won’t be able to chant and shout and scream.  I can’t help the tears; they just keep flowing.

Guest author, Dawn Patterson, in her titled piece on this blog on May 27th, asked, “How are you really feeling?”  Not good Dawn, not good.