When yo' freedom ain't free
i was disturbed by a video* today.
a video of Black parents having "the talk" with their Black children.
you know, that talk they have with you about what to do when/if you're stopped by the police.
Oh... you've not had to have that talk with your parents?...
i realized that the majority of parents in this country don't have to have "that talk" with their children, and I felt 'some kind of way' about that.
...so, what started out as a regular video response ended up this bit of prosetry about why i think that is...
...this is necessary.
So, don't ask me not one more time how 45 became president, how the christofacists took over this country, how the alt-right has used populism to infiltrate this government. This is why 45 & his masters are here performing a couped-up lobotomy on amerikkkan capitalism.
Because this is necessary, we reap the rotten fruit of dominator culture and none of the dominated have the strength to simply take their power back, have the mind to simply say no, have the will to say "here, we have a new way," have the heart to say until we reconcile our grave injustices and inherent inequities, until we renegotiate the power relations and disparate wealth distribution and vocalize the ecological suicide underway...Until we do these things, we can only drink from wells poisoned by hate and only prosper by markets trafficking in death.
When some folks are so unfree that they have to explain to their babies that life for you will always be dangerous, cain't none of us truly be free. When you won't do everything you can to tear down the conditions that make this so, won't do everything you can to stop your babies from ever growing up thinking that life is good for those blessed and if it's not good for you then you must not be trying hard enough, when you won't do everything you can to divest a system built also on your oppression of the last scintilla of your support, when you will march but you won't call for reparations & a reckoning of the long-overdue debts to humanity, then you don't really want to be free, 'cuz our freedom is bound up together you see.
Or don't you see?
'Cuz real freedom is like sunshine, like love and is free...for everybody. And, when you find yourself face-first in a kinda "freedom" where folks askin' you to believe that emotional pain ain't real or hurts less or can just be "gotten over," that psychological trauma is just in your head & is not generational nor a part of terrorism at its finest, or they don't seem to know that all freedom & lack thereof starts in the heart & mind, radiating out onto the realities we inhabit & the ways we touch the world, and they all the while telling you that if you just follow the money ev'rythang will be alright, you know you're talkin' to someone who ain't free in all the ways that make freedom worth somethin'. amerikkka don't really want to be free.
'Cuz he don't know that freedom only comes at a price when some folks are held for ransom.
Had enuff?
*Here's a link to the video that spawned this piece: https://www.facebook.com/thismatters/videos/714035155442346/?pnref=story
