I'm not going to talk about Mike Brown or Officer Wilson. I'm not going to talk about the media. I'm not going to specifically talk about the events or the protests. I'm going to discuss kids.
Imagine you are a young boy or girl enjoying the last days of summer and looking forward to school. Some sirens outside your door and the next thing you know, the quiet town you live in is the center of the universe. At first, this must seem like a cool thing. "Hey, maybe I'll get on TV," might be your thought. Then you go outside and you see people crying. People you know. Maybe even your parents. You see things you've only seen in movies and then it becomes dark.
The next morning you wake and all you hear is mom and dad talking about their fears. They are worried for your safety. They are worried that the world they are trying to protect you from, is right outside your door. You turn on the TV and there are no cartoons or silly game shows, but you're watching your teachers on the television. Your school has been cancelled. "Woohoo," you think, but then your mother tells you that you can't play outside; it's too dangerous.
So all this ends. The media goes away. The destruction caused by looting is cleaned up and life goes on. Police will be back patrolling the streets and good people will go on being good and bad people will continue being bad. Hopefully nothing in your lifetime ever happens like this again. At least not in your town. But the question remains. If everything in life is a lesson, what have you learned?
Everything that you are taught changes, because of this one incident. Regardless of what legal ramifications this case holds, depending on your race, creed, color and socioeconomic group, you're going to learn something from it. Will it be the same as what your neighbor learns?
What troubles me about this and our history of race relations is that they have never improved enough to the point where the next generation can pass down more positives than negatives. I do not mean this to be only directed at blacks in America. It isn't as important as how whites view this, but how they teach their children. And this is where I get personal.
I have a friend who is a new father, who I assume is busy as can be and without any knowledge of what is going on (this proven by the post he shared), he called people savages, looters and thugs. As someone who has followed the events diligently, he is speaking of about 1-2% of a population of 20,000 plus. It doesn't confuse me as to how these terms came to be used, but why? This is a man who claims to be tolerant of all and is a god loving Christian. So who are these savages? A savage might be better saved for a masked man decapitating a helpless journalist, but not an angry confused youth who thinks they are proving a point. So how will this new father explain these types of things to his child? Will eighteen years of hearing "these people" compared to a flow of buzzards and hyenas have an impact on them?
How we teach our kids about these moments in history will forever shape out country's future. Even if the lesson isn't 100% what we feel in our hearts, we might all gain from not allowing our children to view our hate and our bias. Maybe one day, they can tell their kids about how their grandparents taught them not to make judgments based on anything other than the person simply being human.
Imagine you are a young boy or girl enjoying the last days of summer and looking forward to school. Some sirens outside your door and the next thing you know, the quiet town you live in is the center of the universe. At first, this must seem like a cool thing. "Hey, maybe I'll get on TV," might be your thought. Then you go outside and you see people crying. People you know. Maybe even your parents. You see things you've only seen in movies and then it becomes dark.
The next morning you wake and all you hear is mom and dad talking about their fears. They are worried for your safety. They are worried that the world they are trying to protect you from, is right outside your door. You turn on the TV and there are no cartoons or silly game shows, but you're watching your teachers on the television. Your school has been cancelled. "Woohoo," you think, but then your mother tells you that you can't play outside; it's too dangerous.
So all this ends. The media goes away. The destruction caused by looting is cleaned up and life goes on. Police will be back patrolling the streets and good people will go on being good and bad people will continue being bad. Hopefully nothing in your lifetime ever happens like this again. At least not in your town. But the question remains. If everything in life is a lesson, what have you learned?
Everything that you are taught changes, because of this one incident. Regardless of what legal ramifications this case holds, depending on your race, creed, color and socioeconomic group, you're going to learn something from it. Will it be the same as what your neighbor learns?
What troubles me about this and our history of race relations is that they have never improved enough to the point where the next generation can pass down more positives than negatives. I do not mean this to be only directed at blacks in America. It isn't as important as how whites view this, but how they teach their children. And this is where I get personal.
I have a friend who is a new father, who I assume is busy as can be and without any knowledge of what is going on (this proven by the post he shared), he called people savages, looters and thugs. As someone who has followed the events diligently, he is speaking of about 1-2% of a population of 20,000 plus. It doesn't confuse me as to how these terms came to be used, but why? This is a man who claims to be tolerant of all and is a god loving Christian. So who are these savages? A savage might be better saved for a masked man decapitating a helpless journalist, but not an angry confused youth who thinks they are proving a point. So how will this new father explain these types of things to his child? Will eighteen years of hearing "these people" compared to a flow of buzzards and hyenas have an impact on them?
How we teach our kids about these moments in history will forever shape out country's future. Even if the lesson isn't 100% what we feel in our hearts, we might all gain from not allowing our children to view our hate and our bias. Maybe one day, they can tell their kids about how their grandparents taught them not to make judgments based on anything other than the person simply being human.
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