If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention....

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy

of this period of social transition

was not the strident clamor of the bad people,

but the appalling silence of the good people.

- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1957)

Charlottesville.  I can't write.  I'm numb.  I can't write.  I'm deeply sad.  I can't write.  This is so wrong.  I can't write.  But this is America.  So I must write....

The time has come to choose sides: you are either for holding ourselves accountable for living up to our professed creeds - including that all people are created equal - or you are for favoring some over the others, which typically means the few over the many.  What is your choice?

We can no longer sit by and watch a president - small 'p' intended - alternatively encourage and absolve a group whose ideals are the antithesis of our republic's ... unless we want to admit that our ideals were never quite what we claimed them to be (or, to the point, in this modern era, we don't want them to be so).  There are no other options: the situation is binary ... just like the choice before all of us.

You must either stand on the side of humanity, diversity and inclusion or you must continue to defend our country's shameful legacy of inhumanity, supremacy and exclusion.  What is your choice?

A young woman died yesterday protesting the legacy of hate in our country, you know, the one that so many false patriots claim is the greatest and thus can't be criticized.  Actually, yesterday's tragedy proved the hollow falsity of this lie: if you can't criticize what happened yesterday - as our president didn't - then you really can't and don't care about our country.

Why?  It's quite simple really: what happens when it's your turn to be the hated?  I'm guessing that you'll want some special dispensation, the kind that you give to today's haters and withhold from their victims.  But as history shows, none will be forthcoming, especially, God forbid, if your 'side' loses.  Woe to you when the lessers rule....

I want to honor Heather Heyer, so I write ... slowly, painfully and partially numb, but I write.  I want to make hers the last such sacrifice on our torturous road to extending our constitutional rights to all.  I want to make ours a world that's so much better than we showed ourselves to be yesterday ... or, truth be told, any day in American history (with few notable exceptions).

What we saw yesterday is reality, not an aberration.  It's who we really are collectively: the far less noble denizens of a country that has sometimes subtly and often overtly encouraged the violent practice of -isms that, in the end, hurt us all.

We are not raised by racism, we are lowered by it.  We are not raised by sexism and misogyny, we are lowered by them.  We are not raised by ethnocentrism and xenophobia, we are lowered by them.  We are not raised by religiocentrism and religious bigotry, we are lowered by them.  We are not raised by gun-toting and violence, we are lowered by them.  We are not raised by classism and elitism, we are lowered by them.  Etc.

So, America, what is our choice?  Heather Heyer's legacy hinges thereon....

I love America more than any other country in this world,

and, exactly for this reason,

I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

- James Baldwin, "Autobiographical Notes,"

Notes of a Native Son (1955)