How do we love a country that breaks our hearts?
I have started, stopped, and restarted writing this so many times, and forigve me if it is not entirely coherent. I’ve struggled to write, not because of a lack of words, thoughts or ideas, but because my heart aches just thinking about the America we live in today.
An America where Blacks are gunned down and disproportionately charged, arrested, and incarcerated – traumatizing and tearing Black families apart and exacerbating the very real trauma they live and breathe everyday as descendants of slavery.
An America where brown, Latinx children and families fleeing violence in Central America to live free from fear, only to face the cruelty and inhumanity of family separation and detention under the current administration.
An America where our Muslim community have had their mosques, homes, and businesses vandalized and who have been told to go back to where they came from.
An America where our Jewish community was shocked and terrorized by a gunman who attacked and killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
And most recently, mass shootings in Gilroy, California, Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso Texas.
We have reached a point in history when the failure to see these tragic events as the poison fruits borne of white supremacy is no longer acceptable under the guise of mere ignorance.
No, in the face of a series of violence that we have witnessed under the current administration, it is abundantly clear that ignorance and denial can no longer be an excuse when the blood of the innocent is smeared across our screens.
It is abundantly clear that, while not the cause, the President’s vitriol and violent rhetoric does nothing but enflame the passions and poisonous thoughts of the white supremacists in our midst.
But that is not my message today.
No, I write to my Black, Brown, and Jewish brothers and sisters who ask, “How do we love a country that breaks our hearts?”
How do we love a country that thinks of itself as a nation of immigrants, when, in reality, we are a nation founded on stolen land and the trails of the tears and blood of indigenous peoples?
How do we love a country that holds itself out to the world as that land of liberty and freedom, knowing full well that the great fortunes and prosperity of this nation was founded on the backs of enslaved Blacks?
How do we love a country that sought to deny entry to the Chinese and the Jew? A country that confiscated the property of Japanese Americans and detained them in internment camps. A country that bombed and supplied arms to guerrillas, juntas, far-right regimes and denied peoples all over the world the democracies and destinies they longed for.
How do we love a country that gives quarter to white supremacists and domestic terrorists? A country that tolerates the intolerable words and actions of a man lacking a moral bone in his body. A country that reduces that man to nothing but a joke, when, in actuality, he is the gravest threat to America than even Russia.
How do we love a country that lies to itself? A country founded on myths and monuments to a romanticized past. A country in denial of the cancer in its roots.
How do we love a country that breaks our hearts?
How do we love ourselves?
We keep fighting. That’s how. We keep fighting for our loved ones, for the things we love about this country. We keep fighting for country we want and dream of. We keep fighting for the America we believe in and the America we believe we can be.
That’s how we love a country that breaks our hearts.