8-5-13 RMB Brave

8-5-13 RMB Brave

Dear Rita May Brown,

Tonight, after my walk, I finished the last few pages of Bingo and said goodbye to Nickel. She is a brave soul who’s picture you painted well. Brave may be too strong of a word for some, this wasn’t an action adventure, nor a murder mystery. It was a depiction of life. It didn’t dwell on its hardships, but it didn’t ignore them either. And sometimes in order to face life head on, it takes bravery. Nickel is brave, methinks it so.

Today emails from organizations say the next Olympic Games will be held in a country that upholds anti-LGBT laws, where people are arrested and fined if they show support for LGBT equality. This means that a person could be arrested for simply wearing a shirt supporting an organization promoting equality.

The threads in time and space, they are massive in their number. I speak out now, more than I once did, but not as much as some. I hear the echo of past atrocities and current injustice. It occurs to me how very brave you were to speak out when you did.

We think ourselves so bright, with our internet, with our America moving forward in leaps and bounds, but even this, even here, it is still a struggle and I am haunted by the thought that a turn of a screw could tilt the picture, obscure progress completely. Prejudice lurks among us, it’s ingrained in all of us, even the best of us to some degree. Something in the mind screams “No!” when we see two men holding hands.

It does not compute. It is not what we are taught from childhood to accept. It will never compute for many. Why should they even try to make it? It is not their life, not their problem.

The homeless on the street, the child without a parent, the outcast, the crippled and ruined…not our problem? We are one. We connect the past to the future, each life to one another. Trying to see any segment as not our problem is cutting off an arm and expecting to be whole. It is so obviously impossible to do, yet we attempt to do it daily.

If we ignore the problem it will go away. If we only surround ourselves with our own kind, the rest do not exist. Until they do. Until people stop talking and start fighting. Until injustice and discrimination is reasoned as reasonable to most, and thereby acceptable.

“In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

I recall the RMB letter about how we are sentient beings and wonder, do we have to experience discrimination before we can release our own prejudice?

All for one and one for all,

Loraine