It's time to regain all that's been stolen

What is lost to the world, not just to friends and family, is Tyre. With his affable nature and love of people, his talents and the role model he exemplified is lost, gone, never fully understood, nor brought to full bloom.

It’s the case for every wrongful death: the horror at what occurred is highlighted but the life that could have been becomes a sidebar. What is the difference between losing Tyre and losing a 21 year old college student, Matthew Shepard, beaten to death for being gay? Or 14 year old Emmett Till? Or 19 year old honors student Allison Krause killed by the National Guard at Kent State or the other three students who died there? Or 15 year old Anne Frank?

Anne, because of her writings during a 26 month period, will be remembered longer. Her diary has been translated into at least 70 languages. With every wrongful death, though, we are robbed of their possibilities and they are robbed of ours.

What should our possibilities become if they lead to naught? If we lose our capacity to care for and defend the innocent, to insist upon a measure of loving justice? Communities and nations fail when they can no longer stand up to reject the robbers of life and to uphold our commitment to respect and elevate the lives of the conscious and capable and caring and reject the forces that justify or provoke violence and theft.

It is true that the response to the summer of BLM marches of 2020 led to many significant efforts to reform police training and practices - more than most realize.

It’s not enough, because the police alone are not responsible for the violence and hate
that have been sown from the seeds of others.

When the excessive greed of wealthy financiers on Wall Street and major banks and real estate developers caused the Housing Bubble Collapse, tens of thousands lost their homes to foreclosure but those responsible were not held accountable.

Most of the foreclosed properties were purchased by the same group of perps, who profited from the misery they had previously inflicted. That’s not justice. It opened fresh wounds in our nation and accelerated distrust in government across the political spectrum. Ignoring injustice only hastens its malignancy.

When militias and hate groups multiplied in the wake of the election of our first Black & White president, the politicians and their enablers in the news industry accelerated the hatred and violence further. Those who stood up against those injustices were demonized while the unjust were lionized.

The left, liberal and middle rarely resorted to deadly violence, though they’ve been accused of faking the Capitol insurrection, pedophilia, cannibalism, drinking the blood of children and the theft of the 2020 presidential election by the same forces of division that previously proclaimed the virtues of slave owners’ benevolence, and those who conducted secret experiments on Black people, people suffering from mental illness and US military servicemen.

Racism is evident and prominent throughout our history, a history the forces of hate are trying to censor repeatedly. Truth and evidence are not theoretical and those who champion truth and evidence commit no crime if anyone feels guilty when past crimes against humanity are exposed. (And notably, most of the accusations against the forces for truth and justice today are just tired old retreads of the past hate groups they’re trying to hide from public school students.)

We are long overdue for this reckoning. The innocent victims of deadly hate should be known and long remembered. And those who try to destroy what civilized nations have fought hard to achieve for all of its people represent the weakest and most unlikeliest of gods and the most destructive of men.

In troubled times like these, neutrality is appeasement. After the loss of the promise these innocents possessed, we must stand or surrender to the cruel and destructive.

In addition to all the videos and events of yesterday, it was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Let us liberate greater promises ahead.

I intend to provide more positive stories ahead in coming days as a well-deserved break from the atrocities and idiocies. It’s not enough to look at past problems in isolation from the past successes that offer us useful lessons too.