My chest is tight, my arms and legs feel heavy, and there’s a lump in my throat, although my tears are somehow locked up inside of me on this cold and rainy morning. I am angered and heartbroken, as I have been so many times over the last three and a half years. As always, I struggle to find the words to express why I feel the way that I do, and why exactly the things that people have done are so horrible and have had such a profound negative impact on me.
Angela Douglas, the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Cultural Center, is the cause of the latest attack of agony, but she is just one among many. Again and again, more times than I can count or my brain can comprehend, people who think and act similarly to her have caused similar agony attacks, filling the past three and a half years with relentless, unbearable, indescribable pain.
I have no choice but to go on. I know that the actions of Douglas and those like her are horrible, and I know that I am right to be so upset, even if words are inadequate for the task of providing a full explanation. I believe that I am a good person and that what I am doing is important. I know that I am morally right and that Douglas is morally wrong.
But I am in so much pain.
And there is, seemingly, nothing that I can do about it. I am only one person. I do not have the power to stop people like Angela Douglas from committing their hideous, sadistic, sickening actions. Our society has decided that actions like these are acceptable, and that there are more important things to condemn, more important things to fight against. I disagree with this stance as strongly as it is possible for a human being to disagree with anything, but I have no power to convince society to adopt my perspective. All that I can do is to continue being a good person, continue doing what is right, continue doing what I can to stand up for the historical figures.
I don’t believe in hacking historical figures’ bodies to pieces, sawing their heads off, cutting their faces off, and burning them in a furnace.
I believe in honoring them, celebrating them, protecting them, and keeping them alive.
And that is what I will try to do, with the humble amount of resources and power that are available to me.
If other people don’t agree with me, if other people don’t find this important, then that is a negative reflection on them, not on me.
