MLK 2019

What does a white guy in Connecticut have to say about racism? Does it matter if you hear it from me rather than a person in Alabama?

My father’s relatives aided in the underground railroad and my mother’s-great-great grandfather was declared dead when he secretly ran away from a slave-owning Alabamian home to start life anew in New York City. He arrived with an expensive education, but no money. They were all trying to get away from bad ideas.

The circumstances of random chance are stunning when you think about global development. I’ve been studying history and found that those who capitalize, prosper, but cutting corners causes universal suffering; we need wisdom to keep us in check. Geographically-sculpted facial features somehow ‘justify’ our treatment of what is alien to us. We are in the information age, you have to be a fool to believe that the color of your skin defines the content of your character.

So, what does a white guy in Connecticut have to say about racism? It’s a trick bad leadership plays to force conformity. Are you one of us, or are you one of them? Disparity will continue until people look at their entitlement with humility. Guilt turns otherwise capable change-makers into cowards.

This is the information age. We can drop heavy tools and enjoy this paradise. But, there still exists among us foul representation willing to strip their fellow humans of civil liberties. Isis’s fundamental belief is that there is only one Allah. When Rome fell, the dark ages followed. United, we’ll rise, divided, we’ll fail.

That seems depressingly hopeless, but it isn’t.

We just need modern approaches to moral societal thought, preventive mental medicine. We aren’t rats racing to the finish, we’re a species with a shared complex cognitive capacity. However, humanity is sick with blighted people ‘proving’ their self-worth and destroying our mutual environment in the process.

The cure to our collective black-and-white headspace sprouts from creative combinations of: empathy, respect, and community.