Rest in Peace Terence Crutcher
Van Gogh said, “Art is to console those who are broken by life,” so I keep looking and reading and writing and—nope. I remember how it turned out for Vincent, art couldn’t save him from the pain. And that was his personal tragedy, he had to gun himself down.
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I understand that, deeply, but at least he had agency, and that’s no small thing. I’m trying not to look at the lynchings the government keeps releasing. Reading the words is all I can bear ’cause I get it. This country been on one since Columbus first stepped foot, bringing a European agenda to a land that was not his to claim.
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I get how there would be no United States if not for slavery and genocide, and I get how there is no United States without these today. I see where we are, and where we’re heading, and how we’re getting there—and it’s not just the Klan rising again. It’s the disinformation, the cognitive dissonance, the silence: these are acts of complicity.
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Dr. King knew it, back in April 1963. He wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail to Christian and Jewish clergymen, recognizing this:
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“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.'”
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Justice is never convenient for those who have blood on their hands, just as Truth is never comfortable for those who are complicit in the lie.
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Rest in Peace Keith Lamont Scott