Editor’s note: Karen Harris Tully is a writer who lives in Raymond and has agreed to keep a journal to share with Daily World readers during the odd and uncertain time we’re all navigating.
I’m having trouble making sense of the world this morning. I don’t know what to say, I don’t even know what to think about what’s happening in America right now, my country. So, my thoughts come tumbling out in jumbled bits and pieces that I stitch together like a Frankenstein quilt of words. Thoughts centering on Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and so many, many others lost to racial violence and police violence in America.
As a white woman, I have always trusted the police with my life and the lives of my family. But I am not raising black sons. I think of black mothers and the fear they must experience whenever their children leave the house and I know we have to find a way, every way, to do better.
I think everyone knows that it’s not all police. I have the privilege of having one very good, caring law enforcement officer in my life, and knowing others in our community. And I would think, and hope, that good officers would be the most concerned with rooting problem cops out of their own ranks. Yet, I know that is not a simple task. Racism was built into our country from the beginning, into our thought processes. Even when we think it’s not there, when we won’t admit it ourselves, it lurks inside. Perhaps the most when we won’t admit it.
What does it say when armed white protesters, storming the Michigan State Capitol and yelling at police are not seen as threatening, but an unarmed black woman, sleeping in her own apartment was? Or a young boy, playing outside with a toy gun. Or a man struggling to breathe, face down on a sidewalk, an officer’s knee pressed into his neck for eight minutes. I am deeply troubled. I hope we all are.
And now, during a pandemic that has now cost over 100,000 lives in this country, protests sweep our country, some of them violent. Seven were shot in Louisville, not by police, but reportedly by someone in the crowd. Fires burn in Minneapolis. Columbus, Denver, LA, Manhattan, Memphis, Phoenix, Portland, and more. As much as I love our First Amendment right to peaceful protest, violence is not the answer.
“Violence begets violence,” said the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Song of the day: We Shall Overcome, American Folk Song
Karen Harris Tully is a novelist living in Raymond with her husband and two small children. She writes sci-fi/fantasy for teens and adults and can be found at www.karenharristully.com.
