The Importance of Showing Up

What a week it's been. 

Words are my business, but my words are inadequate for what's happening, and I'm asking myself what right I have to speak — except to say that none of this rot at the heart of our country is acceptable to me AT ALL. I want to be part of creating a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that ALL people are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Wouldn't that be nice? Here's Langston Hughes:

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two -
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

1930, he wrote that. He was 28 years old. And what's changed since then? 

Well, some things. Some things. The Confederate Appomattox statue that used to be at Prince and Washington Streets in Alexandria is gone, spirited away in the night by the people who put it up in the first place. Governor Northam announced yesterday that the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond is coming down. Those are both good changes, things that reduce the message that Only Some People are welcome here. 

It's not enough. It won't be enough until everyone feels welcome and everyone feels safe. So tomorrow and Sunday I'll be at some marches, carrying a sign and putting my white-lady privilege to work for people who need it. I hope that's the effect, anyway. 

Most of the good things in my life have come to me just because I've shown up and said yes. That's the principle that drives my social activism, and I don't want it to be shallow or performative or virtue-signaling. I want to be counted. I want to bear witness. I want to make it easier for other people to show up, to be counted, to bear witness. Because silence becomes complicity. Silence is the enemy.

Even if it's just a bunch of us who agree with each other showing up to congratulate ourselves on our virtue, it's important that the people who don't agree see how many of us there are. By showing up we strengthen and support each other, and we speak for the people who cannot speak for themselves anymore. People like Breonna Taylor, who should be celebrating her 27th birthday today. People like George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Freddie Gray. Eric Garner. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Sandra Bland. Amadou Diallo. So many more names. So many lost lives. Say their names.