The Brink
As a child, the elders around me always said "There will be wars and rumors of wars" and "we are living in our last days". There's something in the air. You can feel it. You can smell it. You can almost taste it. On Kendrick Lamar's latest album, "DAMN", on the song FEEL. he declares:
“I feel like it ain’t no tomorrow
Fuck the world
The world is ending, I’m done pretendin’”
My last bit of hope for this country's future dissipated on November 8th. I've been cynical about America ever since I learned about the Tuskegee Experiment in high school. The election of a white supremacist administration directly after the presidency of it's first black one should have been expected. At least it was to me. About two years ago I was sent a message. "Keep a watch out for the tension between Donald Trump and Farrakhan." At the time I didn't know what that meant, but as I sat and watched the Trump lynch mob rallies and the Republican National Convention where Laura Ingraham's Nazi salute was overlooked by media, I knew we'd be in for it. After the election was over I started contemplating leaving the country. I'd need my passport (you should consider getting one too). I woke up one morning after having a dream and wrote this:
“The feelin’ of an apocalypse happenin’, but nothin’ is awkward
The feelin’ won’t prosper
The feelin’ is toxic”
It feels like we are on the brink of something. Something catastrophic. Something irreversible. Something so tragic, we'll never heal from it. At least not for a while. I spent a month wearing all black. Mourning. The death of the American dream had come. However this is not quite the end. There's more to our story. Our ancestors made it through. We are just on the brink of a new American reality. A new Global reality. What will it look like? I don't quite know. But the world as we've known it is gone.
As I watched Harriet Tubman return from the invisible and appear on "Underground" in the episode Minty, she left us a message to get ready for what's to come.
“You gotta’ pray another prayer, and you gotta’ walk in it with your convictions. He will provide, but you gotta’ do your part. You gotta’ find what it means for you to be a soldier. Beat back those that are trying to kill everything good and right in the world, and calling it making it great again. We can’t afford to be just citizens in a time of war. That’ll be surrender. That’d be giving up our souls.
Ain’t nobody get to sit this one out, you hear me.”