The video was heartbreaking and raw. A young mother was walking through a grocery store in a large American city, narrating a live video. The store had just been looted and utterly ransacked by a very large group of youth. This young mother could not even find formula for her baby in all of the wreckage. She was alternately crying, cursing and commentating. And in her commentary on the matter, she called out her own race of people for being the ones who did all of the damage.
May people like her increase.
I could not get the video out of my mind, though. Nor could I escape the desire to also comment on that issue and on larger societal issues that more and more often tend to center around one race or another and one subject or another. And it needs to be done; everyone needs to speak up before our country is so fractured and splintered that there is no rescuing it. But I knew immediately what everyone knows when they contemplate speaking up, namely that everything is already so balkanized that any attempt to speak out on any issue seeming to have anything to do with race will automatically result in cries of “You’re a racist! Speak to your own kind and no one else, bigot!”
And if those are indeed the parameters in which everyone must now operate, then I am going to be the most useless voice on Earth; I am half Puerto Rican, one-quarter French and one-quarter Lebanese. My tribe consists of exactly one, as far as I know, out of 8.8 billion. If anyone else out there knows of another Prenchanese, I would love to know about it, but I am not holding my breath. I am, though, contemplating whether or not I, as a minority of one, qualify for any special treatment, like maybe always and only being given piping hot fries from Bojangles instead of cold, chewy ones.
Anyway, my point is that if people are only allowed to speak to their own, then many helpful voices are going to be silenced at a time when they are needed most. But as I thought on that, an idea popped into my brain fully formed — a fill-in-the-blanks column. Using this helpful methodology, I can speak to the issues and have my words in such a format as to be easily applied by anyone as needed.