Is it possible that the feuds between Red&Blue and Black&White and Black&Black and White&White and Rich&Poor and Rich&Richer and Tenant&Landlord and Boss&Employee and North&South and East&West and City&Country and This&That and That&This actually stem from the carefully planned, cultivated, and nurtured violence of a small group of people who desired to be free years and year ago?
Just as a thief can’t find peace without giving away the money, or a cowboy can’t find love without holding his mother’s hand, or a couple can’t live together without talking about the fight, or a murderer can’t rid themselves of nightmares, perhaps an entire nation needs to look back and see each other gathered around the body.
It took us a while to believe in psychology; now we all go to therapy (at least those of us who want to heal).
How long before we recognize that this model applies to the whole of us? That healing requires getting down on our knees and crying hard and loud for hours until we’re too weak to rise, until someone else needs to lift us up, and we can look into each other’s eyes with that incredible feeling of complete emptiness and dried tears on our faces.
(It really is an incredible feeling.)
Everything is possible in that moment, and nothing is possible before it.
I don’t understand why; that’s just how it is.
For each one of us. And all of us.
All of us are parents at funerals, killers at large, bodies in the morgue. And in the name of freedom, as it was defined centuries ago.
So let’s kneel – every one of us, crumpled at the joints, like parents over our child looking at the blood on our hands and the knife on the ground and the holes in our children and the holes in us. Let’s let it hurt for a while, let’s watch our own hands do the killing and our own hearts stop beating.
Only after we kneel, can we rise.