Dying Wish

So I finished watching a reality show and the episode contained a scene in which a young woman, who is dying, was granted a dying wish. The dying wish was to meet this particular celebrity. This begged the question, if I were given a few months to live,what would be my dying wish, the one thing I had to do before leaving this Earth? As I sit here typing this, I don't know what that wish would be but I do know what it wouldn't be-meeting a damn celebrity. I know different people have different things that bring them joy but for some reason this really bothers me. This is due partly to knowing how we place these people on a higher pedestal simply because they are rich and bring us entertainment, forgetting that they are the same as us. We also seem to forget that we don't really know these people or how they are in their real lives, we only see what they want us to see. For me, if I were granted a dying wish, I wouldn't waste it on meeting a celebrity, someone I don't know and who probably won't show me the real him/her. I'd much rather travel to a place I've always wanted to see or do something I've always wanted to do but either couldn't afford or was to scared to take the risk. But then again, to each her own.

How Much Longer?

Black lives matter. As I try to wrap my mind around the decisions made in the wake of the deaths of so many of our Black men to not indict those who took their lives, it saddens me that after all the years we have fought just to be considered equal, that that is still not a reality. Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, Darrien Hunt, and the list goes on. All of these men died senseless deaths and received no justice. I don't condone bad nehavior by anyone. I won't make the argument that any of these men were angels, simply because it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Whether they deserve justice or not should not hunge on the color of their skin and whether they ever got in trouble. What angers me the most and allows me to view the men who commit these acts as racists, is the lack of remorse after the fact. You took someone's life and yet you feel no remorse? As a mother of a black son, I am petrified that one day it could be him lying dead on the pavement for hours. My son is a good child, he has never been in trouble, raised in the suburbs, he doesn't know how it feels to grow up black and poor and harbor so much anger and resentment against those who are supposed to protect you but even so he is still in danger, simply because of the color of his sking. What can I as a mother do to shield him and protect him when he's outside of my safety blanket? Do I tell him to obey everything a police officer tells him to do and never talk back even if he sees his white friends doing just that? Do I tell him to neevr make any sudden movements when confronted by the police? Do I tell him that because his skin is black, that his rights will be violated and nine times out of ten there will be no justice for those violations? Do I tell him that no matter how successful he becomes in live, even he he becomes president, he will always be viewe d as black first and thereby making him inferior in the eyes of others. Why is this the burden of every black mother with a son? How much longer can we suffer at the hands of ignorance before it all becomes too much? I don't deny that there is a huge problem in the black community with fathers not raising their children. I don't deny that there is black on black crime, usually gang violence. These are facts but so are the fact that so many of those committing crimes see no way out. They don't have any love in their lives or they are looking for protection and the only way to protect yourself and your family is to become part of the problem. With that being said, black people are not the only ones committing crimes but yet we are the only ones judged as a group. If a young black man in a gang kills another young black man in a gang, that image of them being criminals and murders is projected on to all young black men who may happen to live where they live or dress the way they dress. On the contrary, when a yound white male decides to shoot up an elementary school and kill 25 children, he was just a troubled young man. His peers are not judged by his actions. That has always been the burden of being black.