What If.......

What if I hadn't been born to my American, white parents? What if I was a black woman from Harlem whose son had been shot down by one bad cop in the name of hate and no good reason, would I then trust any cops, anywhere? Would I fear for my life because of the color of my skin? Would that always be one of my biggest fears?

Or as a white wife of a police officer who died, because someone walked up behind him, never knowing him, but knowing his job by the clothing he wore, and shot him in the back of his head leaving me without a husband, and my children without a father.

I wonder how I’m not a Syrian woman with a family of seven, piled-up in a makeshift boat, trying to travel hundreds of miles across water to safety, only to arrive and be scorned, looked-down-upon and spat-on in disgust; going sometimes days without food, sleeping in the street, and any hovel of a hole we could all fit into, and crying – crying for my hungry children who I thought I was helping to survive, but now, the struggle is still so very real.

I wonder all of these things until my heart breaks, because the facts are - somebody is all of these people - they are somebody to all of these REAL people that are dead now. How did we get to this point of hatred? How did we seemingly come so far, only to turn around and go back 40 years, back into the days of hate and violence being spewed from our hearts, our mouths and the guns in our hands?

I keep hearing and seeing Black Lives Matter everywhere – let me tell you something – all lives matter, every single one of them. For those of us fortunate to be born in the right place, in the right time, well Glory Hallelujah!  But all of us are not those people, and no, we shouldn’t feel guilty for our place in this life, but by gosh we should feel a definite responsibility to uphold our abilities to provide human compassion for those less fortunate, instead of walking past them in the streets of Greece (or anywhere else) with disgust on our faces because our vacations have been ruined by their will to stay alive at any cost.

What matters is WHAT WE DO FROM HERE – RIGHT NOW. And let me tell you, there had better be a plan, because otherwise we are Iraq and Syria and any other country that kills its own at any given time, with no laws, for no reason, and no consequences.

Our lives - ALL OF THEM - better start mattering and quickly, or we will surely, just kill each other off, one by one until there is nothing left of us. Maybe this is the 2nd coming everyone keeps talking about; maybe He is letting us take care of cleansing this earth ourselves, because we are surely not honoring the sacrifices He made so we could be here.