An Invitation to Believe

For those of us that feel anxiety or defeat that some can look at a fact, data, a video, or a testimony, and never concede that it is true, consider this: The people of this country dunked women in water and called them witches if they survived, and innocent only if they drowned. Eugenics sought to measure the brains of Black folk for the sake of proving they we not human, and classified and institutionalized the poor, the mentally ill and disabled, women, homosexuals, and others in order to justify segregation and sanitation. There is a huge movement to remove and reduce information of chattel slavery from the text books that our young people use, in an attempt to redeem and sanitize American history because of the apparent fragility of the privileged.

This movement seeks to dispel the idea that slavery was legal, institutionalized terror, and violent, torturous, or evil, and that slave owners were benevolent, compassionate folk who simply took advantage of a free-market opportunity. Across the world there are groups in existence simply to disprove the Jewish Holocaust, and every historical genocide has a group of privileged folk who will deny that mass murder was genocide, or that the numbers of those killed are significantly over-reported in the data. The Japanese internment was simply a necessary evil, an extended vacation, if you will, with propagandized pictures to prove how productive and happy the banished American citizens of Japanese descent were.  

There are others who simply do not have the mental constitution or the strength of soul to accept the truth from other perspectives, period. Fear and lazy ignorance prevents these ones from growing and gaining relationships and the invitation to participate in the universe whole.  

For this reason, I intentionally tune my ear for the voices on the bottom-- the bottom meaning those who are most oppressed, those who do not get the podium, or whose voices are being muffled. For this reason, it behooves us all to be confident in what we know to be true, to make a habit of believing and believing in the other, and to not let the loud, lying screams of fearful doubt deter what you know you must do.

ReConciling Act:  Seeing is not believing.  Choosing to believe is believing. It is revolutionary.