If you haven’t heard something really horrible happened around here earlier this week:

Not sure who is reacting with the shocked face, because anyone who knows even a quarter of the history of this country should not be shocked. Even sadness is not appropriate, it should only be anger. Anger and some kind resolution to help repair our sick culture is all that is needed right now.

Let’s first focus on the subject of that aforementioned meeting. It also should not come as a shock that black mothers face more difficulties during pregnancy, more still births, and more birth complications than white women. If this subject is somehow new to you, there’s a documentary called Aftershock that can help you get up to speed. The reasons for this are rooted in racism, and the subject that some people don’t even want to teach their kids about, slavery.

The whole debate about CRT and teaching kids accurate history emboldens ignorant folk, like the ones that thought it was A-OK to come into a public health meeting and spew their vitriol all over everyone else. When we allow people to ban courses on African American history, when we refuse to acknowledge the actual history of our country, and when we sit back and feign surprise this incident occurred; we allow these bad actors a stage. And we are all to blame for it.

There is no debate to be had about whether or not to teach the truth about slavery or the struggle for equal rights in this country. For hundreds of years we have allowed people to put forth a mythology and hero worship version of American history that has not served any of us well. We need to frame ourselves around what Thomas Jefferson first wrote, and later what Elizabeth Cady Stanton fixed for him 72 years later:

We hold these truths to be self – evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. 

That’s it, that’s our common denominator as Americans. We strive to fulfill the promise of this nation that has not yet been realized. All of us, which means we don’t hide history, we don’t discriminate and say terrible things about people different from us, AND we find self-worth outside the race you happened to have been born into (that’s for you white people).

The health department is going to reschedule that meeting and we will be sure to post the new date on our social media. We need to show up en masse, and we need to demand that our county not become a hellscape like the one DeSantis is trying to create.