Do You Understand?

America was built in significant part through a genocide of the Natives and centuries of enslavement of Africans.

The descendants of those natives and slaves still struggle with equal opportunity and equal protection under the law and still struggle to feel an included part of our country as a result of the traumas of their ancestors.

That is a fact.

You don't arrive at our America without Genocide and Slavery. That is something we must acknowledge and reconcile ourselves with. 

We cannot change the past. But we can learn from it.  

Here, in our day and age, we are coming together as a species. We are, as a global community, understanding how we work and learning to accept our differences. We are learning to solve our problems.

This is the arc of history.

Yet people learn at different rates.

Not all of us come to understanding at the same time.

Those who are able to accept the differences, which is to accept what IT IS, are blessed.

This should make them humble. For they recognize the Truth and Beauty in what IT IS, not what it could be, not what it should be. What IT IS.

We are all slaves of the past.

Our History is of displaced people and enslaved people and oppressed people. And, Our History is of displacers and enslavers and oppressors.

We are neither slaves nor oppressors.

The future is ours to write.