The Meditation Singers “Stand Up And Be Counted” (Checker 5046, 1968)

It’s a year after Darren Wilson was absolved of all charges in his murder of Michael Brown. It’s been a year filled with numerous murders of people on our own soil. The level of rage a conscious individual has to sustain these days isn’t healthy. No matter how many Sandra Blands, Lamia Beards. No matter how many churches are shot up or burned down, no matter that Jamar Clark is yet another name.

No matter that 5 Black Lives Matters protesters in Minneapolis  are recovering from the terror of being shot while peaceful protesting and seeking out knowledge about yet another unjust falling of a fellow brother. The majority of this country stays blind and comatose, not willing to acknowledge the constant violence that’s part and parcel of their existence. Those may think it doesn’t directly affect them, and they would be quite foolish.

The Meditation Singers asked us in 1968:

Where are those so called “fighters” who preach for human rights?
Where are they, where did they go to? Now’s the time to fight

47 years later I ask the same questions. It is sometimes, despite the bleary consistency of it all, cases of wrong or right. Granted, systemically, it’s a complex question to really solve, but inert attention and gluttonous avoidance don’t really solve anything.

I’m starting to close out this year with thanks that I haven’t made any missteps to be one of those statistics, one of those faces I’ve seen scroll through social media in the year since. I do plea as the season calls us to care for all of us, that we start waking up, and paying attention to evil of complacency among us as we head into what seems to be an ugly political season.