We must discover the beginning and ending of our responsibility; then — once we have discovered the endings and beginnings — unearthing, where we can use, this responsibility on a social, relational, and historical level. Societal, I believe, we, the people, have a responsibility to create a new future by accepting the reality we are being presented. Which means accepting, if we truly wish to move forward from here, the what got us here and incorporating it as we are going forward. Relational is loving your brother; advocating for your brother to live a fulfilling life. Historical — the most menacing acknowledgement and deeply denied responsibility — acknowledging what brought us to our current condition. People, especially what I’ve seen from Americans, struggle with recognizing the role they serve in shifting the present. Because everything around us is a product of a action, or decision, that came before us, we are forced to reassess and repair the consequences of old decisions.

We all carry the responsibility of helping our brother; one must be involved in creating the conditions for someone to find his light through the bewildering darkness. We all have lost our way, at one time or another, and there is a continual need for correction w/ our tendency to revert back to sentimentalities and move as if our trauma is happens every night. Our identities, which are threats to the potential of the world, remain locked tight to justify our moral waste; we do not allow ourselves to see the disconnect, disrespect, and lack of concern for the world. Our identities have the potential to either: bond us beyond borders, race, class, nation, sexuality, or constrain us to our homes; locked away from anything that could challenge our fragility. These cherished, but repressed, identities come from a need to not ruffle the feathers of the status quo; they come from the way the world responds to your hands, hair, smile, ideas, and jokes. All these simple movements culminate into who we believe ourselves to be; which means, our path to adulthood is creating the conditions to discover our own identity. W/O examination we move through the world w/ a reactive identity. That is responsibility on a relational level; the world does a terrific job of showing us our worthlessness, but if someone can see your humanity, help destroy what created the disaster, we can began lighting the paths for each other. We are not responsible for making someone walk but merely lighting the path; love is the only true wisdom in the world.

We are unable to look ourselves in the mirror; looking yourself in the mirror is acknowledge what you have become. Because this act will reveal the futility of our pursuits, we shun people, and poets, that reveal the truth of our turmoil. So we stand away from the mirror, hands clinched, internally running from the work and pain of accepting the affect of our aloofness. The conditions of our position has cultivated a frame of mind where we have no hope for the future of the country. Our unconscious assumptions contain our past, present, and future fears; they also contain the hope and potential of the nation. We are all forced to confront these assumptions w/ every fiber of our muscle. We must wander through the dark and bring it to the light in order to make the unconscious conscious. No one was born knowing all the assumptions and contradictions they contain; we all come unto the earth empty headed and malleable becoming acquainted, before we could speak, w/ the fears, assumptions, and danger of the world around us. A language is being formed that will make subtle cracks in the fabric of the nation; once these cracks have begun to open the shell and we can feel the breeze of freedom. Our responsibility is to shatter all the pretensions.

We must face our brother and look him in the eyes; we’ll discover the depth of the estrangement, but our dependence on each other. We share — from being on they same continent, same state, same home, same schools — the same hatred, fear and experiences. We are only distant from how we deal w/ these experiences in our private lives. We are being forced, through the loneliness, suicides and apathy, to realize our commonality; we share the death of our innocence and fear of danger. In the end, and beginning, we depend on each other; we fear reality, but exist in the chambers of transformation together. This transformation can only come if we are willing to acknowledge the barriers between our communion. We have to get to the root of our hatred for one another; this blind incoherent hatred is turning us into a far removed people. Our responsibility, person to person, is to trust and be an example so we can depend on each others image. Our current identities are nothing more than cloaks of separation.

Our shameful history is continuing a lie, within the individual, that is destroying our collective ability to face ourselves and the truth of what happened; because we are unable to tell the truth, we inflate the positives to balance all the things we hide under the bed. As a consequence, our children have such a shocking disconnect to the past, seeing the past as something that does not concern them, maybe the young have always held this point of view, they are associating blackness with criminality, and expressing the impossibility of Africa once having a golden age. Teaching a group of Black and Mexican kids world history was a shocking revelation to the anti-blackness moving through our children; there was no connection between history and their current situation. Maybe, no child is able to see how everything around him is a product of yesterday, or how the future is based on our present actions. They became aware of their identity, but it took a lot of convincing and explanation, but — now I know all children contain this ignorance — there was no a understanding of the mayhem that came with the identity. Through facing our history we release the children, just a little, from the clutches of that confusion; while it won’t lesson their pain the truth will create a, certain, freedom. Which means we can then, being invested with the moral and will, change our situation.

The world has to evolve on a social, relational, and historical level; we are all in a dire situation of having to accept the current conditions of our lives, so we can move forward. We must not accept this treatment as the fact of life, and we cannot create a new sense of the world with just wanting to exchange positions with the exploiters of power, continuing the tradition of preaching such insane impotent doctrines, expecting to move the world forward. We must create our definitions for freedom and stability; we must not tell people how to behave, live, dress, and weigh; we cannot create the pain that nearly killed us. We have a responsibility to be involved in this moment and challenged the world. Every aspect of the world must be built anew.