How long will it take?

25 years???

50 years???

100 years????

500 years?????

Can't help but cling to a severe, bitter, burning curiosity that has been building with every decade I draw breath.

How much longer will it take to achieve total and complete racial equality??????  WHEN DOES THIS BULLSHIT RIDE END????

And people dare question my decision to not bring children into this world.

Can't help but feel such aching sorrow and anger for what happened to young Trayvon Martin, but he's not alone.  For any of us, Black, Red and Brown, who know full well what it's like to enter a store and have a guard follow you... 

what it's like to stand in elevator next to a white person and watch them clutch their purse or look nervously at you...

what it's like to drive or quietly walk in a wealthy neighborhood or a predominantly white neighborhood and get pulled over or followed by a twisted, paranoid soul like Trayvon's murderer... 

This child's murder truly is like a modern day lynching.  I can't help but think of my father as a little boy during Jim Crow in Louisiana, watching the body of a beloved cousin cut down from a tree after having been found hung by the klan.  No justice was ever received.  No police taking a stand by the victims, rejecting corruption and bigotry.  No killers ever held responsible.  No peace and ease reborn.  Just seeds of hatred and anger planted in the mind of a damaged little boy wondering why he lived in such a world that detested him for his skin color.

So, again...

How-the-fuck-much-longer will it take???

25 years??

50???   100???   1,000???????  What will be written in the history books (or implanted memory chip downloads) about the insanity of these times?

Where people had to fight for their rights to 

love the person they wanted to love...fight to worship the gods/goddesses they wanted to worship -- or fight for the right to NOT worship...fight to be proud and receive equal respect for the color of their skin and their cultural origins.  So much ground to cover. I usually try to keep a little hope burning and stay active...but it's times like this that I really deeply feel how Nina Simone and Fannie Lou Hamer used to say they were sick and tired of waiting for folks to wake up out of their racism and superiority delusions.   Sick and Tired.

And again, my thoughts turn back to young ones like Trayvon and so many others who have been cut down and silenced.  I can't help but wonder...

What if this kid was supposed to become the doctor who discovers the cure for AIDS?  Or cancer??

What if this kid was supposed to become a great artist and voice for social justice or a brilliant political leader??

So many possible futures and lost potential...gone in the instant of a gunshot.  This isn't just a matter of a wake up call for America.  This shit has been happening all around us, to so many of us since time immemorial.  It's a shout to STAY AWAKE -- put down the remote, stop obsessing over the Kardashians, the newest chatter about Tim Tebow and celebrities battling their weight issues.  GET  INVOLVED and take a stand whenever racial profiling and all other forms of inequality and discrimination appear in our lives.

**Click here for Amy Goodman & Democracy Now's coverage of Trayvon's case:

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2012/3/20