The Ugly

Never in my life have I felt such a dark feeling. The world seems much colder. My country has revealed, they can't handle the shade of the brown that I wear, they can't handle a leader that don't look like them. Then their is slavery..it happen, Stand in your truth and acknowledge the ugly, only then we can move forward, and remember so we don't repeat. We gloss over color like it don't matter, but it does, that's the way people are in general. The police, the ones we should run to for help, we often must avoid, this ain't new, I've been hearing real life stories since I was a little girl who grew up with STRESS. It must be acknowledged and addressed, I'm sick of people trying gloss over it like it's just paranoia or if you didn't break the law....yeah, but, but what laws exactly state death by shooting or beating because of jaywalking, petty misdemeanors? Everyone has an opinion, until trouble comes your way. Drugs...the new one of choice is a old demon coming home to roost. This time it's striking the burbs not the hood and I'm seeing a different approach. That's good, but what about my lost cities, my lost families. When crack came out, it ravaged my hood, i watched it break and splinter apart, I watched as young black men dropped like flies, I watched moms and grand moms get lost and turned out. The solution was clear..."lock em up" , now meanwhile, who was raising the children? We protested and asked it be treated as a disease but NO, to jail you must go.. Decades later, the children are grown and yet not grown, they have no survival skills, no guidance, they wander around like sheep looking for the butcher, but now, we will treat it as a disease? Could it be the color of those affected, the income, or a bit of both. I can't be overly concerned about that if jails still house the non violent who got caught up, Marajuana, I'm not a smoker, that's not my pate, but the business concerns me, so many records and lives are scarred because of prison due to this, now it's legalized in states and where are the cries for expunging those infractions off records? I'm not talking about the "hardcore crew" , I'm talking about young men and women, black, brown and tan that had mini amounts, no bad records that got sent away and forgotten. How can big business take this when they never embraced it?