I'm effectively terrorized by my own country's government, compromised by the color of my skin
...I don't go anywhere anymore. I just stay home. I'm effectively terrorized by my own country's government.
I hate to admit this, but it's true. I'm too decrepit to risk an encounter gone wrong. Had to even sadly face up to an untenable risk to my health in any protest gone wrong.
I know I'm not alone in this, but I wonder about the rest of the nation; a good number of whom have always been privileged by their majority with the ability to play whatever advantage or animus they choose off of their relative under-abundance of eumelanin.
To me, the abstractness with which our majority white society regards their brown-skinned counterparts, despite the tenuous laws which have undergirded my own citizenship and rights in this country, faltering and actually recanting promises and admonitions of my very humanity that had been so long denied by our government and people, all reminds me of the videos I've seen from Somalia where children and elderly and others dying from hunger can be seen crawling on the streets and sidewalks as others more fit rushed past, and roving armored vehicles roamed by and shot them at random.
The funny thing is that I've had a lifetime, born in 1960, that tracked the promise of the civil rights era; my on father Director of Civil Rights at the Equal Opportunity Commission. I had come to be convinced of the irrefutability of my citizenship. The joke was believing (whenever that happened) that a new generational majority of white people would reject the impulses of the past to advantage themselves by disadvantaging people who didn't share their lack of abundance of eumelanin.
Think about what it took for Donald Trump or anyone else to lurch the nation back into Jim Crow, and reflect on how easily it seems we're slipping into a Nazi Germany-type upheaval of the lives of people with brown skin in this country. Not very much, right?
How easily the nation is allowing this theft of our democracy which insidiously relies on an assault on brown-skinned people at each and every turn of Donald Trump's autocratic screw, in presidential declarations and legal arguments that insist 'diversity' is some sort of crime perpetrated on America; instead of the opportunity that I was made to believe existed for me; a tale of equality told by countless leaders, pols, and writers from my very birth and childhood through my advanced age?
This new Jim Crow is sticking in this black man's craw. I'm an island in this country with no sovereignty.
ICE is a modern day Klu Klutz Klan comprised of good old boys who think terrorizing brown people in this country is sport - now fully sanctioned and armed by the federal government for these raids on minority communities in a nightmare that rivals the vigilante violence of the past, indistinguishable only by the official embrace and encouragement by a modern president of the United States.
I'll say this. I'll ultimately be here for y'all, so far as you show up for me.
If you have the privilege and the means, now's the time to step forward and defend your neighbors like that neighborhood in Minneapolis which broke out their whistles to warn the vulnerable among them when they saw ICE forces enter their community.
Like James Brown said...
I don't want nobody
To give me nothing
Open up the door
I'll get it myself
Do you hear me
Don't give me denegration
Give me true communication
Don't give me sorrow
I want equal opportunity
To live tomorrow
Give me schools
And give me better books
So I can read about myself
And gain my truly looks
Do you hear me now, now
Some of us try
As hard as we can
We don't want no sympathy
We just wanna be a man.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...zero communication.
Par.
Perhaps, wondering why I've been a bit scarce lately?
Or, I guess, not.
I'd leave this country if I could.
...back to my hole in the wall. 
And, bigtree, I'm so fucking sorry that it's turned out this way. When you should be enjoying your carefree older years, instead you huddle in fear at the thought of your own government. Freedom? What's that. 
...I'm looking for some reinforcement, not just talking to myself.
Thanks for that. You got it just right.
I hope for better days, and some wind in my sails.
I see you
...that means a lot.
You showed up for me when I needed it today, and it made a big difference.
Thank you
...not too much, I think, to want a little human communication from the community you've participated in for over two decades.
I posted that kicking up the thread from two pages removed, so, thanks for responding. What you wrote made a big difference, trust me.
My anxiety subsided after a few responses, but I'm a little isolated these days, and as I wrote, not at my best.
We are your allies here.
