"WHO ARE WE?"

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The mountains stood tall and the wind surrounded me in a bellow

Compact enough to engulf me in streams of odd discomfort

I’ve worked hard to see the beauty of this land

The one my ancestors died for

Tilling the ground, picking cotton, beaten, raped, stolen, lynched

Surviving on hopes and a belief so strong in God it made slavery look like a joke

Bearing generations to stand for the inevitability of human rights...

How dare we parade and spit on the richest heritage ever known to man?

We ail and ache, complain and woe

When we were taught how to be strong

When from our lineage one woman sat on a bus,

One man had a dream of a world that knew no color, only love.

One woman whose underground operation saved lives

And the stories of many we will never know that died so we could be here today.

Let's not forget the biggest sacrifice of them all

The one who was crucified on a tree so we could be free of our sins, so we could live…even as vile as we are

Somehow this mountain isn't big enough to contain the backs of this our history

Yet we hate each other,

we commit murder with our words,

we bury each other in graves with our voices

And the hate in our hearts, destructive as a tsunami, crashing the borders of a helpless island, in no defense of itself

But we are magic?

No! We are BULLIES!

And frankly, I am drained.

And no river is big enough or wide enough to make us clean.

And we will continue cycling a history every year that we honestly don't respect, for a moment to tell the world we are magic.

This was not the dream Martin Luther King had. This is not the hope JESUS CHRIST SHED BLOOD FOR?

It means so much more. So much more.

Somehow the liberation of mankind took somebody else’s life so we could live

I REALLY NEED TO SIT WITH THAT!

YOU TOO!

Kerique Hoo-Kim