#malcolm harsh

Two black men found hanging from trees within days of one another, only an hour's drive between the two locations, and cops are trying to pass both off as suicides.

How do you handle your very existence being a crime?

If driving, just driving, gets you pulled over, how do you bring yourself to get in the car? If playing outside might get you beaten, how could you ever leave your house? When your unconscious body might be cause for lethal force – how would you sleep? How do you go about your days, knowing that you might be killed at any moment, for something you can’t control?

To be fair, at any moment, we all might die. Struck by lightning, hit by a car, old age – we cannot control any of those, yet we go on despite knowing that living brings us closer to dying. But those are random. The whim of entropy, applied to all of us in equal measure.

But there are those who are special in the worst possible way, for society has conspired over centuries to play the cruelest joke at their expense. They are uniquely qualified to die, or suffer, or both, in all manner of horrid ways, for – what, having a darker skin tone? Being female? Not matching their birth certificate? And if they happen to be more than one kind of special, their agony multiplies?

Aside from the variation inherent to the human experience, there is no marked difference between them and the ones who are left alone. But they are not left alone. They are bruised and battered and bent until you snap, and then their very retaliation is used against you. If attempting to correct this unfairness is dismissed as trying to get the upper hand, if resistance in any form is discouraged, and if protest is silenced, one way or another–

How does one go on?

…I ask because I don’t know. I am “uniquely qualified” in more ways than one, lucky enough to have never personally experienced the worst, but I have heard and read and felt so much. So many, dead or shattered, the only difference between them and me being time and place.

And I am angry, and weary, and afraid. Afraid that my luck will run out, and I will stare down the barrel of a gun I saw coming to no one’s surprise but my own.

So, to anyone who might know the answer: