wiz!
Here is a Georgia State Trooper in riot gear at a KKK protest in a north Georgia city back in the 80s. The Trooper is black. Standing in front of him and touching his shield is a curious little boy dressed in a Klan hood and robe. I have stared at this picture and wondered what must have been going through that Trooper’s mind. Before the Trooper is an innocent child who is being taught to hate him because of the color of his skin. The child doesn’t understand what he is being taught, and at this point he doesn’t seem to care. Like any other child his curiosity takes hold and he wants to explore this new thing that this man is holding probably because he can see his reflection in it and that’s a neat thing and he wants to check it out. In this picture I see innocence mixed with hate, the irony of a black man protecting the right of white people to assemble in protest against him, temperance in the face of ignorance, and hope that racism can be broken because this young boy may remember that a black man smiled at him once and he didn’t seem so bad after all.
READ THIS AND PASS IT ON!
So I work in a Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for the Elderly and I’ve been visiting this one woman in particular on a regular basis. Her name is Annie and she’s 98 years old. She is honestly one of the most wonderful people I have met and I truly believe it was fate that brought us together. She needed me because all of the family she has left lives too far away to visit and she was becoming incredibly lonely and she has taught me so much already. So today, she was telling me about her mother. She told me that she owes everything to her. Her mother raised her to love everyone equally and she has lived by that religiously. As such she has never been quick to judge and would love just about anyone before so much as learning their name. As she was telling me about this my heart lightened because I noticed something I had overlooked in past conversations. See Annie has arthritis, she’s had it since she was my age (in her 20’s), only now it’s much worse. For the most part she can still use both of her thumbs, pointer fingers and pinkies but the middle finger and ring finger on both hands are pinned down into her palms constantly. (See the picture above.) For those of you who do not know, this is the sign (in American Sign Language) for “I love you.” As soon as she had finished her story I told her this. Glancing back and forth between her fingers and my fingers, as they shaped themselves to mimic hers, she began to tear up and a HUGE smile spread across her face. She told me that she believes everything happens for a reason, that her hands could have been frozen in any other shape. And I have to agree. Annie, the woman who was taught to love first as questions later, will probably go out one day, her last words spelled out in her arthritic fingers, “I love you.”
