Food thoughts on hold for a bit. Recent events have stolen my appetite.
What a summer of devastation it’s been. July seemed to stretch on in an unending string of carnage and tragedy. August has been little better.
This weekend Michael Brown, another, yet another, young black man was shot and killed by the police. He was 18, a young one still new to the world set to start college this week. Knowing that tiny detail about him, and his moves toward the future, and his mother’s wishes for him, made him come alive in my mind, even as I was reading about his death. I have a good sense what the official response will be, once the investigation is done, and there is no version of the events that will add up in my mind such that Michael Brown had to be killed on Saturday night.
There’s senseless tragedy, and then there’s injustice borne of conscious, violent disregard for the value of other people’s lives. Both are wretched, but the latter is beyond my knowing how to tolerate. The ability to see other human beings as just as human as we ourselves seems like elementary work, but it’s where we are.