Ruby Bridges is 67.

Many of the racist white folks threatening to kill a six year old girl for being a black child attending a previously segregated school are still alive right now. They’re grandparents and great-grandparents who taught their kids, who are parents and grandparents now themselves, all the same things they believe in but won’t discuss in public because there are (sometimes) consequences for being an outspoken racist.

There’s a sickness in society, in my community, and it isn’t gay kids or critical race theory. There’s a pathological lack of empathy that’s growing more resolute in its delusional self-righteousness and denial. And it will be the death of us.

See, hit dogs holler, and a whole lot of y’all have been howling since people took to the streets in ‘20. It isn’t hard to do that math, even if you yourself can’t add past your toes. I was here, I watched you come sprinting when the dog whistles were blown. I watched you drooling rabidly over the damage inflicted on black and brown people, on the bodies of those who dared to resist the police state. You hooted and howled and made your boasts to your likeminded peers. “Let them come here! I’ll run them over/shoot them!” The buildings and merchandise mattered more than the message. Mattered more than the evidence, than the agony, than the trauma, because you could use it to deny them justice. You could use it to justify, in your head, continuing to deny them their humanity. Property and profit over people. The gleeful delight you took (take?) in their suffering is horrifying.

I know I’m screaming into emptiness. I know. I’m not nice enough, I use too many words, I’m too angry, I cuss. Pick any combination of an infinite number of reasons to glaze over and move on. There are so many big pieces that all fold into this mess, and I can’t fucking let it go. I struggle every day with the ever-dawning realization of how horrible so many people are so comfortable being. I don’t get it. I don’t get why we worship psychopathy. I can’t make it make sense, because the dissonance does not exist.

Ruby Bridges isn’t even 70 yet, the Nazis used our Jim Crow laws as a playbook, MLK and Anne Frank were the same age, Fred Hampton was murdered for reaching across race lines and uniting the working class. It’s a willful and malicious delusion to pretend the monster is dead, because it’s easier and more comfortable to be angry, reactive, and violent than humble. Easier to yell than listen.

We’re all on the same bus, you and I are just sitting at the front being told by the driver that the folks we keep in the back are our enemies. Keeps us from realizing where the bus is headed, and dethroning the driver. The bitch of it is, though, that you’d have to want to change course and share your seat, and so fucking many of you don’t. Because you believe the driver. Because you really are a modern overseer, doing the dirty work the moneyed folks are too good to do. Because you believe they’re like you, that you can be like them too.

I know plenty of you would fight the driver if you could see the truth, and that gives me hope. I believe you’d change if you could overcome your fear of growing pains. Because it is uncomfortable. Because you’d have to sit next to the people you’ve harmed, whether you knew it or not. Whether you had a choice or not. You’d have to acknowledge and admit your privilege, that your success was hard earned and still made easier by virtue of your skin color. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, avoiding that discomfort is often more important than being a decent human. Which is cowardice.

So, here we are at this bus stop in the part of town that taught me how a society that burns books is one rabid lynch mob away from burning people. It’s in my town. And every time I log in to Facebook I’m reminded of how close to home this stop has always been. So, again, if you ever find yourself believing that burning the witch is the right and good thing to do, forget I exist. Because I see you. It’s a pattern of behavior, and I see you in it and it concerns me deeply.

And yet. Ruby Bridges lives in New Orleans and runs The Ruby Bridges Foundation, because she knows that patterns can be broken. It just takes courage and support. Should your soul and conscience develop, revivify, or discover themselves once again in the depths of your being, and you find yourself at a bus stop in a town that no longer feels like home, you’re not alone. There are plenty of us here trying to find our way back to community and decency. I haven’t given up. You’ve got to be the change, right? It’s dark as fuck on this bus but I look at my kids and see light.