He should be alive, surely.
They all should, those men killed for their Little Trees. Those children killed for a bag of Skittles.
But America is poisoned to its core by racism and genocide. The killing of black men and women isn’t happenstance or accident. It is the Machine working as it was meant to—crushing the breath out of Black Lives. And getting away with it.
Mostly.
Until today.
3 guilty verdicts.
It’s not enough, of course. It absolves us of nothing. But it is a necessary step toward a future that seemed like it might never be more than a dream.
Guilty is a resurrection. Guilty is an electric jolt reviving all us white folx about to drift back into complacency.
This isn’t over.
Guilty is a battle cry.
Because even though this isn’t justice (how can it be when George Floyd is an ancestor way before his time?), it is the piercing hope that justice can be the force that guides us forward.
But it will not come with out a fight.