THESE ARE NOT
COMPLAINTS.
THESE ARE
MOVEMENTS.
BY ANTHONY ZARZYCKI
It is my father’s generation celebrating an
apparent end of civil rights movements.
Even my peers believe they have drawn
to a close and social liberality concluded.
Sadly, I have seen no commentator
dismiss this dangerous falsehood.
My father’s generation tarnished those
who rallied in pride and called them
‘faggots’ as my grandfather’s tarnished
those in Salem and named them
‘negroes’. My great grandfather’s era
tarnished those who bore the banner of
suffrage and titled them ‘destroyers of the
family’ and it would only be miraculous
if the activists of our century are not
labeled in slander, the same way, as
‘liberal’ or ‘Millennials’.
It is in every generation that civil rights
appear completed until others bring to
light the struggles of fellow brothers and
sisters.
I bear those admonishes, and urge others
to as well, without hesitation, for the
fabric of freedom is not tarnished by the
people who strive to eradicate it but by
the people who struggled in raising it.
It is the Bible which reads the poor shall
inherit the Earth, and in the same, those
who toil today are tomorrow’s forefathers.
The forbearers of human betterment have
never been—and can never be—the
powerful, the minute, but the multitudes of
voices which proclaim Providence for
more, not less.
The fight for fair voter representation
—without the need of wealth or
superfluous barriers,
the fight for economic freedom—for the
‘necessitous man’ to earn the right to
human decency,
the fight for climate justice—to defend the
well-being of future generations,
those are the shadows materializing,
among many others, from the fog of war
that is the new civil rights battlefield.
Freedom is a legacy birthed to us by our
forefathers but it is a prophecy which is not
so easily granted, and it is only when we
choose to march on these issues we will
fulfill it.
But why see these slurs as praise?
Because in the same way that our
ancestors spoke those wicked insults,
which pain even in reading like hot iron,
in order to dilapidate people speaking
truth to power are, inevitably, the
historical remnants that remind us of so
many peoples’ struggles. It is the cultural
monument of the wrongs we must
commit nevermore.
RISE
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