OP-ED: How Are You Doing?( continued)
the emotional dam holding in our living pain to burst through the coping line.
You know that line. The one that once we get pushed across it, people will expect and understand when we say we are not fine; too obvious for us to hide it then. And why do we have to get to broken for us to finally claim the right to say I am not fine? To realize we as a collective cannot see our necks stepped on repeatedly and be fine? Can we look each other in the eye and say: I cannot be fine because my life is not valued in a home where I am treated sub-humanly and forced to occupy a protected structure of financial oppression, suffocating marginalization, and racist misremembering?
While we paint a smile over the living anguish that we could be next, those that could make laws to limit access to weapons of destruction, who could revamp institutions such as our police forces, instead are now using their elected positions to brazenly make sure their children never know what was done to us. Why do we live in pain? Why so much of our life, energy, and focus are spent fighting for the rights to health, shelter, freedom, expression, self-definition, fair access, equality, difference … breath.
While we struggle to sustain / gain access to basic rights of being in America, the gatekeepers work steadily to concentrate their power into wealth and to maintain the status quo for their offspring and their offspring’ s offspring. While we beg in agony like Tyre to be treated like we are humans who belong to this country, and to claim a stake in the institutions founded on our backs, seventeen states are currently working with the fervor of a hyper-fertilized weed to plant more poisoned seeds of systematic institutional self-destruction. Beyond the rifle, baton, and taser, we also are being mass murdered with a legislative gun.
I need to hurry and finish this draft. If I take too much longer, there may be more names added to this list: Eric, George, Breonna, Tyre … strangers who feel like family I have lost. Strangers who feel like, but for chance, could be my cousin or my neighbor or you, my coworker.
Cultural norms do not erase the pain we bear / wear / fear. Let’ s coax all the reluctant amongst us to learn to share more authentically. Since many of our tribes are still hesitant or opposed to dealing with mental health, or often don’ t have the power to access, even when they embrace it.
We have to keep our eyes on each other. Such as vicious cycle: poor mental health contributes to violence and violence contributes to poor mental health. It doesn’ t matter which comes first, the devastation is still the same. Let’ s break the cycle. Let’ s stop saying“ I’ m fine”, and we just keeping it moving.
How are you doing? I really want to know. How am I doing, you ask? Let’ s see, where do I start …
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 40