Question: what are you willing to die for?
Slaves who wanted freedom FOUGHT TO THE DEATH. They were willing to die. THEY understood that the life they had was no life at all. So they resisted. Violently. Often. Don’t let white folks have you outchea thinking that enslaved people were peaceful. Freedom requires bloodshed.
Pain. A spirit of “I am not afraid.”
I am not afraid.
Because death is better than this.
Death is better than this. That’s the sentiment that is missing in the movement. We only want to talk about it, beg, cry, and cajole the system for mercy.
We don’t want freedom, then. We just WANT WHAT THEY HAVE.
Get free or die trying — or whatever Patrick Henry was talmbout. Or was that 50 cent? Either way—freedom is the goal. Not replacement.
There are two enemies inside the “system” that we are up against: escapism and busyness.
Escapism is to close oneself off into a superficial world of cultural fluff with total disregard to weightier matters. Here we find voracious consumers of celebrity news, excessive drug use, consumerism, and the like. The goal is to figure out ways to escape real thinking and change in one’s self that bleeds over into lack of regard or concern for community.
Busyness is the related but slightly different idea of doing without result or product in mind. Doing for the sake of. The bulks of jobs,school work, and life tasks are ultra time consuming. Making doctors appointments, challenging invoices, checking credit reports, filing paperwork to enroll in school, doing taxes, work meetings,and the like eat up your time and drain you of energy.
Then all you want to do is escape the misery of your reality for a while before having to jump back on the hamster wheel of doing all that you need to do to “live”.
Death is better than this.
This is capitalism.
This is America.
You can be rich inside this system. It’s easy! Just have zero regard for humanity. Money will flow like rivers because that is what this system is designed to do: disregard humanity. But if you want to uphold humanity, strive for excellence, and fight for what is right and true? You gotta be prepared for death.
Death of your relationships.
Death of your finances.
Death of your previously held beliefs.
Death of your ability to accumulate stuff.
Death of your desire to live life as a cis-het able bodied white man/woman.
Death of your physical self.
When you are no longer AFRAID of death, you can truly live AND bring change to the community around you.
I’m pretty sure that one? That one is Biggie: Ready to Die. Get into it.
Step out of the system.
And then what?
Well. Stepping out of what you’ve always known—as horrible as it is—is still quite daunting. But it must be done.
My personal choice is and has always been following the will of God. I say that now knowing full well I haven’t always done and even now sometimes struggle to do—but it’s the choice I’ve made. To step out of a system designed to malign me and into one designed to free me, justify me. Lol—even as some would use it it to enslave me again.
Crazy how freedom is such a fight, innit?
And still. Jesus is also that ancestor who gave His life so that I might be free. That I’d strive for it, press towards it, looking to Him as the blueprint on how I get to it.
Freedom.
Happy Juneteenth.
Kisha Creates 