So uhh…what now?

This past week was a long one, filled with some of the worst kind of vitriolic hate speech I’ve seen on the internet. Mind-numbing expressions from people most of us will never meet speaking on experiences they can’t understand. To interpolate the words of Young Jeezy from the third track of his debut album, “If you a [troll] and you know it, fuck you.”

It’s been a rough week to be a young American, it’s been a tough few years to be a young, black American. We were supposed to inherit hope and to take the baton from our freedom-fighting and policy-defining forefathers and run with it. Instead it seems like the passing of the baton has been replete with bumpy portions of the track, outright executions in making the pass or hurdles that seem to spring up from thin air.

It’s frustrating to have to get to know the life and times of another dead black person because of a video. To learn the ins and outs of their family, of the law enforcement agency that took that life, the community where it took place. It’s not just that these hashtags pop up and are used as fodder in the days, weeks and months that follow it’s that they are seemingly adding to a canon of black death at the hands of stressed, often overworked, sometimes inexperienced, sometimes racist law enforcement officers.

I talk to cops on a weekly and sometimes daily basis because of my job. I know what they do is difficult, I know the toll it takes. It can be a whirlwind of emotion and training is necessary and effective but is not something that can eliminate human error.

But when human error leads men to make brash decisions that lead to someone’s life ending — innocent or guilty — without a chance for that person to answer for their deeds there’s a problem.

When hateful individuals strike and kill the very people meant to protect others there’s a problem.

And I guess that brings me back to square one of why it’s difficult to truly express feelings about this. No one looks spotless, no one is without blame. But that’s always where we keep the conversation. There has to be a person to take the blame, we have to ascribe fault somewhere when ultimately numerous systems are sufficiently fucked up and there’s no productive conversation, there’s no fresh tactical ideas, there’s no funding or policy documentations to create legitimate change.

While mourning the lost lives of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the lives of those Dallas police officers and the NYPD officers about two years ago and thinking of the others we’ve lost it’s also chilling to remember that we’re only about a month removed from the horrific Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

We’re days removed from a flurry of fatal bombings and attacks in Bangladesh, Iraq and Istanbul.

And depending on where you’re from (Miami in my case) your community has likely dealt with the untimely death of teenagers, of innocent bystanders due to gun violence, accidents or plain negligence. I think of the lives of children that have died in South Florida like Marlon Eason, Richard Hallman, King Carter, Roderick Sweeting and far too many others and I wonder why I’m lucky enough to be here typing this.

Segments of our public bloviation machine will tell you it’s because I’m a humble, modest and well-spoken black kid who’s stayed out of trouble. But that’s bullshit and shouldn’t be the thing that enables someone to violate civil rights and take life.

And even when someone fits that magic mix of personality traits and is compliant with the law, we see that it can still lead to tragedy.

So I guess I write all this to clear my head and also admit that all I want to do is hug my parents tighter, to report to them every time I make it through a weekend of going out or hanging with friends. Every time I make it home from work or a trip to the grocery store. Because I don’t want them to worry and I don’t know if those trips are guaranteed to happen without issue.

I want to hug my younger cousins and wish for them the kind of young adulthood where they might not have to deal with the same issues we were told were in the past.

I want to scream for every family that’s had to deal with these losses, for every cop that’s had to suffer a hit to their reputation, for every public servant or community organizer that wonders what they can say that’s meaningful.

And I want to scream at every person that needs to wait for all the facts to come in, or wants to justify death by conflating a poor driving record or previous arrests with the incident that got someone killed. The person who thinks, given the history of our country, that I am someone speaking a foreign language when I suggest that black people need affirmation of their lives being significant beyond our impact on popular culture and enabling white co-eds to call themselves “Trap Queens” or to “dab on them folk.”

Every single life on this green and blue earth matters but, in this 240-year-old country, members of one of the most visible and vocal minorities still have to wonder if the playing field will ever be even close to even.

I sympathize with the LGBTQ brothers and sisters who are left out of movements, I appreciate the allegiance and support of my Latinx, Asian and White friends. I recognize that our experiences, no matter how similar, will never truly be the same.

And ultimately I keep hoping that the gains we’ve made continue to grow and we can bridge some of the gaps Black leaders talked about more than half a century ago:

“There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality…We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one…We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” —excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech