What to Philando Castile is the Fourth of July?

Remembering the life I saw cut down on Facebook Live with the post I made for the mourning after.

July 6, 2016 — By the time you’re reading this you would have learned that another black body lies dead, riddled with bullet holes following a confrontation with the police. This time, it was over a broken taillight.

You will see his blood — lots of it.

You will see the nervous, now shaking hands of the police shooter with his gun still trained on him as if he will, by some magical power, rise from his slumped position in the car seat, already near-death, to harm him.

While waiting, his girlfriend talks to the officer — in essence, re-telling the moments which led to the taking of this life, over, and over, and over again.

“I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hand out …” said the officer.

“You told him to get his I.D., sir, his driver’s license,” she said.

He had told the officer that he had a license to carry.

But, that seems like ancient history in the almost ten minutes of Facebook Live video — the longest of my life — now deleted.

You will hear her prayers. You will hear her cries. She will ask for her child. They will handcuff her. They will seat her in the back of a patrol car with her daughter.

“I’m scared,” her daughter, a toddler who witnessed the shooting from the backseat of the car says.

You’ll hear her daughter try to comfort her, “It’s okay Mommy.”

Losing her cool, “I can’t believe they just did this,” her mother says to no one in particular.

“It’s okay, I’m right here with you,” says the toddler — the toddler y’all. A toddler.

But it’s not okay little one. And I don’t know if things will ever, ever be okay for you ever again.

Dear mostly black Facebook friends, despite however “woke” you may be, you will search for details before being convinced that his death was undeserving. Because this is the burden of blackness: To always be guilty until proven innocent. And even when not proven guilty to always, always, always have people be suspicious of you. To raise the ire of the blue veil and to have even the youngest, most innocent of black lives less precious than a black gorilla’s.

You will rationalize why President Obama is yet silent. You’ll write in the comments of this post about the limits of his office. And you’ll “tell” me about the limits of Federal power and about states’ rights. You will not want to talk about the fact that his presidency is directly tied to this open season on black bodies, spirits, and lives, and that his inability to merely utter “Black Lives Matter” says more than the silence of any or all of my white Facebook friends.

Today, you will cower when a co-worker, direct supervisor, or president/CEO says some asinine thing hateful enough to make you think they’re just stupid, when they are part-and-parcel of the racist system that makes white terror okay, and black lives not matter in the same way in which white lives do.

You will try to keep from going off.

You are trying to keep your job.

I understand.

Like me, you will try to feel safe even when you truly are not — because surely by now, you now know that “it” can happen in your city, in your community, to someone you know, and to you. Because an open-carry permit, and due process, and all lives matter are each conditional if you are not white and male, with added privileges to those middle- and upper-class, and throw in some for those cisgender.

Still, you will try to get through your day without being drawn again and again to the image of a bloody black body who was once somebody’s somebody. But you won’t be able to resist the chipping away at your soul.

The media will tell you the story of every misdeed the body ever did. They got a jump start on it during the wee hours of the morning. And by daylight, the morning and mourning will commence anew with a new hashtag for a taken life.

Good “mourning.” #PhilandoCastile