"I, too, sing America"

    ("I, too, sing America..."from my inspiration board...artwork by Bryan Collier

                                  quote by Langston Hughes)

I have thought long and hard about writing this post...but my outrage + grief is sitting in the pit of my stomach and weighing down my heart. I am angry, pissed, boiling with rage. You see...my husband is as American as apple pie but I am Canadian so even though I live here in the U.S. I am largely an outsider; a spectator in many ways. I was not socialised or educated here. So...a lot of times when I observe certain things...I simply can't understand. A few weeks ago when we all started hearing about the Trayvon Martin case down in Florida...I, like so many of us, simply failed to see how this could happen. Here was  a child ( a child, people...a child) who was walking home carrying some candy and an ice tea and he gets shot and killed by an adult. Now the incredulous thing to me is that the police fail to arrest the man who did this!!! After we hear all the chilling 911 calls ...and the Sanford Police won't arrest Zimmerman????? Say what???? They cite that Zimmerman was "defending himself" as per the Stand Your Ground law in Florida. Oh yeah...even when Zimmerman clearly says on the 911 call that he is the one following the youth????

Not only that...but they don't do  a background check on Zimmerman but they do one on the 17 year old boy??? And...they don't contact Treyvon's parents for 3 days???? Here's the sad truth...Treyvon Martin wasn't killed because he was wearing a hoodie (I wear one everyday)...or because he was "suspicious" (he was walking home talking to his girlfriend on his cell) but...he was killed because he was a young Black male. That part is painfully obvious to me. It's the same reason the Sanford Police Dept. treated the case as they did. And the real tragedy of this situation is that this beautiful child will never see his 18th birthday.

I thought long and hard before I wrote this post...Oh!! this is my blog about art and inspiration and...I shouldn't get poitical and...but I spent the first 13 years of my life under a Nazi Government (otherwise known as apartheid South Africa), my husband and daughter are African American ...and this hits too close to home for me...as  a wife, a mother, a human being. We are failing our children if we don't speak up...tomorrow it could be my child that is shot down because she looks "suspicious". Or yours. This is wrong...this has to stop; we can make a difference. If you want to sign the petition to get justice for this little boy...you can go here ; it's a call for Zimmerman's arrest.
Dear Trayvon; you have worked your way into my heart with your beautiful smiling innocent face. You loved baking chocolate chip cookies, playing video games and you wanted to go into aviation. Under the U.S. constitution...you have the unequivocal right to justice. You, too, sing America.