burn, baby, burn...

I am not an American person of color...I will not, and really cannot, claim to know your anger if you are reading this...I do know of religious hatred...and have been at the receiving end of antisemitism...but I can hide my Jewish identity behind my married last name that is most often thought of as Italian, instead of Russian origin...as I could hide behind my maiden name...one created by my father and uncle in their early adulthood...hoping to blend in like Hellman's mayonnaise into the white, Christian fifties...but I know from the history of my people...with every fiber of my being...that I can be a High Holy Day Jew...or daily observant...or one who walks away from it all...and it would not matter...as when my ancestors were lined up outside trains bound for crematoriums...2020...our country is burning...and crumbling under the weight of collective amnesia...here we are again...this time protestors are masked...crawling out of covid confinement...the anguish palpable...the situation flowing coast to coast...like lighter fluid...and I don't have any answers...I thought we had reached the bottom of the 2020 rabbit hole when I saw the food lines in Corona...and a mile away...this is not a rabbit hole...it's an abyss...a visual indictment of why our fellow Americans of color cannot escape the grip of institutionalized poverty and incarceration...but mostly it comes down to this...that every day when a black man walks the street...there's that invisible target on his back...it's a bullseye born of hatred and fear...passed down from generation to generation...Rest in Peace, George Floyd...