The Billboards are up on Crenshaw Blvd and also La Brea #NOTMENOTNOW Fight Back Against All Oppression No human being deserves to be disrespected or abused – not physically, mentally or emotionally. We live in a society populated with warm and loving people. Yet it is often the atrocities and human causalities that capture our attention. Aided by the media, the lenses through which we view the world are shaded by darkness and fear. Fear and ignorance is the incubator where racism, homophobia, sexism, HIV stigma and other ills are allowed to grow and fester. Today, with the advent of social media, the sharing of information in rapid real time allows people everywhere to see the unspeakable atrocities that happen around the world. We are no longer limited to our small microcosm on the planet. We see the gassing of innocent children in Syria, the bombings of civilians in Paris and Germany. We experience shocking shootings of students in schools around the country. I hear the sirens, the helicopters, and the gunfire. I see teenage mothers in increasing numbers. I see them struggling to rear children, and in far too many cases, doing the best they can with what they have been given. When we pause and consider that many of them have been handed down a legacy of mental and emotional illness, plus under-reported physical and sexual abuse, it is not surprising that they too will spread the disease of rage, violence and neglect. Homicide within communities of color and now in middle class suburbia can only be explained as the byproduct of injustice. Racism is the soil in which poverty, dysfunctional child rearing, peer bulling and all...
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