As the Bubble Bursts

Have you ever watched a bubble? You blow it into existence--big, iridescent, wobbly...free. And it bounces through the air, adrift to whatever the future holds, until it reaches a certain point.

Maybe the oxygen decreases. Maybe the atmospheric pressure increased. Maybe a bubble just wasn't meant to last forever. But it reaches a point where you can literally see the edges beginning to disappear, thinning to a point of translucent nothingness, yet it still exists. All color gone, just a fragile shell of its initial beauty.

And then, POP! Its frame shatters into a million particles and no matter how many times you hoped it would last, there's something eerily alluring, mesmerizing, beguiling, even, about watching it burst at the very last second.

I watched this happen last night, in my daughter's eyes, as I explained to her a G-rated version of the #georgefloyd travesty.

How sometimes people hate other people because of the color of their skin.

How you are just as guilty for standing by and watching but not stopping the person doing something wrong or by not going to get someone else who can.

How people are angry and doing bad things for the wrong reasons.

Pop.

I could see the questions zipping through her mind. All the confusion and unimaginable reality. The whys and hows and trying to grasp at some semblance of an example in her own life to piece this together. But she couldn't.

I tell stories for a living. Benefits, experiences, activations, memories, incarnate mere words into tangible consumption. Yet, I simply had to deliver this raw and concisely.

And her dear heart, with no ability to empathize as a white, young, girl--just simply as a human being--asked with tears welling up in her big blue eyes, "Is he okay?"

Pop.

What do you say? African-Americans are rightly angry, exhausted, hopelessly working toward change that maintains unreachable heights. Whites are cautious so as not to offend, hesitant, which reads as complacent or complicit, and divided between sympathetic supporters and sociopathic supremacists.

Change is eminent, a path that must be forcibly traversed, yet inexplicably forks to a singular goal of freedom and peace. We must ask ourselves, do we choose to reach that end peacefully or at the reminiscent hands of a merciless civil war.

"No, sweetie. The man, Mr. George Floyd, died. And the police officers, even the ones who weren't hurting him, are all in very big trouble and lost their jobs. Do you understand?"

She shook her head, "I don't, Mommy."

Pop went her innocence and my heart.

Nobody does, my sweet girl. Nobody does.

#compassion #honesty #communication #dialogue #wemustdobetter