It doesn’t matter whether you live in New York or Missouri,
Whether you’re “black” or “white,”
Whether you’re Conservative or Liberal…
When you hear a man say, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,
you feel compassion.
And in your compassion, there is some space, even the tiniest of spaces, that says:
Something is wrong here.
When you watch him die–there on the sidewalk, outside a convenience store, while a friend films the scene, it doesn’t matter whether you saw him as a man or a black or a father or a criminal–you feel grief.
And in that grief, in the space that comes before pointing fingers and assigning blame, you hear:
There’s another way.
Together, we must find it.
Because really it doesn’t matter who we think Eric Garner is, it matters who we are.