The Little Girl

There is nothing more moving to me than daughters…I have two of them, and remember so well their priceless moments. I was very protective of my little girls, as much as I could be. I am still a little guilt ridden because I was so busy being a coach, a Principal, that sometimes I think I carried my work home with me.

And then we lost their mother.

Suddenly the world turned upside down. To lose a spouse to breast cancer, over an eight year period about broke me.

My little girls grew up knowing that their mother would probably not see her grandchildren.

She did live long enough to see her niece, but that was about it.

And now, I ache to see the family of the man, George Floyd who was murdered by choking in Minneapolis by the police.

His little girl is 6 year old. My daughters were about 16 and 12 when they learned their mother was dying.

How do you explain to a little girl that their father was murdered? How do you explain that to a little girl?

I had to do basically that for 8 years. We all knew for at least five of those years that their mother was not going to live into old age, miss their weddings (she missed one of my daughter’s weddings), missed her four grandchildren being born.

The right wing loves to marginalize these tragedies. Every death from the pandemic, every death at the hands of racist police, affects families and friends forever. They try to marginalize the pandemics death as relative to say, Cancer Deaths. They lose me right there!

My great great grandfather was a Cherokee. He was lynched in north Texas by a mob, led by Confederate Soldiers, because he allegedly stole a white man’s horse. He was the village blacksmith, and did not steal the horse he was working on it. In those days an Indian who was caught with a shod horse could be hung as a horse thief no matter what.

My great great grandfather also was married to a white woman.

An Indian married to a white woman did not go over well in Texas…still doesn’t.

And that “still doesn’t” is the rub. Tragic deaths, like the over 100,000 we now suffer from the pandemic and climbing, are not mere pebbles in the sand, they cannot be minimized with fake statistics or relatively…

It is easy to be relative if it isn’t your loved one.

Over 40,000 women die of breast cancer every year. That is about 1/2 of those who have died of the pandemic in three months…and there is no relativity here at all…none.

All there is, is…..pain, and suffering and agony for the rest of one’s life.

It has been over 20 years and I still feel the pain, my daughters don’t like to talk about it.

That is because we are people, not statistics. Black Lives Matter…Each Life Matters…Each one.

That is what differs us from brutes, we care, we can have empathy for loss.

Our President does not have that ability. He just doesn’t…

And we remember…We shall not forget….We Shall Overcome!

We need to remember as human beings the wrongs of slavery, the genocide of Native Americans in our own county, the prejudice against Asians, the ugliness of white supremacy.

The ugliness and wrongness of that band of Confederates who hung my great great grandfather, we shall remember…WE SHALL REMAIN…

When I finally heard that truth I was glad that I devoted my working life to helping others. I was revitalized and teach classes on racism and prejudice and the Native American Experience.

And I do it for my little girls!