As I sit here on another night of the travesties that are occurring in Baltimore and around our nation, I wonder why is it that I am so engulfed in this? Why am I willing to turn on the news and listen to the Baltimore police scanner every night to see how things are going?
Is it because it is in Baltimore, close to home and a city that I love, have visited frequently and have wonderful memories of?
Or is it because I am angry with myself because up until violence broke out two Saturdays ago I was only faintly aware of what was going on in the Freddie Gray situation. Not because I didn't care, but because I realized that I have become complacent, because it has become such commonplace to hear about this kind of situation that I wrote it off.
That scares me. I am white, I grew up middle class, I grew up in the country so one would assume that I can sympathize with this situation, but I also grew up struggling middle class, with a single parent, an absentee father and a strong-willed mind.
I am all for the right to bear arms, but I am also pro-gay marriage. While I truly believe in welfare reform, I believe in legalizing marijuana. While I believe in immigration control, I am also pro-choice. While I believe in the death penalty I believe in leniency for minor, nonviolent drug offenses.
I am an independent. I do not have to identify with a particular party to prove who I am. My mother, grandmother, grandfather and family raised me to be an independent thinker, to lead and not to follow, to lead by example, not follow in the footsteps of others, to believe in myself and my thoughts, think for myself and stand for what I believe in, right, wrong or indifferent.
In a time when our country is in such dire straits we need to stop playing the he-said, she-said game. We need to stop blaming each other, the politicians, the police, poverty, color, race, education, etc., and we need to start blaming ourselves for the selfishness that has overtaken all of us.
I spent some time recently trying to explain to my son what was going on in Baltimore and why it was happening, and the best I could say was that even though a human body is the same physiologically and that the only difference between us and a black person was the amount of melanin in our skin, I still found myself struggling with how I was supposed to explain to him that even though that was the case we still as a country could not let go of something so simple as a different color crayon in the box.
How and when will this end? When will we recognize, identify and react to not just the racial divide, but the social divide, the education divide, the employment divide, the injustice divide.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it takes the nation's people to raise a country. We need to take care of us all and make ourselves the strong, solid nation that other countries fear but at the same time wish to be like.
When will we realize as a society that all lives matter, not black lives, not police, not white, all lives period? It is not God, not the media, not the law but what truly is in your heart that will begin to make a change.
Barbara Dunn-Tomasco, Flemington, N.J.