Liberty and Justice for All at Our Beck and Call

by Ernie McCray

Hints of “Liberty and Justice for All” have come upon us suddenly like waters rushing from a broken dam, washing away long held resistance to social and political change.

How else can one explain a shift from disparaging notions such as “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” as well, to where a man can marry a man, and a woman a woman.

Legally. All across the country.

As themes of gender identity play on stage and across movie screens and on TV.

It must be the birth of new life as no one had ever seen such a sight as a White “keeper of the peace” being handcuffed and hauled off to jail for taking an unarmed Black man’s life, what with Black folks’ history with the police.

Going back in time to when they rustled us, like hounds hunting foxes, from our hiding places, as we ran from slave plantations like runaway wild horses that had been corralled much of their lives, driven by a strong desire to live free and breathe in the sweet and fresh air of a promising destiny.

And then, when what was called freedom came to fruition, the supposed upholders of the law stood between supposed freed men and women at the voting polls, armed with rifles and gasses and dogs and fire hoses, giving not a care when the bombings and burnings left their homes and places of worship and fun, and the businesses they’d run, in smoldering heaps, drowning hopes and dreams that swirled hopelessly in their souls like rag dolls in a whirlpool, aiding and abetting those who hung them by the neck in trees like empty pinatas swinging in the inhumane relentless continuous breezes of White supremacy.

But, in an atmosphere of astonishing “Glory be,” a jury of a rogue cop’s peers made a stride towards making arrears for a people’s mistreatment for hundreds of years, peering carefully at his heinously melodramatic wrongdoings and pronounced him, if there is such a thing, guilty as sin.

Oh, the rushing waters are baptismal in their power, giving rise to growing realizations that new ways of living can exist if we persist.

And we can’t resist wondering, as we heave deep sighs of relief in our state of shocked disbelief, what’s next in this miraculous awakening, this new hope inspiring reality?

And the answer is before our very eyes, in the form of the younger generations who add, to the good work already in place, new ways of thinking and being with life altering technologies that, in a click of a mouse, widen pathways and connections between us unlike any melding of purposes ever known or seen, re-inventing democracy into something that can adequately serve our collective needs.

But we older citizens still have to keep our eyes on the prize and, from our historical experiences based on our age alone, get our two cents in, but what’s coming next in our quest for human decency is, fundamentally, now in the hands of our children who:

capture who we are with the photo apps on their cell phones,

who take to the streets in throngs to make right our plethora of wrongs,

who write and voice their visions of a better world in award winning songs.

They make the potential of liberty and justice for all less a hint and more an ideal

that’s at our beck and call.

From now on.