I faintly remember a news broadcast that would start every report with the line, while you were sleeping.  It was an update of news events that had happened overnight while the majority of us were lulled away in a state of rest.  I was reminded of that this week as we began the process of repairing our nearly breached and broken democracy. It was indeed a while you were sleeping moment.

Getting our current President into the White House was a journey unlike any we’d seen to date.  Four years earlier, many were lulled by the blunt, crass and often insulting words of a reality TV show host and failed business man.  Choosing not to exercise their own right to vote.  Choosing not to educate themselves on local and national issues and choosing not to participate in the democratic process, they instead chose to shout at their TV’s.  Their shouts were aroused by a then novice Republican candidate who tapped into the sentiment of a large majority of the American public that thought all politicians were crooks as if they were powerless to do anything about it.  That novice candidate, road his reality TV training into the hearts and minds of many Americans that had only conceded to the pressures of One Nation Under God, but never agreed.

They found for themselves a representative who would later foster a cult leader mentality and following of people who felt the country had been stolen from them by the browning of America.  Its not just an election they have issue with but the country itself.  Its their right to humiliate, degrade and keep under foot entire groups of people that this election truly represents for them. With no thought that slavery would one day be abolished, we were brought to these shores as free labor and when slavery was abolished, the US was made to free the very commodity that had brought them their economic wealth and even erected the seat of democracy which is the White House.  Even today, the African American community inhabits the radius around the Capitol building not eight minutes away.

When the pandemic started three years into the presidency of the reality TV show host, we were quarantined and riveted by the state of the nation.  While minority groups had protested the ever emboldened landscape of speech against minorities, the rest of the country was busy preparing their children’s college funds and studying the economic landscape of their stock portfolios.  It was not until we ALL were affected by the same threat that the rest of the country peeped in to watch the horrors of being black and brown in America.  Now that we have your attention with the ever increasing threat of different stains of this virus, how do we prepare ourselves to dig out and make enough progress that our release from quarantine does not land us in the same predicament that we found ourselves in before the pandemic started?

There are 535 members of congress, of them 225 are lawyers.  That is nearly half, 42 percent that have studied our legal system.  And why is that important?  Its important because of focus.  If the large majority of congress is not focused on the needs of the people or are not there for the constituents…  Then, we are in an environment that 42 percent of congress understands how to mitigate the need for change.  It is incumbent upon us all to educate ourselves on the issues that affect us at the local, state and national level.  We must either offer our support for those that speak for us or reject complacency with views that do not represent our own or the future of this nation.  If this pandemic has done nothing more, it has awakened us to the forces that surround us.  It is our duty to act in the best interest of ourselves and our children.  Not through militias or hate groups but by educating ourselves on the issues and arming ourselves with truth.  The lip of truth shall be established forever: but a lying tongue is but for a moment.  Proverbs 12:19