The Absence of Closure

If anyone still wonders, is still confused or even still care about why the Klan still has power, the Holocaust still bears us pain, the Trial of Tears still rings in the ears of Native Americans and slavery still has not been reconciled by a nation, this may just help you understand why.  I simply call it the absence of closure because with any event or occurrence, there must be closure in order for the wound to heal and those wounded or effected by it to move on.  We have not moved beyond these things because we have gotten no closure to them and now add to this wound more damage caused by the failure to get closure on the Wall Street wreckage of the economy and now the rising number of police involved shootings of unarmed people.  Mount St Helen was once a quiet volcano until the heat built up and it blew.  These situations must be fixed and the newer ones need to stop before this entire nation blows over.

I’ve reached this conclusion after reading this article and viewing the video of “GRAPHIC FOOTAGE: LAPD officer shoots homeless man after responding to report of altercation” written by Tom Boggioni for The Raw Story.  Tom reports “In extremely graphic footage uploaded to Facebook on Sunday, an LAPD police officer fired his weapon five times, killing a man who was reportedly homeless.  According to the LA Times, officers were responding to a report of an altercation at a homeless encampment on a downtown street this morning.  In the video, originally uploaded by a man named Anthony Blackburn, officers can be seen wrestling with a group of homeless people, with two officers dropping their batons while tackling a woman. After one woman picks up an officer’s dropped baton — with the officer shouting “You have my baton” — another officer can be heard yelling repeatedly, “He’s going for my gun!”  Five shots follow, with the man filming the incident repeatedly cursing before saying, “They just killed that man! Just shot that motherf*cking man like that.”  According to the Times, the fallen man seen on the ground with officers standing over him was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.  Before watching the video below, be forewarned that it is extremely graphic and contains very loud profanity.

What does this have to do with the absence of closure, you may ask, well consider this?  The Trayvon Martin family may not have received justice in the George Zimmerman Trial but they did get satisfaction.  No justice because Zimmerman was found not guilty but satisfaction because it at least was played out in a courtroom.  That is closure and that works to heal even though the outcome is not what the majority may have wanted.  Contrary to what we are led to believe, no one really wants to take justice in their own hands so just having their day in court is sometimes enough to allow their wounds to heal over.  We did not get this in regards to any of the above mentioned atrocities and until that happen, the wound will stay open.   As long as these wounds remain open society, no matter how hard we try, will ever move forward.  It shall stay marred in the muck until these crimes are addressed in the only real forum that this country has embraced, a court of law.

You can color this picture as brightly as you wish but when it is viewed, the color will never shine through all of the black and white that it has worn for these hundreds of years.  If it is color we wish to have the painting of this great nation viewed in, we need to wash away the black and white, add that color and as the world heals, so shall the painting become as colorful as we all wish it truly was.