This is the email I’ll be sending (or snail mail letter where they don’t accept emails) over the next week. Feel free to adapt it for your own use and send it out. This is an “all hands on deck” situation. Tough when we already had one going (Covid19), but there you are. Btw, if you ever lamented not living through the 1960s, congratulations! You made it!
I’ve been a vocal supporter of civil rights since college. It breaks my heart that we still have so much work to do to improve things, but then, improving humanity is much like housework — you have to attend to it regularly.
If the law isn’t applied fairly to people who don’t seem much like you, don’t expect it to be applied fairly to you. If there’s no justice for some of us, there’s none for any of us.
I don’t know what it’s like to live as a black or brown person in my country, but I do have experience of being judged by my looks, gender and age, so I can connect to the issues that way. I understand what it’s like to be abused, harmed physically and mentally, with the understanding that such treatment came not from the inadequacies or ignorance of my abuser, but were the “fault” of who and what I was.
Government will never be perfect, because it’s created and run by humans, and humans aren’t perfect, but striving for that perfection improves it. So we must and should hold our police departments and governments accountable. Mistakes will still be made — but how do they address those mistakes? How do they work to reduce them?
How do they clean the house?
Make sure your voter registration is up to date and correct, and request an absentee ballot, if you can. If you can’t, tell your state legislators to fix it and don’t take “no” for an answer. And vote, not just in federal elections. As we’re seeing, city, county and state elections make a big difference in how your daily life goes.
All honor & respect to the non-violent protesters exercising their Constitutional rights. I stand beside you, demanding that our system of government do better by all of us.