We can choose to be how we want the world to be

Protest peacefully please. As a mother, grandmother and soon to be great-grandmother, I feel it’s my obligation to appeal to you to assemble peaceably. Because it just may be that if there is to be no justice and no peace, then there is no future for your children. Think about it carefully.

Look to the past. You know that reacting to violence with violence only provokes more violence. Remember the great men and women in history who actually brought on change. People like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Gandhi and the most influential man of all, Jesus Christ. All of them are honored and memorialized for bringing about change by being lights of change in a world of darkness. Only by shining a light into the darkness can we ever hope to extinguish it. It will take courage, sacrifice and trust in God. This is hard, but it can deliver far more than a lone victory in a battle won, it can bring about a bright future for generations.

What do you want to be remembered for? What do you want your children to tell their children about you? That you threw caution to the wind and went out amid a life-threating pandemic to burn down their cities, because you thought it was the only way you’d be heard? Even at the cost of more lives? Or do you want to be remembered for being constructive by taking a knee like another light of change did not too long ago? An officer felt justified in planting his knee, and suffocating a black American. He’ll go down in history for the shameful actions he chose to take. We, Americans, black, white, red and yellow, can take a knee to establish reform in a racist legal system. And we can continue to do so until our peaceful protests bring about an effective change in the treatment of the citizens and foreigners in our country.

I know we can’t always control what happens in our lives, but we can choose to be how we want the world to be around us. Please understand, the way you choose will be what you are known for, and could very well determine the future of your children. Please realize, no justice and no peace and no future equals a divided America, but peace and light and change equal a united America. Which one do you want to pass on to your children?

Angel H. Clark-Hall

Coulee Dam