It’s time to speak up.

“In order to change the system, the system has to be infiltrated.”

– Chris Sliwa

If you know me, you know that I eat, sleep and breath sports. It is the top thing that I am thinking about at any given moment. I am not the most outspoken person but sports is one of the only times where I am very outspoken. But since we are currently living in a world without sports, the past couple months has made me think a lot and I have come to the realization that right now it is not about me. It is about the people who have been working around the clock nonstop to save lives. It’s about speaking up for those who are not as privileged as I am. And I am not saying I am the most privileged person in the world because I come from a middle class family in an average city; but I do know that just having a solid foundation that I was raised on is way more than a lot of people have across the world.

In the past week I have been silent, and its not because I don’t support what a lot of people are out protesting. I have been quiet because I wanted to make this post or a video to speak my mind about the current situations and I haven’t said anything yet because I could not find the right words to use. The truth is, no matter what I say there won’t be a perfect or correct response because I will never have to experience the torture and trauma millions of black people and other people of color face on any given day. The least I can do is to put my thoughts into words. So if I say something in here that doesn’t sound right or is interpreted the wrong way, I just want you to know that I do not mean it in that way and I am simply trying my best.

So here we go.

We are all angry. We are all frustrated, We all want the pain and suffering to end but it never will. What happened with George Floyd should never happened but unfortunately it happens all the time and it has been happening for generations and it will sadly happen again in the future. That is because racism has been around for a very long time and it will probably never go away. The only thing we can hope for is legitimate change to happen but it never does. Its the same constant cycle where police murder a black man and it becomes national headlines for a couple weeks or months and people are outraged. These people protest for change and it never comes and eventually the situation gets forgotten about until it happens again. So that is where I will leave this quote by Albert Einstein because to me it really speaks volumes.

This quote is why many people are now resorting to riots instead of peaceful protests because peacefully protesting isn’t working as good as it used to. And yes I know many of these protests were peaceful and turned into riots once the police got involved. At the same time there are instances where the police or other law enforcement were not involved like many of the stores and shops around the country that are being destroyed and looted. I truly feel like if major changes do not come soon, we will be well on our way to a civil war; if we aren’t already.

There is a reason why Colin Kaepernick sacrificed his career because he was standing up for what he believed in which was the police brutality needing to be spoken out on. And if he did not speak up in 2016 there is a chance that the various movements and the entire conversation doesn’t have the prominence that it currently does.

And this piece is not me saying “Fuck the Police”, it is the furthest thing from that. I have always supported law enforcement even when its not popular to because those people and many of those that have served our country are the reason why we are able to speak out on this type of stuff. In times like these you won’t see all the great things they do for us because it is such a sensitive topic the media either forces you to be on one side of the other and not be in the middle.

The matter of fact is, whatever aspect of life we are talking about there will be extremes, both good and bad. In sports there are the Lebron’s and Michael Phelps and Serena Williams in the world who are the Alphas of all the Alphas and are way above their closest peers. There are also bad extremists like Neo-nazis, white supremacists and Isis where they go way too far. The point I’m trying to make is there will always be those in a group that are on complete different spectrums from everyone else. And once again we are witnessing how there are extremists in the cop world where there are those who are racist and should not even be in the position they are in. These extremist assholes who makeup only a small percentage of the police force everywhere, make the perception for the actual good cops worse because no one will trust them. Because the truth is most cops actually are good people who are risking their lives every day to make the society they are in a better place for everyone. I am sure many of them are just as outraged as all of us are, we just can’t see it.

As far as I know a situation involving police brutality has not happened close to me so I don’t know what it feels like. (If I am wrong and there has been a major situation like it in Massachusetts within the past couple years I am sorry.) What I do know is I live between two cities that have been devastated with violence for many years so although I do not directly know someone who has lost their life to violence I do know that it is close.

Often times, you don’t realize the magnitude of something until it hits close to home. And though I have not truly been hit by violence, today was the first day since Monday when the video of George Floyd was released where I truly feel a burden. What I am getting at is today in Boston there were protests which turned into violent riots. From pictures I saw friends of mine, both black and white standing up for the injustices that have plagued us. On the other side was the Boston Police Department doing their jobs and I have a friend who works for BPD and I pray for his and the officers safety just as much as I do for everyone that is protesting against police brutality. Just watching the destruction being done once the peaceful part went away and from the opposite side of the state made me feel heartbroken and helpless.

Although this post is a lot of typing, just looking on my phone and seeing the damage that has been done leaves me kind of speechless. Boston is an original American city and is one of the most hardworking cities in the world. Yeah on the outside Bostonians seem like assholes but they are also proud people who have grinded all of their lives to make shit work for themselves. If you are from Boston or you know anything about the city, you know that these people will live and die for each other and their city. That is why our sports teams are always so great, because the players understand what these people go through everyday so they don’t want to let them down. So when I see damage done to that city, although I only go to college and Boston and don’t live there full time, I still feel hurt.

The reason why I feel hurt today is, I absolutely love the City of Boston and I have for as long as I can remember. It started as a kid when I would go to Red Sox games and it was the best thing in the world. As I got older and college came around, I did a year of community college and that just wasn’t for me so I decided to transfer out and all I cared about was being in that wonderful city. I got names of schools out there applied to some, got accepted to one and committed before even seeing the school because I knew that was where I needed to be.

https://twitter.com/Tori_Bedford/status/1267266909143171073?s=20

If you click on a link it will bring you to a tweet from Tori Bedford who is a reporter for WGBH. When I first saw that tweet, my heart sunk. Not only because of the activity going on in the photo, but because of where she was in it. That street she is on is West St, a street that I have walked down almost every day for the past two years since coming to Suffolk University. And that building across the street is one of Suffolk’s dorm buildings that was damaged. One of Suffolks other buildings down the street was vandalized and a car was set on fire outside of another Suffolk building. To see all of this stuff happening outside of a place that I have called home for two years truly is disheartening and I wish I could do more to help fix the problem.

But like I said, me being the person I am, I will never know what its like to have a police officer holding a gun to my head not knowing if I am going to get killed or not. I will never have to go through the issue of being racially profiled because of my skin color. I will never be discriminated against because I am white and that alone is privilege beyond anything else. It doesn’t matter if I have money or if I am poor. It doesn’t matter how smart or dumb I am. All that matters is that I am white and I have to speak out against the injustices that are happening all the time to people of color everywhere. I have very close friends of mine that aren’t white, I even have family members that aren’t white. And those people are some of the best human beings that I will ever come across in my life. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe in, or who you support; at the end of the day we are all human beings and we have to come together to make serious changes to the systematic issues that happen every day.

So as I come to the end of this, to whoever takes the time to read this through, I appreciate your time whether you agree with what I said or not. What I would like to end off with is my suggestion of how we can make serious change. What I believe is in order to change the system, the system has to be infiltrated. What I mean is more people of color should want to become police officers or work in law enforcement. I think that because in my eyes it would be less stressful if an African American is pulled over by the police and the officer happens to be the same race as him or her instead of white. So if more people of color are working in law enforcement, it might actually help relations between the public and the officers because many more of the cops will understand what their brothers and sisters go through on a daily basis.

Like I have stated earlier, I know what I said isn’t perfect, it will never be because I will never truly understand. The only thing I can do is feel everyone else’s pain as much as I can and hope the words I type makes some kind of impact because we are all humans at the end of the day and we need to all come together.

If some of what I said is confusing or I am all over the place, I am sorry, I started writing this sometime after 1 in the morning and it is now 3am so if you make it this far; thank you. We will come together to fight these terrible issues plaguing us all.