Michael Cerveris Says

Michael Cerveris had the following to say after recent World events:

"I lived in LA during the riots after the officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. Shops in my neighborhood were burned down and looted, but the worst of the damage was in South Central and the neighborhoods where many of the rioters themselves lived. I struggled to understand why they were destroying their own homes and business instead of burning down Beverly Hills or the Beverly Center, the places that represented the wealth and white privilege that the verdict seemed... to derive from. Volunteering in South Central in the days after and helping deliver food and supplies with the AME Church's recovery teams, I came to understand that when you have been so disenfranchised and made to feel so outside the system, so invisible and powerless and voice-less, you'll trade your best interests for the chance just to feel seen and heard and to have your will done. If you spend enough of your life being shown you don't matter in the system, you don't care about logic or consequences.

It's time all of us start reflecting on the people around us are saying and not shouting them down or calling them ignorant. Yes, there's hopefully still time for our leaders to stop governing from a position of privilege (and that includes all the Republicans and both of the Democratic candidates) and to genuinely listen to the voices of all the people. But it's NEVER going to be the politicians who will change our country. It's going to be US. In the way we talk to the human behind the deli counter or the grocery line, and the human who makes our coffee because we didn't or grows or delivers our food be cause we can't or don't want to, or who drives the taxi or the bus because we don't want to walk. Or the human we work with or see everyday. Or the person we disagree with because they have a different understanding of gun control or abortion or racial equality or sexuality.
We don't have to agree, but we HAVE to start really seeing and hearing each other and treating each other with RESPECT.

We know what will happen if we don't.

comment if you like, but from now on I will immediately delete anything that isn't respectful of another person or their point of view"