I remember how there was a time when I could never fathom the following:
How Black Americans in the time when racial aggression was at its worst could live in a neighborhood where daily their friends and family got beaten, shot, or lynched.
How people in Afghanistan could go on living in an area where each moment laid imminent death by the Taliban.
How could they carry out any semblance of normal living at such times, and in such areas?
Why wouldn't they just leave?
Now, when I read about how a girl was returning from the market on her way to dinner, when suddenly a soldier raid rampages her neighbor hood, or how a man was driving home from work and was suddenly shot by a member of the KKK, my senses are not completely shocked at the complete contrast of the two happenings.
I understand perfectly how my country can be deemed a terrorist nation, facing internal war from a religious sect, and I can still go on living their with my family, and living a relatively normal life too- watching movies, going to Church, having parties.
I read daily that another Church had been bombed, another raid unleashed- and with the full knowledge that it could have just as easily been me, I wake up and do the same tomorrow.
Why it is this way- I do not really know.
But sometimes leaving just isn't an option- and not even in the physical sense you may think I mean.
Maybe it's because leaving just isn't the answer- but that's probably not really why.
But it doesn't just stop there- I myself have been a subject of a dreaded news take on a crises. It was horrible, I was shaken- but I'm still there and I still live.
What I have learnt is this: We can never just stop, we have to keep moving-to carry on.
And sometimes these things that happen really are greater than us, and all we can do is be moved, swept by the tide.
Harsh fact for someone whose barely lived.
I really am too young, to be feeling this old.
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