“You tried to kill my daughter to shut her up, well guess what? You just magnified her!” Heather Heyer’s mother’s words at her daughter’s funeral
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It’s often said that you can’t really imagine what it’s like to lose a child. I believe that one can never know what it’s like to lose a child, unless you have actually lost one, but if you let your mind go there, to that dark place, you can begin to imagine what it might be like and that’s bad enough. So the reality of waking up every day knowing that your child is gone is truly something we cannot begin to fathom. And any parent would do anything to avoid that. Heather died, but with the conviction with which she lived; standing up against the hatred, racism, and anger that she rejected and that has been under the surface of this country for a long time, but is now bubbling to the surface thanks to a president who has given a green light to its ugliness. While he lamely says it isn’t right, he simultaneously nods and says there are “good people” on that side too! The person carrying and walking with or behind a Nazi flag or signs of the KKK while shouting slurs to Jews and Blacks is not a “good” or nice person and trying to say that they are is simply playing to the base that elected him. You can not have it both ways. You can not equate Presidents from our Revolutionary war, flawed as they may have been, with those who fought AGAINST us in order to preserve the right to enslave other human beings and thus protect their status quo. Monuments are to HONOR others, to CELEBRATE them. How do we, how dare we, celebrate a period of such darkness and blatant failing to honor human rights and then attempt to compare them to our quest to be a free nation with “liberty and justice for ALL”? And how is it we can’t see this?

One of the white nationalists today said that more will die before they are finished!! I heard it with my own ears! Who will they be? Whose daughters or sons, sisters or brothers, mothers or fathers? And how is that ever OK in the United States of America? Where is the leadership that will stop the terrorist behavior and attacks in our own cities? There is none. Yet. But it’s time for all of us to make sure that.there will be.

Someone today also told me to stop speaking out. But that is precisely why America IS great – I can.