Where do we all belong?

it’s like when Nina yelled

Mississippi Goddam

To an indifferent audience

I will shout it

To the whole world,

To wake you up.

Like Medgar Evers in Mississippi,

And the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, where those four little black girls

Sat down in the pews

And prayed for the last time.

I think of Kelly Thomas,

A man stripped of his breath and his human dignity

For being homeless,

Being stomped on by authority,

And the stern warning that has been continually ignored,

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever,”

By George Orwell in his book 1984.

I think of Mississippi in ‘55,

Of Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen year old boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time,

And being killed and brutalized because of a big lie and hate.

And then this little six year old girl,

In Ukraine,

Going shopping with her parents, carried by her father covered in her blood.

“Show this to Putin,” the doctor who tried to save her says.

"The eyes of this child, and crying doctors."

I feel like Nina Simone crying and belting out, yelling

Mississippi Goddam

For the whole world,

cause where do we belong when everything is like

Mississippi 1963,

And all of history and the whole world can see our history culminating and replaying

In these four pictures at the end of a news story:

Mississippi,

Why?