To see your people die in front of you, day by day, feels like a stab to the chest every minute you remember they no longer exist with you on this earth. your day one, now reset to day zero. To know that there is something that could be done by the government to help, yet the government refuses, is something that I will never understand. How dare you say that it would be too expensive to implement standards, research, and rules? How are we putting price tags on millions of lives? During the AIDs epidemic, all that was needed to stop people from dying was research. The simple step of researching this illness could have saved thousands from one community and thousands of others. So I ask, why didn’t we just do our due diligence? It was because they wanted this mass sweeping, they decided that the majority of lives being lost were lives they were willing to spare. In this process, not only did we lose the sons and daughters of the LGBTQ community, but we also lost young children and an outstanding number of heterosexual women. EVERYONE suffered from the negligence of the government. This isn’t the first instance of attempts at clearing a community. Let us not forget that the drug distribution epidemic in black neighborhoods was created by the government itself. They wanted the community to break itself down from the inside out. They placed boxes of narcotics all over the streets, knowing that people would fall into their traps because addiction is a strong drug, one that feels impossible to break. watching my people drop dead from overdosing, my family become estranged, and statistics skyrocket felt like a stab to the chest. It wasn’t until the narcotics made their way to prosperous neighborhoods that they stopped placing these traps. This shows once again how hurting one community hurts EVERYONE. The number of times the government has intentionally watched a community die is something that should make everyone’s stomach turn. We cannot sit idle and watch as this occurs. Every time we sit back and watch as communities die, whether it be at the hands of one person or an entire branch, we are allowing ourselves to be stabbed in the chest. an injustice to one is an injustice to EVERYONE. As someone who is a part of both communities talked of above, let me ask you something: Did you just stab me? 

Under the First Amendment, we have the right to protest, so why is it that when we do, it’s just seen as an annoyance? Why do they believe that some bodies don’t have the right to form one big body of people? The truth of the matter is that they feel we don’t belong. The biggest protests known to America have been over civil rights, the rights to just be seen as human and nothing less. people felt as if those bodies didn’t belong on their streets and sidewalks. How dare our bodies occupy space reserved for theirs?   People will scare you from your position, run you out with fear and violence. You must remember that the reason you are there is for bodies like yours no longer have to run in fear, but stand in comfort. They feel as if their space is being taken away when, in reality, they must realize that it is meant to be shared. The earth belongs to no one and everyone. It is our right to take up that space and even hold more than what is needed for our bodies to allow more to stand with us. Every time we subject ourselves to the world of protests, the better the chances for the children of tomorrow to not have to. We all once had that fire in us when we were children ourselves. The fight we gave to our parents when we refused to eat dinner,  and the rage-filled letters we slipped under doors, all show the fight inside. When we relearn how to unlock it, we regain our wonder and imagination, the imagination of what this world could be if we all stood together in unity. In everything you do, remember you are deserving of the space you use. Do not shrink yourself, do not move over, own it. This can be exercised in your daily life by the way you walk and talk, be bold and brave. You have the right to exist, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.