my boots are heavy

This morning it is taking all that is within me to not head back to my bed and go to sleep, hoping that I'd wake up in a more peace-filled world. In my bed, I feel safe. In my bed, I haven't heard about the sad things that are happening in the world. In my bed, I am wrapped in warmth and am left to analyze the somewhat strange dream from which I just awoke. In my bed, I can claim blissful ignorance.

But I'm already out of bed and it seems that my boots are heavy. "My boots are heavy" is a phrase from the book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's a book (and later a movie) about a boy whose father dies in one of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. He uses this phrase to describe how he feels when things are too much, when things in the world are too heavy, when he is overwrought with sad emotions.

Today, my boots are heavy.

My boots are heavy because Trayvon Martin is dead. Whether or not I agree with the jury's decision about George Zimmerman, sending a person to jail (or in this case, not sending him) does not bring justice to the family of the deceased.

My boots are heavy because a Florida mother is going to jail for 20 years for firing warning shots (that didn't injure anyone) at her abusive husband (against whom she already had a restraining order) to try and avoid another beating. Now, her child will be living with her abusive father, while her mother lives out her life in jail for trying to protect her. Somehow self-defense is okay for George Zimmerman, but not Marissa Alexander, though she didn't take a life.

My boots are heavy because of domestic violence and rape.

My boots are heavy because I know that people of all ages, colors and creeds are getting killed each day by violent means and for whatever reason our society doesn't acknowledge these people's lives. Whether it's from genocide, war, domestic abuse, gang violence, or other means, these deaths are silent because the media doesn't recognize these people as worthy. I lived in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Memphis, I know that there were lives lost daily that I never read about in the newspaper or heard about on tv. I still live in a fairly violent neighborhood and honestly a few weeks ago I wasn't sure whether I was hearing gunshots or the beginnings of the firework season, but I heard no mention of either in the news.

My boots are heavy because we still don't have stricter gun control laws, even after decades of mass shootings and daily occurrences of people getting killed by nature of another person holding a gun.

My boots are heavy because Texas women had tampons and maxi pads confiscated from them upon entering the capitol building (On a lighter note, how hilarious would it have been if people started using tampons as projectiles? Ladies, way to instill fear and stick it to the men since clearly they aren't allowing us to make choices about our own bodies these days), yet guns were still allowed in the building. Which is a more deadly weapon?

My boots are heavy because this country is still so divided on issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.

My boots are heavy because two young people in my city are dead after hitting a brick wall at a high rate of speed, just a few blocks from where I live. The building, which I pass every single day, is utterly destroyed. Emergency personnel didn't even realize that the two boys involved in the accident were inside until hours later because the damage is so extensive.

My boots are heavy because of structural violence that keeps the poorest of the poor, poor in our country and beyond. This violence allows for healthcare disparities. This violence allows for the vast majority of the obesity problem in the United States to affect people of lower socioeconomic classes because healthy fruits and vegetables are much more expensive than the processed, non-nutritious "food" that is sold in stores and fast food restaurants. It's this violence that often makes it easy to assume that a person is sick because of non-compliance of medications or other prescribed therapies without thinking about other social factors that may have prevented that patient from following doctor's orders (cost of therapy, ability to find a ride/gas/money for the bus to return for follow-up appointments, cultural beliefs about Western medicine, language/cultural barriers to receiving instructions about therapy, etc, etc).

My boots are heavy because I'm reading about the Hmong (pronounced "Mong") people and the Quiet War. The Quiet War was a covert CIA operation that continued to fight the Vietnam War after we officially pulled out of Vietnam. Except that we were no longer using American lives in the war. We found an ethnic minority to fight for us. And fight they did. They lost their lives at a rate about ten times as frequently as Americans did during Vietnam. And they were cheaper too. An undersecretary of the state named U. Alexis Johnson once said "I personally feel that although the way the operation [in Laos] has been run is unorthodox, unprecedented, in many ways I think it is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money is, to use the old phrase, very cost-effective" (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, 128). Being proud to be cost-effective? Seriously?! Losing a life, no matter whether it's an American life or not, should not be considered more or less cost effective. Just thinking about war makes me sick to my stomach. And I know that the US is not the only world power to do this. The Romans and Greeks were doing it in biblical times and world powers have taken note ever since. But it still makes me sad that this is how we choose to live out our lives on earth.

My boots are heavy because of these reasons and because of so many more. We are a broken people and sometimes it's just too much for me to handle. Today I am not going to fake optimism. Today is not a "fake it 'til you make it" day. Today is a day to let my boots be heavy. To grieve the sadness of the world. Today is a reminder for all of the other days about why I want to be a doctor, about why I want to change the ways of the world, about why I wish this world were a less violent place, and about why I truly hope that God and Heaven are real.

Today my boots are heavy.