Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash

Never again,

Never, never, never

Again.

Never, that which emerges from the slime of single celled exceptionalism.

Never, the creepy crawling supremacy of the one over the other.

Never, the nationalism that parades and disguises itself as love of country.

Never, the suspicion, implicit or explicit that sees a threat where there is none.

Never, the presumption that we know what another is feeling, thinking, or knowing.

Never, the undefined anger of the unrefined heart that passes over nuance to settle on assumption.

Never, the festering resentment that sees justice for others as a loss of personal rights

And never, the air of entitlement and privilege that forms the invisible bottom line of our thinking

And of our policies to which we assign noble names and motives which mean something different

Than what we say.

Never, we exclaim, never,

Yet, what we know is how readily never becomes ever …

Evermore….

Ever after …

Ever until the cry of never takes hold of us and we take hold of it.

When we say, "Never," we mean that there are ensigns that flag the dangers of insidious and invasive weeds,

Weeds that take root in our individual and collective consciousness,

Weeds and germs that multiply in the virus-friendly environment of our minds and systems.

We mean that we must resist any inkling of emergence of that which innocently masquerades as virtuous

While penetrating the soul of society,

Infecting it with the venom of bitter hate.

We must resist and be vigilant against any and every notion that one is better than the other or 

That one deserves justice and the other is not quite human enough to warrant it.

We must be alert to the subtleties and subtitles of racist rhetoric that propagate and proliferate in the

Fragile soil of liberty.

We must name it and reject it before it takes root.

Never again means that the worst that has ever been could actually be again,

That "those people" were not so different than us and that

"Their times" were not so extraordinary and that

"Good people" can participate in horrific deeds.

Never again means that we can never let down our guard and stop saying, "Never Again!"