On Mike Brown: “What I have is you and the God who gave you and the God who just may take you away”

The case for some sort of justice for Missouri teenager Mike Brown, 18 and black and unarmed and about to start college when he was shot by a police officer on the street where he lived, will (hopefully) be a fixture in the news for a while. In the meantime, Stacia L. Brown writes beautifully and hauntingly to her daughter about this never-ending story:

How can you learn at 4 to do what still makes me flail and falter at 34? And how can I let you go when a girl a year younger than you was gunned down in our city last week and a boy who would’ve headed off to college for the first time on Monday was executed within steps of his Ferguson, MO home on Saturday?

I’ve no more access to the language for this than you do.

What I have is you and the God who gave you and the God who just may take you away. And I have the resilience of a race who has survived every previous effort to exterminate it (and to compel it to exterminate itself). I have eyes and a watchful heart; they are both weary. I have hope that if the time comes, my community will be like Michael Brown’s, immovable and resolutely together. And what I also have are words that I’m meant to use when I least want to, in hopes that they will reach beyond my grasp and be a reckoning for those who, in the face of immense loss, would just rather we all returned to our homes and kept quiet.

The officer who shot Brown is currently on administrative leave, with pay; the similarly awful John Crawford shooting is turning up more and more damning evidence; the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown tag is heartbreaking. [SLB]