I am so disappointed in my generation. Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000), the ones who believed that once the old bastions of hate were gone from power that we’d finally have a world where true equality is allowed to lift everyone up to the same level and there’d be no more bigotry trying to push anyone down. Oh, it was a sweet dream, one that is long overdue to become reality.

Was.

Then some twenty-one-year-old fucktard decides terrorism is the answer and murdered nine people in a church. A church. I’m a fucking atheist and even I know you never even raise your voice inside a fucking church. People should feel safe in their house of worship; you never think something horrible will happen in God’s House (unless you a prepubescent boy but that’s another column).  What horrible crime did these people commit to deserve such an end?

They were black. No, really, that’s the entire fucking reason. The goddamn color of their skin was enough reason for some shit-brain douchebag to commit murder. Because… racism. 

Yeah, it’s not dead. We do not live in a post-racial world. A man with African ancestry in the White House did not signal a new beginning (but it did inspire hope that we were at least on our way – but that delusion has been crushed).

And of all the churches to attack, he chose this one!

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is a church with an amazing history; it has stood as a pillar of hope since first being founded in 1816 and has stood against racism ever since. To have an attack happen within its walls only makes it all the more horrifying; the killer not only slaughtered innocents but did it inside of a building that existed simply to allow oppressed people a place to pray.

But you already know the details. And that’s not what I’m writing this for. 

We’ve been deluding ourselves thinking that once the older generation passes the torch, we’d be able to make real change. But now that someone in our generation has killed in the name of racism, the giant fucking elephant in the room has screamed “it’s far from over!” loud enough to finally force our acknowledgment. When even one of us shows they are stuck in the past and loyal to ideas that have no place in an equal world, we see we’ve failed. And that failure came simply because we allowed hope to blind us to the ugly reality. 

America is fucking racist.

Not everyone one, of course. But there are still those out there who hate others for no reason other than skin tone. How else can one explain why every single person in that cunt’s life treated his non-top racism as boys being boys bullshit. Really, he wasn’t doing anything wrong, nothing to worry about. It’s cool.

Racism thrives because people ignore it. They brush it aside like it’s nothing. And when you do that, the person throwing up their disgusting opinion sees there’s no challenge to their bigotry. And hate wins.

And people die.

That was supposed to change in my generation, or at least, we were meant to make leaps forward in our collective thinking and begin undoing the damage that centuries of oppression have caused. But one of ours did this. And we were too blind to see. We failed.

One of us did this. One of us used terrorism to make a very loud statement. Racism lives.

But we cannot give up. We need to keep fighting; not only the old guard who stand against equality but those in our own generation (and those that follow – they are coming of age now) who seek to follow in their footsteps. We need to look around us and see the ugly even though we’d rather pretend it’s not real. We need to stop the ugly before it spreads. We need to speak up and denounce these hateful individuals and show them we will not allow their deluded thinking to win. 

We need to take our country from the racists and turn it into what it’s meant to be: a place of freedom for all its citizens.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. 

We need to live up to those words. 

I refuse to publish the terrorist’s name or face here. The names that deserve to be remembered are those of the innocent people he murdered. These are the names that should be shared and remembered:

The Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Cynthia Hurd
The Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
Tywanza Sanders
Ethel Lance
Susie Jackson
Depayne Middleton Doctor
The Rev. Daniel Simmons
Myra Thompson

One. More. Thing. Stop the #WhiteLivesMatter bullshit. We know white lives matter. And stop the #AllLivesMatter; we know that, too. The reason for #BlackLivesMatter is simple: not everyone believes it’s true. And if we’re ever to stop the senseless violence against our darker-skinned brethren, we need to make it known that they deserve respect, they deserve to be treated as the equals they are. They deserve to not be murdered because of a chance of birth.

So, yes, I’ll continue to tell you #BlackLivesMatter until this damn country sheds its racist ideology and finally acts like #AllLivesMatter. Then we can change that hashtag.