In the days I wrote There Is Hope, I was a restless and distracted child. I would listen to music as chaotic as the Biblical book of Job. I watched America crack a half-smile-half-frown in Ferguson, and would remember the words of a radical. From the rooftop just outside my bedroom window, I looked at the stories of a revolutionary and felt my own story in there somewhere. I was learning more and more about social justice, or at the very least, it’s role in various systems of government. I felt my feet for the first time in a long time after marching with trepidation from King and Crenshaw Ave to USC and on over to the Metro station in Downtown LA (probably Broadway, but my memory escapes me). As I walked, I could smell the desert, and for some reason, the racism I left behind there.
Everything seemed clearer to me then. I would walk around the streets of Riverside, CA, take the RTA from meeting to meeting, and lament over the injustices that took place in the town that I lived in: the displaced families, the gentrification, the forgotten faces of houseless folks, the people with differing mental abilities, the denial of race problems and their protestors, the women who roamed University Ave with no other choice but to sell their bodies*.
I lamented it all, until I began to hope. And I had to write it down.
Below are the lyrics to the song:
*With all due respect to sex-positive feminists and other peeps of similar philosophies.