Black. Lives. Matter.

The litany of names reads like the endless litany of saints we used to read off during Holy Week.

Saint Jude, pray for us. Saint Bridget, pray for us. Saint Paul, pray for us.

Only the litany of names are all those black lives that didn’t matter. All those black men and women murdered simply because they were black:

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. And on and on.

And those are only the ones we know about. Imagine all the other murders never captured on film.

Like you, I feel weary in my soul from it all, yet we can’t afford to be weary. We can’t afford to look away. We can’t afford to tsk, tsk, and say, yes, but why all the looting?

People: We all saw a public murder of a black man by a police officer whose life was NOT being threatened in any way. That officer didn’t act in self defense.

We all saw George Floyd begging to breathe and crying out for his mother as a Minneapolis police officer casually knelt on his neck. His neck. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds. A police officer slowly squeezed the life out of a black man and knew he was being filmed doing it.

We didn’t see Breonna Taylor die. We can only imagine what those 8 bullets did to her body. She would have turned 27 last week. She was an EMT, safe in her own bed, gunned down by Louisville, KY, police who, oops, barged through the wrong house. To this date, no police have been charged with her murder.

We all saw Buffalo police officers shove a 75-year-old peace activist to the ground and leave him bleeding on the ground with a severe head injury.

Where do we even start to change this broken world?

We start by acknowledging that it is broken. We start by acknowledging that Black Lives Matter. That ALL black lives matter.

And we acknowledge that ever since this country began, black lives have not mattered.

I’m 64 and am still waking up to what it means to be white, to have been given that “bonus” at birth, to have been born white in a country that values white lives over any other lives.

The police killed Gianna Floyd’s daddy. She is only 6, but that little girl is already celebrating a powerful truth that is still unfolding for the rest of us:

“Daddy changed the world,” she said gleefully, smiling as she opened her arms wide to the world.

Yes, her daddy changed the world.

Now it’s up to us to do the same.