Many individuals talk about progress, thinking it’s a positive, forward-moving thing. Who doesn’t want that to be something they fought hard to accomplish? We claim to be in the age of technology, enlightenment, and intelligence, but does our claim hold water? What, if anything, has been learned?
The three steps forward matter not when progress is pushed back into the halls of oblivion. Such is the ugly face of racism. Its roots encompass more than one race, as was learned from centuries past. Racisms face has no specific color because racism has no boundary.
In this twenty-first century, one might conclude that history has taught lessons to prevent something as heinous as happened from 1831 to 1877 during the forced displacement of self-governing tribes of Native Americans in their eastern ancestral homelands. The Trail of Tears was a real account. The Ugliness of man’s character spilled out, leaving in its throes motherless and fatherless boys and girls along the trail. Those children grew up to remember every detail of the horrors. How could they ever forget? There would be no way to find the happy lives they once lived. They had lost too much, but they would pass to their children their stories, traditions, and a tale of a small girl’s journey as she walked the trail.
The little girl was displaced
Regarded as trash, a scorned race
The Indian Removal Act
An ugly governmental fact
Their ancestral homeland
The Government banned
West of the Mississippi river they went
To a designated area now sent
Exposure, disease, and starvation in route
Many more they would shoot
Many died on the Trail of Tears
A thousand-mile March anguish and fears
Barefoot, no shoes or socks
Huddled together freezing at Mantle Rock
waiting for a ferry to cross
Many died, to the Government, no loss
Somehow she survived the horror of it all
A lifetime of anguish she still recalls
The death march called The Trail of Tears
Still remembered through generations and years
Man’s ugly inhumanity to man
It was never what our Creator planned
It took almost three months to cross the 60 miles on land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The trek through southern Illinois is where the Cherokee suffered most of their deaths. The history books contain pages of data and facts, but only someone who walked the long journey can impart the mindset it took to complete it. Many did, but at what cost? What damage to the tiny human psyche would affect them for the rest of their days? Only those who made the trek know. What we do know is cruelty by people thought to be loving good upstanding people, whose worst fear seems to be the color of another person’s skin. The mind feeds the soul, not vice versa. Racism starts in mind. We are not born with hatred; it is a learned action. Until man looks at his neighbor with a mind and heart of love, kindness, and understanding, do not expect change. You will no doubt go blind trying to find it and find yourself walking a trail of frustration with no way to change the path in from of you. The Trail of Tears should cause us all to take the time to shed a few tears for our neighbors, no matter who they are. If they are anything like ourselves, they need them, especially in today’s atmosphere of hatred and distrust. She walked a trail, one she remembered, what is your path?
