The Powers That Be Are Liars

This was never the land of the free and the brave.

Emily O. Weltman
Equality Includes You
9 min readMay 26, 2022

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Data doesn’t lie. 3 charts showing deaths and injuries from mass shootings and school shootings

A blip between NPR stories. Schools will have lockdown drills. Even the Senate hid under their desks…and they did nothing to make us safer from another insurrection. Nothing to keep women safer or Black people safer. NOTHING to get guns out of our country to make it more habitable for the rest of us. It makes me want to scream.

Business as usual for many. I try to focus, but I fail. I fail over and over again, because I’m supposed to make the world safer. Parents, especially moms feel responsible. Because we failed, we all live in fear. We’re conditioned to apologize and self-flagellate; we lie to ourselves that it’s not their fault because we’ve heard it on repeat.

I imagine this is how Black people feel in this country 24/7, especially 2 years after George Floyd’s murder. He was scared; he was someone’s child. He had a child too. 2 years later, the community didn’t fail to show up. The whole world showed up. The Powers That Be did not. They promised to do more, but weren’t brave enough. The truth? The Powers That Be are all cowards. Somehow, we have to keep being brave AF.

We’ve had enough. Everytime we make plans, to recommit, to double down, the patriarchy sends a clear message: stop trying. Stop working so hard; stop pretending or pivoting. Stop dreaming…stop fighting. Give up building better.

I had planned today, and yesterday. I plans last week when Buffalo happened. I plan, dust off my deep fatigue and show up. I keep showing up; sometimes I’m the only one.

Maybe I should stop working so hard too? Even when I throw up a white flag or ask for help, everyone’s out of gas. I can’t blame them. Everyone deserves a break, right?

When I saw “TX school shooting” in Slack, all plans ceased to exist, again. With my cup and tank on empty, and my heart racing and overflowing, I showed up to my 2nd grader’s school just to see something real, to see they were ok. I hugged him and said I was popping in to see if he was too tired for Art Camp. We sat on a log while he ate chips, and then he stayed to create something magical under some trees.

Next, I drove to the middle school, farther from the one near our house because…

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Emily O. Weltman
Equality Includes You

Emily Weltman, M. Ed., strategy consultant, social entrepreneur + coFLOWco founder is “Leading with Purpose–because the patriarchy isn’t going to fix Itself.”💫