Little Boy Lost

by J.D. Trafford

She laughed gently. “Boys always need their mothers, no matter how old they may get.”

“Rules equal love. If you let your children run the show, then you really don’t love them.”

Racism had become the last defense of a way of life that’d been dead for over a century.

It’s hard to maintain faith when life gives you such pain and organized religion seems to have been co-opted by the cruel and self-righteous.

We are, whether by nature or nurture, episodic. We find a problem and then we fix it. We want there to be a beginning and an end.

We are in a constant relationship with one another, a series of communications sent and received through word and action. An unrelenting feedback loop that either gets louder or softer, but never goes away.

The relationship wasn’t over. Post-racial America did not emerge. The long history of violence and control continues to be unresolved. It only waits for another moment in the future to remind us of our sins, even as we all do our best to just live our lives.