Fill A Need
by Miranda Frezza
What does Social Justice mean?
Why make it anything to me?
I have no need to be preconceived as
Pretentiously perched on a high horse
As others bleed in the streets and see me as
Human tapping at computer keys
while in reality I’m forced to scream into a sea of ears
That refuse to hear my name.
Refuse to feel my pain.
Refuse to give those without Justice what is Just.
Our anger all too justified but our voices nullified
As the louder we scream the tighter their hands squeeze to the sides of their heads.
Deep breath.
Breathe.
It’s all too easy to be carried away as
An open mind can often come in the heat of a blazing heart like mine.
So, what do I think it means?
I think,
It’s facing flaws.
I think, in a system of haves built on the backs of have-nots,
It’s challenging a society plagued by intolerance and willful ignorance,
A society that devalues and silences,
A society that tolerates violence and perpetuates hate.
It’s planting your feet in the scorching sand and saying
“No.”
We reject your norms.
Your “standards”.
Your heteronormativity,
Your war on sexuality,
Your objectifying,
Your sexualizing,
Your fetishizing,
Your white-washing,
Your notions on what type of face belongs in what kind of space
And that people of different shades don’t deserve to be seen on the silver screen
Or in magazines
Or be treated like human beings because they,
Because we,
Cannot be contained, confined, constrained in cases neatly preordained for us.
We are deemed unclean.
Obscene.
With agendas that contaminate
While we try only to illuminate the possibilities and explain
That people are not cut from paper,
Not carved in stone,
Not molded in plaster.
Our understandings cannot be limited to what we can see
Perceive,
With senses tainted by toxins fed to us from infancy with an ivory spoon
As we lay swaddled in pink or blue
Knowing that there must be more.
So that’s what it means.
Human rights and filling needs.
A sense of social responsibility.
Justice, change, accountability.
Because in the words of Edmund Burke,
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
Nothing.