As a child, I lived near Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. Recently I remembered a neighbor of mine had a small dog that he kept chained to a fence in his back yard. As the weeks went on the neighbor spent less and less time with the dog. It got to the point where the dog would go days without food, water. It would spend cold nights chained to that fence, rain and the heat of the Florida sun would beat on it. For days on end, that little dog would bark, yelp, whimper, howl, and I swear, scream, but that neighbor never left the comfort of his couch to go and see about the dog. I am still haunted by that dog’s plea for help, but at my young and timid age I didn’t want to mess with the guy’s dog without his permission. My reluctance to help that dog probably contributed to its early death.
Now decades later, I’m that dog. Chained to the fence of Georgia’s racist prison system, and regardless of my pleas no help comes my way. No body cares enough to come to my rescue, like me they’re probably scared to intervene with the system’s slave. I believe that me ignoring that dog have resulted in me being ignored in my time of need.