So we have this plant in our office that is rigged up with a water bottle to self-water when needed.  It got moved to my window and I let it be known that it was not my job to take care of this plant and I washed my hands of it.  Over the last few months, it has slowly been dying and withering away, but when I look at it, the water bottle is half full, so I thought that it was fine.  Still, I said it’s not my problem because I already said I refused to take care of it.  Last week, the dying leaves littered the floor around me and I was forced to clean it up.  I thought that the water bottle may be faulty and poured water into the pot and when I did, the soil soaked it up and the water bottle started to actually leak out water.  I realized then that the soil was so dry that the bottle couldn’t even properly work.  I feel this is a good analogy for what’s happening right now in our country.  We never said that it was our personal responsibility to take care of police brutality and racism against Black people, so we didn’t.  It happened, but it was just there and we didn’t acknowledge it until it started dying on our very doorsteps.  And when we looked into the issue, we started to realize that we were blaming Black people for not growing when it was really the system that was failing them.  Perhaps we can stop refusing to acknowledge the root of the problem and what lies underneath because it actually does affect all of us.