Ashley:
The night after Sunday's vigil, my fiancée and I returned home and watched a documentary on the Egyptian Revolution in Tahir Square.
I never would have imagined two days later, some of those very people would be tweeting me information on what to do after being tear gassed.
"Sister," they said, "rinse with milk."
Palestinians tweeted me to move against the wind. "We are Ferguson," they wrote.
They saw themselves in our oppression. They bonded to us by adversity. Our struggle is their struggle and the justice we all seek is the same. The bombs that light up Gaza at night and the bullets that killed Michael Brown are cousins in lethality. We share no formal allegiance. We have become a family related by blood.
Meanwhile, those that stand beside us, hands over hearts, repeating liberty and justice for all never told us the exception to that rule. But they show it to us daily. They fall silent when we suffer. They look away when we die. They exist beside us daily, living, breathing, being; yet we never occupy the same space.
That space was never meant for us anyway. It was a trap set to make us easy targets. Michael Brown was your last catch. His death was the fuse that ignited the powder keg of oppression you thought you had us trapped in.
The world heard the boom. Our freedom came loudly.
It will echo on. We will not be silenced.
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