Why I bother? A Soliloquy

What Do I Bother?

(Hindsight! — Part II)

William Monroe Trotter asked the question with his whole life.

Not as a sigh.
As a reckoning.

Here is where I begin.

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I bother because silence is expensive—and the bill always comes due in someone else’s blood.
I bother because truth, unattended, rots into myth, and myth hardens into policy.
I bother because I have seen what happens when people confuse peace with quiet and nonviolence with weakness.

I am that Black woman who knows the difference.

For seven years I wore The Peace Hour on my sleeve—not as branding, but as burden.
Seven years of conversations that did not flatter power.
Seven years of interviews that refused amnesia.
Seven years of children—young truth-tellers—given a microphone before the world could teach them fear.

I did it with integrity.
With ethics.
With a fierce commitment to nonviolence—not as passivity, but as discipline.
The kind that requires courage when violence would be easier.
The kind that demands imagination when despair offers shortcuts.

Like Trotter, I knew the battle was uphill.
And like him, I understood something America keeps relearning the hard way:
that asking for justice politely is not the same as asking for justice truthfully.

So—why do I bother?

Because peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the presence of courage.
Because history does not move on its own—someone has to push.
Because children are watching, and elders are counting on us not to blink.
Because the work did not end with a bill, a march, or a moment—it began there.

I bother because I am a peace warrior.
Because I know whose shoulders I stand on.
Because Sankofa is not nostalgia—it is infrastructure.
And because the question itself—What do I bother?—is the proof that I must.

This chapter begins here.
Not with apology.
Not with fatigue.
But with resolve.

I bother because I can.

#sankofainitiative #7thgenerationstrategy #ebkpk