Black Lives Matter March Eugene Oregon

I went to my first BLM march today. I am a 2 time survivor of police beatings. One in 1990 in Md and one in 2015 OR. It has been a long time since living in Springfield and Eugene Oregon that I have felt proud of my heritage and that is not easy to say. I mean today I felt honor and love in a way that I haven't since I left Washington D.C. and Baltimore in 1995. I am mixed Black Panther and Hells Angel from the Oakland chapters 1967-68, and adopted by white family in DC suburbia. My Dad marched with King in Selma and always told me that I could be anything growing up, but I never got 'The Talk' other boys like me got in a black household. I have seen and experienced things during the 70's that was the height of racial turbulence, and also was able to see things change like very few could from my vantage point. I was a young man of 21 when I first first got beat by police. I was viciously beaten with a flash light and a flack jack until I lay in a pool of my own blood and urine on the cold pavement while on the way to the hospital for my sons birth after a phone call from his mother. I never made it. I wound up in a hospital across town then jail. It was a heavy introduction into the full savagery of police racism and black life. 3 weeks later a video that everybody saw, Rodney King was beaten in LA. I had only one friend who was also black that came to my rescue. There was a terrible stigma with what happen to me and I even lied for a while and told people I got mugged. That should give you and idea of what society saw in those who the police went after. Do you understand what I am saying? Do you understand what BLM means to me now and even more to that young man who was beaten, what it means to the black people who survive the beatings today and the families of those who die at the hands of police? I had no one at all, no one stood for me. I couldn't go home. Do you understand the difference you make in peoples lives? So from that young man long ago I want to say thank you for the lives you have changed. I want to thank you for creating something that tells people the truth of injustice and brutality that only those of us who been through it can understand, but some how you put it into words and a real movement for change. Everybody in America and the world knows what Black Lives Matter means. Yes, I have scars and the damage done to my life living through two police beatings that have a level of savagery that is unreal has left its mark. Today I saw something that finally helped me heal something from long ago. 31 years is a long long time. I marched today so others kids will grow up and not have this happen to them. I marched for hope. I marched for George Floyd. I marched with a friend who lost her bother a Captain Vet of Afghanistan to police who shot him dead in his front door. I marched to change tomorrow. Chef John aka THOR