A few months after the tragic incident involving George Floyd, I found myself standing before a youth group. The room was alive with chatter, the kind that comes naturally to teens—full of energy and half-distracted. I quieted them down and told them we were going to have a different kind of discussion that day. I wanted to teach them something about discerning truth for themselves.
“Who here knows who George Floyd was?” I asked. Hands went up. There was a mix of eye-rolls and curiosity. Of course, they knew.
“What happened to him?” I followed up.
And then, the room lit up with answers. Some said, “A white racist cop killed him because cops hate black people.” Others shot back, “Floyd was a criminal and resisted arrest, that’s why he died.” Back and forth it went.
I let them get it all out. Then, I asked one more thing. “Where did you hear that?”
Their answers were all over the place—social media, news outlets, family, teachers, even church leaders.
That’s when I shifted gears. I asked them to retell the story but without using any labels. No “police,” no “white,” no “black,” no “criminal.” Just tell me what happened.
At first, they struggled. The labels were too ingrained in the way they processed the story. But with some guidance, they eventually distilled it down to this:
“One man knelt on the neck of another man until he died.”
Silence filled the room.
I asked, “Would that ever be okay?”
Heads shook. No one argued. The truth, in its simplest form, is hard to dismiss.
I took that moment to explain something I hoped would stay with them far longer than the details of this one tragic incident. I told them that the world is loud. People will fight to control the narrative, bending it to fit their opinions and agendas. But you don’t have to accept the story as it’s told. You can strip away the noise and see people for what they are—human beings.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
It’s an old question, but one that still pierces the heart of every generation. The truth is, we are. And it goes beyond the color of someone’s skin, the uniform they wear, or the circumstances of their past. One man lost his life that day. Another lost his freedom. It was a tragedy that stretched far beyond the streets of Minneapolis.
When trust is low and misinformation is high, people stop seeing each other as brothers and sisters. They become enemies, divided by fear and prejudice. But we have a responsibility to do better. We are each other’s keeper, and if we don’t take that seriously, we risk losing the thread that ties humanity together.
I asked those teens to start seeing each other—and strangers they encounter—through that lens. Not with assumptions, not with preloaded narratives, but with humility. I urged them to hold their judgments lightly, especially in moments of heightened emotion, and to ask themselves the harder question: Am I doing the right thing?
Viktor Frankl wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” We all have biases, and none of us have the full picture. But if we can pause, even for a moment, and choose to see the humanity in someone else, the world shifts, even if only by a fraction. And sometimes, that’s enough to change everything.
—Be a better human!
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