Poetry-Questions for a disgusted onlooker

Questions for a disgusted onlooker
How would you feel if the color of your skin and everything thought bad were the same?
If you had no language to call your own, no land, no name?
If everything you built were broken, and all your efforts came up lame?
What if the freedoms you fought for were attacked and denied?
The life you want constantly questioned and tried?
Why do you look at all of us and assume that we’ve never tried?
How about if the dreams you nurture went unfed and died?
What if the questions you ask always fell on deaf ears?
If your friends fell all around you, you had no family, no peers?
What if you were constantly at war?
Always harassed and followed?
What if the homeland your forefathers knew was divided, pillaged, and swallowed?
What if you were like us? The darker brother, the immigrant, the border jumper, the slave?
What would you want? How would you behave? What if the things you like to create were dismissed, treated as if all the history you know to be brutal-dismissed and rewritten as “it wasn’t that bad?”
Would you work hard, lend your voice to that of your brothers? Would you take up arms and add to the numbers of martyred others? Would you fight for “liberty or death” and your place in the sun?
Or would you take your shine now, however you got it and run?