Photo from a Portland vigil after MAX stabbings Credit: Ninjanabe/Wikimedia Commons
Micah Fletcher, the 21-year-old poet, who survived a vicious knife attack on a train in Portland, Oregon, while standing up to a White supremacist’s hateful slurs against two teenage girls, one of them Muslim, has reminded his fellow citizens that “it’s about those little girls, that they are the real victims.”
He acknowledged the outpouring of support for him, and two men – Taliesin Namkai-Meche, 23, and military veteran Ricky Best, 53 – who were slain by supremacist Jeremy Joseph Christian, but said the American society has a big moral responsibility to help the two young girls, as life is not going to be the same for them after the terrifying incident.
“These people need to be reminded that this is about them, that they are the real victims here,” he said in a video message.
“Just remember that they got hurt too. And that when it comes down to it, when a kid’s hurt like that, we as a society, as a world, have a moral obligation to do something about it and to help them,” Fletcher said in the message posted on his Facebook page.
Fletcher, who in the past won an award for writing for equality of all members of the society, also reflected on some of Portland’s socio-political challenges.
“We in Portland have this weird tendency to continue patterns that we’ve done forever, and one of them is this same old, just to put it bluntly, white savior complex,” he said.
“Suffice to say, I think it’s immensely, immensely morally wrong and irresponsible how much money we have gotten as opposed to how much support, money, love, kindness, that has been given to that little girl.”
He asked people to be in the two teenage girls’ place and experience what they have gone through in the face of slurs and rants form Christian, a known supremacist and sympathizer of hate groups and Timothy McVeigh, who killed more than 160 American in Oklahoma bombing.
“Think about that for a second –being the little woman on the MAX. This man is screaming at you, his face is a pile of knives, his physique is a gun. The whole lot about him is cocked, loaded and able to kill you,” Fletcher continued.
“There’s a historical past right here with this, you possibly can really feel this has occurred earlier than, the one factor that was totally different was the names and faces. After which stranger, two strangers, three strangers, come to your help, they struggle that will help you and that pile of knives simply throws itself at them, kills them….”
Fletcher asked people to donate money to fundraising campaign for the young women.
He lauded expressions of support for him but Fletcher but made an impassioned appeal for help for little girls including the Muslim, who was wearing a hijab.
“I’m not good at accepting assist or presents, it’s one thing I’m making an attempt to study to do,” he said.
“I couldn’t craft a statue out of the proper clay out of the earth to mirror the true gratitude shining inside myself.”
