When I first heard about the Michael Brown shooting I was, of course, disturbed.

How could the police kill a man who witnesses say had his arms up in surrender? It was so wrong. People around me, my friends and family, were organizing and protesting in Ferguson, Missouri, and I wanted to join, but I had an uncomfortable knot in the pit of my stomach.

How could I, a girl of mixed parentage, living in a predominantly white neighborhood in the city of St. Louis, claim Brown as my brother? How could I stand next to the members of the Ferguson community and say “I am with you! I can relate!” when my light tan skin means that my experience as a black American is fundamentally different from theirs. Despite our similarities in age and geographic location, I felt that Michael Brown and I had little in common.

Thanks to some of my coworkers, I finally decided to go to a rally protesting the events in Ferguson. I drove to downtown St. Louis not knowing what to expect and was surprised by what I saw. Although many key protesters were indeed black, there was a remarkable amount of diversity.

As we walked toward the Wainwright Building, chanting our discontent, I began to recognize some of the people around me. There was a white man who frequently led community projects at my church and a Latina barista from a local coffee shop.

In all, probably only half of the protesters were black Americans. Regardless of skin tone, however, everyone was equally distressed by the injustices that were occurring in Ferguson and wanted to do something about it.

Of all the demonstrators that day, one was very hard to miss. She was a diminutive woman at the front of the protest line wearing dark sunglasses and a black shirt that read “Stay Human.” Her name was Hedy Epstein, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, who was later arrested for her involvement with the protest.

Although I never spoke to Epstein, her presence stuck with me. She exemplified why I and so many others had come to the rally that day. The fact is that Brown’s skin color is of secondary importance to his humanity.

Brown was human, I am human, Epstein is human, and it is that humanity that we lay claim to. Just because our lives do not exactly mirror Brown’s life does not mean we have less cause to be upset. The implications of his murder and the issues that arose in the aftermath affect all of us.

The momentum that thrust this shooting to the forefront of the American consciousness has begun to die down. Brown has been buried, the protesters, although not gone, have begun to shift their energy elsewhere and the judicial process to determine the guilt or innocence of the officer, Darren Wilson, has commenced.

Even in St. Louis I have seen a large decrease in the number of references to Ferguson both in the local news and in the uses of #Ferguson on Twitter.

This does not mean that we should let Brown fade from our awareness.

The extraordinary use of force that the Saint Louis County police displayed in response to the protests is not an isolated event. The use of paramilitary equipment in law enforcement, as well as the increased utilization of SWAT teams to respond to crime, is happening across the country.

Though President Barack Obama claims that the governmental grants awarded to police districts aid in buying essential equipment like radios, the reality is that this money is more often used to buy military-grade equipment like tanks, which are wholly unnecessary when addressing domestic infractions.

The Michael Brown case has also shown how essential body cameras are for transparency and justice in law enforcement. Cities that have required body cameras on their officers have seen a dramatic decrease in the use of police force and the footage has proven beneficial when determining the correct sequence of events during officer-civilian interactions.

Although large scale implementation presents its own set of challenges, in situations like Brown’s, where eyewitness accounts are invaluable but often deemed untrustworthy, the merits of such cameras are obvious.

Author Eli Pariser talks about the concept of the “filter bubble,” the idea that in today’s society much of the information we consume is from the Internet, and most of that has been tailored by algorithms to be relevant to us personally.

Since we do not control what is filtered, it is easy for important information to be edited out based upon our apparent interests. Beyond that, we often create our own filter bubbles of friends and family, in which we discuss shared concerns and passions but not much beyond that.

It would be all too easy, here in suburban Chicago, for our filters to deflect any further news about the Michael Brown. It is my hope that in the coming months we as a community can remain aware of these very relevant issues and that we will not allow them to fade from our memory.

Willow Pastard is a Weinberg sophomore and can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a letter to the editor to [email protected].