Shelter in the chaos

I'm in one of my writing spaces. I have the comfort of dogs and cats. Jill is a few feet away in her studio. Coffee cup at my elbow, hummingbirds outside the window, jazz playing in my ears. It's my shelter, my refuge, my safe space, my home. Not everybody has that.

Over the past week, as I've been checking in on the news sporadically, the trouble in Ferguson MO has punctured my serenity. It runs parallel to a book I'm reading at the moment, Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything. On social media, I've seen memes and pictures and outraged comparisons to the Civil Rights movement half a century ago. (Half a century? Damn, I'm old.)

This book is subtitled: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975. It reads like a dissertation, which I suppose was its basis, and was published in 2006. At this moment, it is helpful for me, because it provides a historical perspective.

It's not news to anybody that race is a fraught subject in the US. I don't think I have much to offer that hasn't already been said and re-said a gazillion times before. All I have to go on is my own limited experience. That's where having been on the planet for awhile comes in handy.

My own experiences with civil unrest are defined by only a couple of times in the distant past. I'm lucky that way. My neighborhood was only marginally involved. My sense of personal security was not completely destroyed, though it was definitely rattled. Neither involved overt racism. Both involved "otherness" and authoritarianism.

I have vivid memories of the armed, organized, National Guard marching on my campus, the University of Illinois at Urbana. We lived on Green Street only a couple of blocks from campus, and it was a main drag. In the morning, we would see the Guard close it to citizens and make their presence known, ostentatiously marching to the campus. They swept down the quad, gathering up students for arrest. While my sympathies did lie with the protesters, and I attended rallies and prepared to be tear-gassed, according to the steps on my "Kill The Pigs" flyer, I was still concerned with getting to class and finals. The semester was almost over. I needed those credits. But students at Kent State and Jackson State were being killed on their college campuses. People were marching and running and shouting and throwing things right there where I lived and went to school. Once, I got caught in a canyon between buildings with the Guard coming at me and thought I was in deep shit ---- I turned and ran, hoping I would not be shot.

The Revolution was upon us.

My only other brush with rioting in the streets came in San Francisco following the murders of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. I worked an 8pm - 4am shift in the Federal Building, back when computers took up entire rooms and had to be backed up on tape every night. That was my lonely job, in a towering building with only a front door security guard in the building, at least as far as I knew. I was too close to City Hall for comfort. Cars got turned over and ignited. People massed in the streets. There was shouting. I was afraid to come or go. I stayed put. It didn't feel like my war to fight, but harking back to my college years, my sympathies always landed with the people, not the armed authorities.

I don't know what sparks any individual riot. They may occur spontaneously, but they are not out of the blue. Unrest and rioting in the streets come from a cause, from many causes, but it seems to me it boils down to desperation. No other voice will be heard. It's the voice of people who have been ignored and shunted aside too long. 

Have you ever tried to explain yourself to someone who won't let you get a word in, who won't listen to anything you have to say, who is completely uninterested in your point of view? Don't you want to slap him (or her)? Not that it would do any good. It wouldn't change anything and would likely make it all worse and you'd wind up hurting more than you started. But still.... SMACK! "Listen to me, you righteous mother-fucker! I'm here in front of you!"

Ferguson slapped America. Selma, Detroit, Los Angeles. So many others. 

Wake up! We're here! We matter!

All of us others ----- All of us humans.

Just listen, please, with heart, not fear.