When I was a kid, my dad was a cop. I would watch him get
ready for work and think it normal that his job involved a bullet-proof vest,
handcuffs and a gun. Surely all dads got
ready for work like that. I never
thought about my dad’s gun. It was just
part of his uniform, part of his holster, and part of the counter when he sat
down for dinner and took it off. I never
thought that cops and guns were a bad thing, but the world, our world, has
certainly shown me that cops and guns aren’t always right.
Any time I hear about a cop killed in the line of duty, I
think about my dad. I can immediately
feel what that family is feeling because I can easily remember what it was like
to be part of cop’s family and I know. I know how they worry when they come
home late, and I know the way your stomach clenches when you hear someone has
been hurt. I have seen one come home and
be so shaken up about what he had seen that he couldn’t talk. I know this life. I woke up to the news in Dallas and I wept for
those families. For the wives, the
husbands, the kids living that life and hearing that news and knowing that
their lives are changed now, today and forever.
I watched the news footage of officers racing towards gunshots again and
again and I know my dad would have done the same thing. When one chooses to serve and protect, they
serve and protect.
But, not always.
Sometimes cops make mistakes.
Sometimes they don’t have time to think it through or use rational
thought and sometimes they shoot and they kill.
And when it happens again and again and again and it is not in one city
or one state, but all over America, something is wrong. Something is terribly, terribly wrong. And we are watching it and we are clucking our
tongues and we are saying smug things like “well, don’t all lives matter?” And when no one is held accountable for all
those deaths, when no one stands up to say “STOP.”, when no one puts themselves
in the shoes of those being shot, we are saying again and again and again “you
don’t matter.”
As a woman, I know what it is like to face
discrimination. I know harassment and I
know the feeling of being dismissed before being heard. I do not, however, know
what prejudice feels like. I don’t know bias.
I have never had anyone cross the street when they saw me walking
towards them and I have never been kept from a job by the name on my
resume. This does not, and should not,
keep me from imagining what that feels like. How I would feel if I experienced it again and
again and again? If I can put myself in
those cop’s families this morning and feel their pain, should I not be doing
the same for the families of the two black men shot by police this week? And if I am not and you are not, who is? And if black families aren’t feeling sad for
the cops who were killed last night, do we have any right to demand that they
do?
I have been listening to the soundtrack from Hamilton again
and again and again this summer and it made me feel proud to be American as I
listened to the imaginary rap battles the Founding Fathers had. “Yo, I’m just like my country: young, scrappy
and hungry” made me smile to imagine a time America had it together and was going
to do great things. Great ideas, good
intentions, however, they stopped short.
They did great things for some people, but not all people. A nation built on slavery is not truly a free
nation. All men are created equal should
have meant that ALL men and women are created equal; not just the rich, the
white, the privileged. We failed then
and we are failing now. I am so damn
tired of failing.
I have spent a lifetime being an avoider of icky
things. Present me with conflict and I
will present you with my back as I retreat.
I am tired of retreating. I am
tired of being part of a nation of retreaters, of people afraid to feel someone
else’s pain, of people subscribing to stereotypes and bias, and of people
getting all of their information from buzzfeed and thinking it is fact. We need empathy and sympathy and dammit, we
need to have respect. We need to get
smart about our world and if we don’t know how to get smart about our world, we
need to go to a library and have a librarian help us find facts, real facts, to
make educated decisions. But most of
all, we need to start seeing ALL people as people. Not black people, or brown people, or female
people. People. Perhaps, if we, the people, looked others in
the eyes, we would see not their skin or their religious garb or their uniform;
rather we would just see their eyes and remember that they are a person too. We would know they have feelings, we would
understand their feelings, we would try to be better, we would try to make
changes and would finally, finally, be the land of the free.
