Again and Again and Again

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.