There is no Such Thing as Safety

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My best friend—who is an elementary school teacher and mother of 11-year-old twins— texted me this morning. 

“It's crazy we all just had to get up and drop our children off at school. Hit a little different this morning.” 

“Stay your ass off the subway babe. Thanks 🖤” reads the text from my lover as I sit in my place of worship last Sunday. 

Last week, my mother, who is a regular grocery store shopper in New York who is in her 70s, tells me when we talk on the phone, “I don’t understand what is going on with the world, Please be careful.”  

I have been scouring the internet to both escape and find meaning in these times of overwhelming information exchange. But to no avail. To be blunt: I am fucked up.  

In a nation that portrays domination as freedom and creates pipelines of violence where there is more ease in buying artillery than there is in having bodily autonomy - I have no time for discourse.  

There are very clear boundaries of what is right and what is wrong. 

I am losing words to express the overwhelming amount of fear, rage and sorrow that lives in my heart, mind and body. Despite the ease in access to information, criticality has been tossed to the wayside; histories abandoned or revised; the news cycle determines our tragedy and dilutes our shared understanding of what is urgent. 

Systems of domination have left many who believe they are powerless—but who resemble those who are actually in power—to assert control using acts of violence. This is not control. This is a distortion.  

These vitriolic attempts to rectify this imbalance, these attempts that murder and injure humans and extract and destroy nature, only mitigate the precarious reality of living in a nation that is both imperialist and oligarchic. Our nation has only reinforced violent power structures through a petulant discourse of violent individualism. To be blunt: we’re fucked up.

Maybe I am delusional to have hope, to think about my life in terms of the heritage of my lineage. Has my body’s proximity to danger shifted much from my grandparents, all born within the first decade of the 20th century? I have doubts. The difference between then and now, to quote Wendy S. Walters, is “people were more loud about who they wanted to kill.”

For centuries, for millennia, there have been those who will never understand the grim reality of the vulnerability and the precarity of those of us whose resources, education, gender experience and skin color determine our class and the dignity of our lives.  

Thoughts and prayers and rage and sadness are moot without collective action.

Many of us are mourning. Many of us are in shock and have to disassociate in order to function amidst the tragedies of our day-to-day lives and the realities that our bodies are facing where we live and breathe.  I’m opening up the thread below because I am holding on to the emotion that offers me optimism: curiosity. It feels like it’s all I have left at this point. 

Tell me what’s on your mind and how you’re feeling at this moment or just leave a 🌹 to let me know you’re here.