Don't Say My Name

I don’t want you to say my name. I don’t even want you to know who I am. I don’t want you to recognize my face, or hear from my friends. I don’t want you to protest in the streets, loot shit that doesn’t belong to you, fight the cops, or get arrested trying to make a point and defend anyone - and everyone - just like me. 

Don’t say my name. 

I don’t want my mother forced to go on camera, at a press conference, after I’ve been shot and killed.  I don’t want my spouse to relive my tortured screams captured on the body cam of the man or woman or veteran or rookie or partner or trainer who killed me stemming from a knee-jerk reaction or what they were ‘trained’ to do.  I don’t want my face dragged across any news channel or website or magazine or newspaper or political fundraiser. I don’t want the president to stand before a podium and lament the fact that I was taken far too soon, and that it will be his or her mission to see that I’m the last one cut down in the prime of his life. 

Don’t say my fucking name. 

I don’t want my friends to tell reporters or newscasters what a great guy I was.  I don’t want people questioned about whether or not I goddamed complied or sat respectfully or had a legal right to own a firearm or shouldn’t have been walking or running or playing somewhere I ‘shouldn’t have been’ or that I fit a motherfuckcing description or I seemed suspicious because of your upbringing or biases that you feel but only acknowledge when you think you’re threatened. 

Don’t fucking say my name. 

I don’t want to know that my child - minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years after I was killed - has to live that day over and over again until therapy or time or self-medicating or anger or the fact that he can’t escape his own thoughts cripples him and his ability to flourish and become someone magnificent and world-changing.  I don’t want my family to have anything to do with the civil rights attorney of the moment, spewing platitudes and niceties. I don’t want to hear conservatives or Second Amendment advocates or any asshole who automatically victims shames and blames.  I don’t want my wife to endure a trial or sound bites on the steps of a courthouse knowing that my killer is protected by the kind of immunity which lets them violate the next person with an impunity more dangerous and oppressive than the good ones can imagine or defend or stop or mitigate or eradicate. 

Don’t say my fucking name. 

I don’t want to turn on the TV or fire up my news apps to read that I’m one person closer to being unjustly harassed or assaulted or murdered.  Because every day I AM just one person closer.  To being harassed.  To being assaulted.  To being murdered.  To never being in your life. Or in my child’s life. Or in my family’s life.  That’s probably not the kind of daily scrutiny you’ve contemplated.  You’re probably not in a position to comprehend looking over your shoulder every time you aren’t in your own home - and sometimes even when you are.  You don’t know what it feels like to be paralyzed in this society that is never going to be post-racial.  I don’t want you to know who I am.  

Don’t say my name.  

Better training.  Better pre-employment vetting.  Better ability to deploy the right resources to the right problem.  Better protection against unions.  Better communication skills and de-escalation skills.  Better identification and punishment of bad cops.  Better and more support for cops who are doing the right thing and truly benefitting their communities and are freed from whatever interdepartmental bullshit keeps them silent and hidden and protects the shitbags who give them all a bad name.  Better whatever it takes to bring this to a stop.  Better I don’t care.  

Tomorrow is a new day.  It doesn’t have to be my last.  I hope it isn’t.  

Fix this. 

Don’t say my name. 

To A Mouse

In 1786, Robert Burns penned a simple poem, “To a Mouse”.  It is an apology written to an anonymous rodent for upturning his nest while Burns ploughed his field.  “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft a-gley (often go awry).”  Elegant, and often misquoted, those two lines of prose capture perfectly the human struggle and our seeming inability to find within each other that which would peacefully bind us together.  Where one man wishes to have peace, another engages in hostility for no other reasons than to prove his enemy wrong or to take from him what he wants.  War, we have found, is not always the best answer.  Politics – and politicians – are not always the best voice. 

It is ironic then how similar war and nation-building are to running for president of the United States in the modern era, don’t you think?  In war, your objective is (or, at the very least, should be) the complete and utter, yet not quite inhumane destruction and intimidation of your opponent.  In the race to become the next leader of the free world, your focus is the same, albeit with fewer casualties.  Typically described as ‘campaigns’, both are gross misappropriations of confidence, one side firmly believing their strength and cunning are enough to disengage their enemy (and assorted supporters).  The hoped for outcome of each is the toppling of insurgency, the dismantling of that which propaganda tells us is evil, and the introduction of one’s superior beliefs into an otherwise uncivilized and unsophisticated culture. 

The planet is dotted with red states and blue states, no matter the country.  Confined within every border and woven internationally, as well, there has existed in man for millennia the desire to best his enemy.  War and politics drive the building of nations, yes.  They are the visible spectrum of light used to illuminate both progress and oppression; their voices shouting mightily through the loudspeaker touting their triumph or loss in an effort to win sympathetic allies.  But it is their beastly undercarriage which scratches indiscriminately below the surface being ploughed, an undignified chumming of the waters, which polarizes and turns those who would be friends into enemies.  An apology for that on any level is rare.

“Man is the only animal that deals in the atrocity of atrocities, war.  He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.  He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out….and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.  And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ – with his mouth.”  Mark Twain wrote that, and it can be appropriately applied to both war, as well as the business of politics in this country and abroad. 

Shouldn’t we applaud the building of nations and the uplifting of the citizenry which may have once been oppressed?  Shouldn’t we support the desire for change promulgated by the disenfranchised and underrepresented?  And shouldn’t we encourage the dissenting opinions of those who simply want to be heard?  I think so.  Whether by ballot or bullet, change is the only certainty the world can count on.  Men will war in search of peace until the end of civilization as we know it; democrats and republicans will do the same for the next eight months.  Someone once emphatically shouted, ‘Yes We Can!’

That’s all well and good if you’re the farmer.  But what if you’re the mouse?