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Tag Archives: control

BOLO for Conflict. Calling Wisdom In for Backup.

02 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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angry woman, Baltimore County, Choose, control, I see you, police brutality, teenager, Why I Marched

Had to get up. Had to walk away. It broke me apart and hurt in my mother bones. I became the Angry one again. The little girl of me spoke her victim words:  “Someone. Help. Please Make It Stop!”

So here it is. He’s an unarmed black 16-year-old trying to stop somebody else’s cat fight at school. The cops roll in. He sits on the curb away from commotion. SITS on the curb crying. And you come and assault him after he wouldn’t put his hands behind his back to be cuffed for trying to break up a fight.  You put your body on top of his frightened body and proceeded to hit him.  When that didn’t work, your partner dove in and hit him some more, now two of you have him pinned, bystanders filming, asking why are you [hitting an unarmed teen?] I was afraid of what was to come.  I remembered the other deaths I didn’t want to see, vowing to protect my fragile insides from a death I couldn’t prevent, some other crime that’s just so easy to click off the screen and avoid.  I was so afraid that boy or the bystanders were going to get shot, and all I could think was he’s somebody’s child, please make it stop, feeling sick, angry, and shaking.  It happened last Wednesday, heard about it today, and now I’m wondering what to do with this Anger.  Then the other words came, the ones that the lawful people say: “Well maybe he shouldn’t have gotten involved; shouldn’t have resisted arrest so it didn’t have to escalate; too bad he has emotional issues and didn’t understand, but the law is the law, I mean, they weren’t hitting him that hard after all; they have a job to do, and this is just more anti-cop propaganda; sweet baby Jesus deliver America from the carnage.”

So now I get to choose not to get in my car and drive up to the Baltimore County PD and ask the officer at the front desk if he had a really bad day last Wednesday and dump bales and bales and bales of my hateful words in the hallway, plaster them all over the walls for the assault committed on a teenager and get arrested so I could spit on them and ask “How’d you like me to hit YOUR kids?”  Now I get to choose not to call the desk or spam their Twitter with RAGE. How COULD YOU?  Now I get to see what kind of woman I am, right now, who feels that no tear, no candle, no word makes a difference. It’s all a waste of time. The teenager should have been a man and let them take him in peacefully and work it all out down at the station.  Why let it bother me? Shrug. Click.

I’m writing in the dark because I just can’t bring myself to light a candle for justice. For peace. For wisdom.  I can choose to stay in the dark where it’s safe to fume and cry, to grind my teeth…or stand up and find a better way.  Now I get to choose what kind of woman I want to be, to seek justice and peace with words along with action.  And sometimes it is so. damned. hard.

A little time has passed where I could collect myself, and I would like to end this progression of thoughts this way:  Anyone who has been the victim of a person who was violently out of control, as I have been, will understand why it is not okay that these officers allowed their emotions to escalate into losing control of themselves. They couldn’t control a terrified teenager, they got angry and hit him repeatedly, which is the act of someone out of control. Their actions are under review, and this evening I will meditate on what kind of positive force I can be for everyone.

Sleepless In Virginia

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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amwriting, change, control, evolving, justice, peace, respect, sleepless

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” — popularized by Benjamin Franklin

Sometimes I go to bed early because I just can’t stand another minute of being awake in this world. I set aside little projects, put my pretty glass of water on the shelf near the bed so as not to bother my neighbor with thirsty midnight wanderings that might creak on her ceiling, and hope to read until oblivion.  Sometimes it comes quickly, but most times not so much.

After looking back on the day, the days, the weeks, months, a lifetime, my mind cannot rest because it feels like all the things it wants to say, to shout, to megaphone, telegraph, all the change bonfires it wants to set or incite mean nothing.  Smug minds are sleeping cozy in their righteousness while I lie awake thinking about injustice, or tiny personal wounds or the greater ones that deforest this thing called humanity keep after me. I can’t sleep when everything feels so wrong, even while counting my blessings, acknowledging with deep, deeper gratefulness for all these things.  I am safe, warm, and fed in my bed grinding my teeth, feeling afraid for the future of your great grandchildren, and yes, still sorrowing for the vacancies, lapses, and longings in my own life.  I cannot sleep even though I count a rosary of gratefulness, though I delve down into breathing and the art of silence, hoping to form a memory palace, but the mental noise is still too great. I cannot sleep because I despair, wanting with a need so great it grinds sinews for I cannot go back and undo my mistakes.  That the world would be a better place if it would just listen to me and do as I say, because I am right, and the shock when I realize I’m no better than you are with that kind of controlling attitude.  I can’t sleep because I realize how wrong I have been, so all there is left to do is get up and write.

It’s hard to let go of despair when I realize that writing about peace, love, decency, honor, sacrifice, family, gratitude, amounts to what feels like a hilla beans. Hell, if it were a hilla beans at least it would offer a chance for somebody to plant and grow and share sustenance.   I feel like all I got now is Times New Roman type on a white page seen by few, something that provides no sustenance, in a world where women and children sift through garbage because it’s their normal, knowing if I introduced them to clean water in plastic bottles, grocery store food, amazon delivers  you things you didn’t know you wanted, media that tells you that you are unwashed and need to better yourself, that you need a constition and a militia to save you from poverty, perhaps I am the crazy one, and you were better left in your simple, scavenging life.    I can’t sleep because the things I want to say to people who do not matter conflict with the things that do. I can’t fix the whole world though I want to, like it’s my job or something, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to make my shade satisfied in the end. Perhaps no shade goes to rest satisfied?  Or perhaps they all do because they know that this earthly, mortal mess in between mighty fields of beautiful ain’t nothing but a thang.

I need to sleep in the dirt and drink from a stream and walk farther than I meant to because I am not a resident of this land.  I need to sleep beneath great black blankets of night and peeping stars, flashing skies that observe me peeing behind a stand of trees because life is just so much better when it comes by the cupful. No one of us can right the tilt of the world, its temperature, its depth.  How can I convince the rest of the world that we can coexist, if only we respect?

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