There are many things spinning through my brain this week. The house-hunting saga continues with now two offers rejected from us when other buyers were chosen and two houses rejected by us due to frightening inspection reports. A Federal judge has found that covering PreP drugs (preventative HIV medication) is an unconstitutional measure of the Affordable Health Care Act. There is at this moment an active shooter on a live-streamed shooting rampage in my beloved Memphis, and a young woman who was friend and family to many of my community there was abducted and killed last week.
I had to step away.
The person driving all over Memphis and shooting people was caught and taken into custody by Sheriff deputies in Northern Mississippi. He is alive, which is not the outcome I expected. I am grateful. This is nothing short of amazing, as the visibly raving teenager was a young Black man. The older man who is thought to have abducted and killed the much loved Junior Kindergarten teacher is also Black.
And so for many, this will feed a racial narrative of terror and separation. It’s a narrative that is deep in the South, and certainly present elsewhere. It asserts that we are better off in our own communities, a voluntary apartheid, and that if any one clearly does not belong, they’ll be run out before they do you the harm they surely intend. (This is pathological, but common.)
Bedroom communities spring up, planned communities, suburban developments -all intended to provide a ‘safe haven’ from the dangers of the city. Oddly enough, these all require their own school districts and the ‘choice’ platform affords the perfect opportunity to isolate their children. Modern day versions have acceptable archetypes of ‘The Other’, generally based in class but occasionally on perceived merit, and those conforming are allowed, and sometimes even welcomed.
For some, it will feed a narrative of sexualized violence, as the teacher taken and killed was a woman jogging alone in the early morning, preparing for a race in the only time readily available to a mother of young children. I am thinking of a reddit thread I saw memed that asked women what they would do if men did not exist for 24 hours. Almost all the responses were statements of freedom at night, like “sleep outside under the stars” or “take walks by a lake at midnight”. It was hard on many of us for many reasons.
But the young crazed man who stole several cars, and shot up several places, and harmed several people (news outlets are still piecing together timelines as I write this -at least one person is dead) didn’t just kill white folks, or just black folks. No, he pointed that gun and shot at just about everyone he encountered.
The pain felt by the slain young woman’s family and friends, students and fellow teachers, is deep and real. Shocking and traumatic simply that it happened, much less to someone you love. The trauma certainly rippled outward to any woman who has ever felt vulnerable alone, which is surely all of us.
I wish to all that is sacred that it were, but this pain is also not unique. Hundreds of other families and communities in Memphis have been similarly affected by equally tragic stories. Law enforcement should mobilize for each of those women’s cases, and all future cases, as they did to find her and her attacker. I pray they do.
But much more importantly, I pray the broader community can find the grace to hold, to face and address the pain and grief, shock and trauma, that we all share. Common loss, and shared fears when spoken and named, can build real relationships, change the situation on the ground. MORE engagement, MORE integration and shared equity, MORE humility and stepping back as we walk alongside.. We need MORE of all of it in order to build the world any one of us might envision and absolutely deserve -one with clean air and water, safe communities, access to necessary resources, and at least one decent park.
There is no future in isolation, although I understand its seductiveness. It is so very tempting to believe that if we just take care of our own (always narrowly defined), then we’ll be fine. That if we circle up, huddle together, we can create a bubble of utopia among the chaos around us.
But we are all bound together, and this is always true even if we rarely quite see how it works. Covid is teaching us something about our radical interdependence. Our plague of gun violence and violence against women is teaching us something about mutual obligation and care, and that rights claimed and power asserted without responsibility and consent are illegitimate.
There are moments when the breaking open can go many ways, when the heart is teetering and tipping, tripping over how to be in the places of pain and loss. This is true for us human beings, and for places like Memphis that have their own souls.
I wrote this prayer for the women of Memphis before the tragedies of today, but this is a call for common empathy and shared grief. For that is the surest way through. Together.
