How the West was Radicalized

As I signed my name on the ‘Locker Cleanout List’, I remember thinking to myself; I suppose I won’t see my friends for some time. By this time, school had been closed for a couple of weeks. A virus had appeared in our country and spread to my community a month prior and now we all had to finish the school year at home. Of course, unannounced interruptions to education were something that my generation had become accustomed to by this point.

I’d been just a few months into 8th grade when our country elected a reality TV host to be president. To say that my parents seemed frantic about this would have been an understatement. My mother cried as it became clear her preferred candidate would lose. My father cursed the country, he cursed the system that didn’t work, he cursed the fools who could be so easily drawn in by what he called a “chaos candidacy.” My universe of interests had not yet fully introduced the joy of politics into its orbit, but I was beginning to really understand the everyday consequences that our elected officials inflicted upon us. It was just a handful of years earlier that my family had attended the wedding of my mother’s cousin. I remember the minister had said something regarding how monumental changes to the law had occurred that gave my mom’s cousin and her partner the legal right to marry. In the car ride home I’d asked “What did he mean by that?” They explained that marriage between two women had not always been legal and that in fact a lot of people still hated some people simply because of who they loved. At the time the concept of legal and illegal love seemed fishy to me, because as with most things, children are a better gauge of humanity and equality than adults are.

My Freshman year of high school I busy enough figuring out the campus, figuring out where my classes were and how to manage a larger workload, and a larger social circle. That larger social circle came with an awakening to a growing array of social issues that were effecting a more diverse set of individuals than I’d been introduced to in my otherwise sheltered childhood.

I remember sometime in the spring of that school year there’d been a shooting at the school down the road from us, we’d were put in lockdown, the kind of lockdown my classmates and I had been preparing for since we were in Kindergarten. We all sat there for an hour or so, mostly unimpressed, tweeting on our phones under our desks. I remember my Sophomore year I’d be introduced to a new student named Carder Braun in English class. Carder and I were quite different in a lot of ways, he was physically much larger than I was, he had just moved to our small town from a big city, Oakland, he was a great athlete, and he was black and I was white. I remember asking him what Oakland was like. I’d never been there before, I’d just driven through it on my way to visit family in the East Bay, which as he described it, was a totally different world than Oakland. He told me about how his grandparents had been Black Panthers, a group that up until that moment, I knew nothing about, there’d been no chapter on their movement in any of my history books.

He told me passionately and proudly about the Panthers as he spun around and pointed over his own shoulder at the panther emblazoned on the back of the the black letterman-style jacket that he wore to school every day. He explained that they’d fought for equality and the end of police oppression and they’d enriched and protected the neighborhood he grew up in when his parents were kids. He explained that quickly after forming they’d been persecuted, assaulted, arrested, disbanded. He told me he’d moved to our small town because his mom was afraid of the violence in Oakland. Carder’s own father had been murdered when he was just 8 years old and his mother was beginning to fear a similar fate if she didn’t get her children out of the neighborhood they lived in. As a white kid from the rural suburbs, the stories Carder told me were the kind of stories that I’d only seen in movies or heard about in rap songs, but here in my small, rural, white town I sat next to another 15-year-old, who was just trying to survey the world like I was, but he was doing it having lived through all of this terrible shit I’d never had to experience.

I remember feeling angry that in America we continued to allow this kind of inequality. What had my parents or grandparents done to be be able to hand me down such an easier path? I remember that Junior year had started with walk outs. A young girl, about my age from across the world had been travelling the globe, by sailboat, to try and warn people of the horrors of climate change. To this point in my life I’d always been aware that our climate was changing, each year the news became more clear on it, the summers were getting hotter, the last two or three we’d been forced inside at some point because the prolonged forest fires were destroying the air quality in our State.

Our Christmas break that year had been consumed by conversation regarding the upcoming impeachment trial of our Reality TV Show president. It seemed he’d attempted to bribe a foreign leader with congressionally approved military aid, it was one of likely a dozen offenses he could have been impeached for, but I guess it was the one they liked the best. The New Year, 2020, would break with news that we may be starting a military conflict with Iran, one of the few countries left to invade on America’s Middle Eastern War Bingo card.

I remember that my girlfriend and I had spent our Valentine’s day date arguing over whether the more progressive of the two Democratic presidential candidates would win in November. It seemed clear by that time that her choice would win the nomination, but I was still feisty because I believed mine had a better chance of winning. I remember getting a news notification on my phone around this time; something about a province in China I’d never heard of, something about bats and wet markets and a virus. I remember scoffing, contemplating how we’d find a way to fuck this up.

Of course, it was just a month or so later I’d be signing my name on that ‘Locker Cleanout List’. I spent the first few week’s home from school procrastinating; the teachers were mostly hopeless with online courses so I knew I had time to make up my fucking off. April just sort of appeared and disappeared like a month that never existed. My father lost his job and spent his morning calling an impossibly clogged unemployment hotline. My mother was working from home and the house with bored kids and an unemployed husband was creating a series of tensions that were rising each day. May had seemed to be making its way into nothingness as well, that was, until May 25th.

On May 25th 2020 a man named George Floyd was murdered by police in Minnesota. For 8 minutes and 43 seconds, George Floyd was murdered by not one, not two, not three, but four police officers, in broad daylight, while being filmed by multiple witnesses. I sat in horror watching. Of course, this was not new to me either, I’d grown up seeing Trayvon Martin killed and his killer walk away free. I’d watched Ferguson burn for Michael Brown. I’d seen the “I Can’t Breathe” shirts NBA players had worn after Eric Garner was choked to death in New York. I don’t know what it was about George Floyd that stuck a nerve, I am not sure we’ll ever know what made his death create the uprising it did.

My parents hadn’t wanted me to go to the protests but they had little control over what I would do and they knew it. They supported Black Lives Matter, but they also knew our town had a history of violent racism and there would be counter-protesters, and they knew something else, the police were violent and I could be collateral damage. My mind had been made up though, and so I put my mask on, I met a handful of my friends and we walked toward the park where the protest was beginning.

I remember walking past the police and feeling uneasy. They were all wearing masks and dark glasses, bullet proof vests were adorned with a half dozen extra clips for the hand guns that sat on their hips. Their waist belts complete with a baton, a can of pepper spray, and restraints. There were teams of men with helmets, carrying assault rifles and wandering around military style vehicles I didn’t even know our city had.

The speakers spoke with passion, and anger and sadness. They spoke of their personal experiences with police, they spoke of the kind of community we could have if we chose to use our tax dollars for rehabilitation instead of incarceration, if we chose to police our communities with compassion and understanding, instead of violent force and ignorance. I watched as the police needlessly got agitated by the shouting, dressed in armor like warriors they grew ‘scared’ of the handful of water bottles tossed in their direction, then I watched as an officer began spraying pepper spray at a crowd some 20 feet from me. They’d caused no great disturbance, they’d broken no laws, and before I knew it police had come barreling in from every direction, I was knocked to the ground, people ran over my legs as batons and shields scraped and banged against each other over my head. Before I could make any serious effort to move I’d find myself in restraints on the curb. I’d made no effort to flee, I’d made no effort to harm anyone, yet here I sat with pepper spray burning my eyes, my hands tied behind my back cutting the circulation from my fingers.

Some 45 minutes later, once the chaos had settled I was walked to the edge of the park, with my restraints untied, I was told to go home. I remember looking back and seeing a line of men and women in restraints waiting to be taken off to the county jail in a line of police vans.

I found myself at that park every day for nearly a month straight. Every day was the same story. I got better at getting out of the fray, better at getting away before I’d be restrained. By week three I was wandering around with an umbrella in the middle of summer, ski goggles propped on my head to save my eyes from the inevitable tear gassing I’d be subject to that evening. I had a baggie of ear plugs to protect my ears from the flashbangs, and I wore two sweatshirts under a heavy jacket to try and numb the rubber bullets that by this time had bruised my back and arms multiple times that month.

I remember that month I saw mothers and fathers beaten and bloodied, I saw grandfathers smacked with clubs and I saw grandmothers sprayed with pepper spray. I watched police officers slash the tires of private vehicles parked on the street near the protests, I watched a handful of them huddle together and throw rocks through a business window in an alley before arresting a random passerby who appeared to just be going home.

I remember walking home and seeing good people that I knew standing around, having watched it all unfold, they sat and they had done nothing. Were they not seeing what I was seeing? I remember getting home and hearing my family bicker over subjects that seemed wholly unimportant to my ears that were still ringing with the sound of injustice and brutality and totalitarianism.

I remember lining up the wine bottles in my parent’s garage and I remember riding my bicycle home from the Shell station with a red tank and a funnel. I remember driving slowly with milk crates in the trunk and I remember parking with my lights off in a corner of downtown. I remember the sound of the police station precinct glass breaking and I remember the smell of the smoke as it began billowing out the whole I’d created in the window. I remember the crackling of the fire and the sound of sirens and alarms. I remember the sound of the gravel beneath my feet as I ran through alleys and yards and I remember laughing as I was thrown to the ground.

As I signed my name on my charging documents at the County Youth Jail I remember thinking to myself; I suppose I won’t be seeing my friends for some time.