It is almost midnight on January 6th. When I woke this morning, Reverend Warnock and Jon Ossoff had won their respective races and Democrats had taken control of the Senate. By the time I go to sleep tonight, I will have spent the better part of a day with eyes glued to all my screens, never willing myself to look away while witnessing an attempted coup incited by a sitting president. I know I’ll not forget what I saw today. Images of Trump insurrectionists scaling walls of the Capitol will inform my identity for the rest of my political life.
I keep looking for the words, but they won’t come. I just feel ill, cautionary tales from the ancestors flowing through my blood, making my stomach churn round and round. Over 4 years, so many have rarely fixed their lips to exhale. The tension helps to absorb the shock. If you can keep yourself desensitized, you can sustain all the little bee stings. Then along comes a day like today and there’s a whole angry hive buzzing in the pit of my stomach. Their queen has been threatened, and they’ve been awakened in quite the mood.
These years have stripped me- of energy, optimism, and of a lot of things I thought I knew. In a way, I believe these years have left all of us a little more exposed, and now I feel I see so many so much more clearly than I used to. Tonight, I’m thinking of all my friends who love a cop- whose fathers and brothers and partners wear blue. I’m thinking of the times I’ve been told to blame the institution and not the individual, as if an institution is held up by anything other than the folks who participate in it. I’m thinking of the friend standing in my kitchen, shoving a cell phone in my face, asking me to read the insight of some brother-in-law in Kenosha, appalled and disheartened by the looting and the riots he witnessed there. I’m thinking of the time I got caught smoking weed in the woods. That night, 10-15 inebriated college kids filed out of the dark on a trail by the river, but only 3 were stopped and searched. Two of us sporting skin rife with melanin.
Gaslighting comes natural. I find that most often, it happens as quickly as it passes, perpetrators none the wiser. I wonder what today feels like for someone who has always known that police exist to protect them. I wonder if they realize now what a thin blue line really stands for.
A thin blue line separates a riot from a protest, a thug from a patriot, brutality from complicity. A thin blue line holds firm in June, yet crumbles under the slightest pressure come January. A thin blue line squanders a black life with one hand while it snaps a selfie with the other. A thin blue line will protect white supremacy over democracy, some free to walk while others will never stand again.