back from jaded

This post is just a personal attempt to process some of the things I've been seeing in the news over the past couple weeks (Trayvon Martin, Jason Russell and Invisible Children, Robert Bales and the killing of Afghan civilians). It's a blend of poetry and prose. Not particularly straight forward. It's more like an internal monologue. Hope you read it anyway and can identify with it. I may adapt it to be a spoken word peace piece.

Given the swirl of the current.  Events in my head, I'm sinking under--
The subsurface flow tugging at my toe.

"Gavin?" he asks his son, "… Who’s the bad guy?”

A tiny finger in a posture as old as human history.

There's solidarity.

Then, “Saviors” “superheroes” and -- Skittles?

Iced tea.
Vigilante.

Goes down easy.

" 9-1-1, what's your emergency?"
"There're two guys, see? 
Hey! Get from the window!"
Yea, they're shouting... No... They stopped."
The silence brings tears.
 
“We heard him calling for help. We could have helped him."
But he’s dead on the grass.
The operator consoles her.

We all need a little.

Community consolation.
Justice of the mob.
So “tell me, who’s the bad guy, Gavin?”

The question can't be too simple when the answers are all too ready.  

It's Fox news and fear-mongers.
Liberals and trend-hoppers. 

It's racist George Zimmerman.
No, it's too many tours of duty.
It's Kony. Stop, it's more complicated.
It's fear. It's hatred.
Nah, he brought it on himself.
It's hero complexes.

“Maybe it’s hoodies.”

Maybe.
It may be the bad guy is everyone and every body.
Trapped in these bodies of finite thought and narrow motive.
We don't know half of the injustices,
But we're often the perpetrators.

I've been known to play the villain in some screenplays.

We all have our typecasts.

FADE IN:
ACTION:

Hero---villain---tumbles out of his car in the downpour and speaks:

These a**holes always get away.

Ask him whether or not the script felt right at the time. If he thought he was doing the right thing when he followed and murdered Trayvon not-the-bad-guy-not-an-angel-just-your-average-adolescent Martin.

#HoodiesUp, right?

But the boy... he’s still murdered. She’ll never see her son again.

And we can't make that right.
But they tell me, "Justice and mercy met once on a hill."
They assure me, "This too shall be…"
They sing to me, "Farther along, we'll know"

And I resurface.