Questions about violence

What if we responded to violence with a question: why?

These are some questions I wrote last year after the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. This piece is excerpted from my ‘zine, Wait Five Minutes, It Will Change.

What if we responded to violence with a question: why?

And what if then, we asked more questions: Who were the bystanders, the people who waited until it was too late? Why isn’t it “terror” when a man threatens his wife? What does it take to make someone truly terrified? Is terror the same as fear, and have you felt it?

Why do we feel for those we’ve never met? How do we live with ourselves when we think about the people we feel little for? How does racism change empathy? How do borders? How do trauma, and power? How does loneliness? Is empathy innate? When we lose it, can we get it back?

Is there such a thing as being powerless?

What is the story of the people who were harmed, what are their parents’ and grandparents’ and lovers’ stories?

If you believe in safety, where do you find it? What do you do to defend it for others? Do some people’s bodies have to be massacred in order to matter?

How quickly will you put this out of mind?

When have you expressed horror over a border, gone someplace where you don’t feel safe? If you thought it would save lives to take a risk, would you do it?

Have I turned away, at times? At whose expense? Have I harmed my friends, my community, people who are invisible to me, whose pain I’ll never know? And where I have caused harm, why? Was there another way?

Why is white nationalism on the rise? Where did it come from, where does it dwell and show itself now? Why do white people need a big bad wolf, a Trump, in order to see and speak up about white supremacy? Why is our society structured so that cops kill with impunity, and U.S. bombs hit hospitals and homes? Why is technology wielded against people instead of used for them?

Why is anyone “collateral damage”? And what does it feel like to be chosen for that role, deemed anonymous and bleak?

Where does this nation begin to trace its string of massacres? Do they begin on slave ships, at Wounded Knee or Turtle Bay, do they start in central Florida, the Seminole wars? How many massacres are without a monument?

How does it feel to be a casualty on the path to “progress,” whose name doesn’t even flash past on the screen? How many humans went down in ships last week, fleeing Syria, awaiting asylum?

What is it to take great risks to live fully, to risk everything to survive, only to be turned away at the border, to be held in a cage, to be caged in a nightclub and killed, and know that the people who killed you are too cowardly even to dance on your grave, because they are too cowardly for dancing?

Why the need to say that we are all “one”? Why claim that you are Orlando or Paris if you can’t feel that? Why are you not Kabul or Baghdad or Aleppo?

Why must we be “one” in order to defend one another? Who can possibly feel it all? If we are limited in empathy, risk and action, how do we live with our limits, with ourselves?

What comes after an outpouring of sympathy? Who benefits, whose stocks go up, whose lives remain the same and whose are changed? Who rides in on a white horse and whose struggle continues apace? Who is able to stop and grieve, and why are some people without that space? Who is celebrated for their stance, and at what personal risk did they take it?

Can you choose to take a stand if your body is a target? Whose bodies are controlled, debated, battled over? What toll does this take, and by whom is that toll paid?

Why is it men who tend to sacrifice others on their own pyres? Why, for only some people, is self-defense a crime? Why is weaponry fetishized?

Why are people who are not actually in danger afraid? What does that mean about how they see other people’s fear? Why do we ask what country a killer was born in, instead of what kind of world?

How do we imagine our own ability to shape that world?

Are we really all connected by love? Should I imagine that I know how you feel? Do I need to know that, in order to support you?

If Omar Mateen hated black people, queer people, and treated women like shit, why? If he seemed “normal” and “nice,” what is normal? What is nice? Can a person be more than one thing at once? If a domestic abuser is now a security guard, why? If a mass-murderer once wanted to be a cop, why? Did he revel in the heartbreak he would cause? Why? If he went to the club, watched people dance, if he hated queer people and yet held queer desires, why?

If you never imagined that something like this could happen, why? What stories didn’t you hear?

When there are so many pieces, which of us will pick them up? And when some of the pieces are bones, are blood, are disguised memories, are shame, who will hold the gory parts? Whose job will it be to shroud the rest in disguise?

If your breath, your sense of hope, and your ability to imagine all escape you, what will you do?