I Saw Myself in A Killer

We are a product of our environment.

I see Micah Johnson, and see myself. I didn’t know him personally, but his story is one I quickly recognized. It’s not hard to draw a line between the emotions that prompted his attack and my own. It’s not hard to see how, with only a few changes in direction, my life could have mirrored his.

Who was Micah Johnson? A more complex picture emerges | Dallas Morning News

I finished my final two years of high school at Poteet, in Mesquite, TX. He lived only a few minutes away, at that time in the middle school that feeds into John Horn HS. As he served his country, I stewed over my own anger at the world after a traumatic injury. Like me, he likely lived a childhood with relative peace, but with the stress, the uncertainty, the literal scarring of DNA that has come from generations of discrimination and oppression. From there, my own what-if’s begin:

• What if I joined the military, which is often the choice of young men of color seeking structure or a way out of the cycle of poverty in which they are trapped?
• What if I came home after a tour of duty to a country that has a poor history of caring for their veterans?
• What if I constantly saw people who looked like me executed in the streets for the crime of being black? (this one isn’t a what-if, actually)
• What if I didn’t believe in the power of nonviolent protest and advocacy? What if I hadn’t had a network to nurture my burgeoning activism into something productive? What if I completely lost faith in the belief that the systems that govern this country will fully protect my rights and my body?

This is not a defense of his actions. What this is, hopefully, is a logical line of thought that brings us to a particular choice to take an action we all recognize as wrong. That is something we can study, so that we may prevent the next string of tragedies. The challenges we face in this country are many. Many are directly caused by our perceptions of race and class. All are tied together.

We are a product of our environment. We are a product of our choices. We are a product of the choices made for us.