Anyway, I will rewind my life to Sunday, January 15th, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, at a little bit before 1 pm. I was with my colleagues at HandsOn New Orleans at a local school preparing for a corporate volunteer service project to commemorate Martin Luther King Day. The school property takes up an entire square block, with the front of the building facing an arterial boulevard and fencing lined along the back and side streets of the campus, enclosing a recreation area with a playground, sidewalk games, tennis courts, and basketball courts.
We had just unloaded all of the tools and supplies to their respective areas of the school campus, and I was taking a break and eating my lunch while we were waiting to volunteers to arrive. I was perched on a white wooden bench with planter boxes on both sides, next to the fence lined along the rear perimeter of the school property. Two of my colleagues were about to head back inside the school, when I heard sounds of a guy yelling behind me. I turned around and saw an African-American man with dark pants and probably a gray sweatshirt in the middle of the street, probably 50-60 feet away from me. I heard the infamous "pop-pop-pop!" sounds not even a second later; however, it wasn't until I saw the gun that the man was brandishing in the air that my mind registered what was happening. My initial response wasn't even panic or fear, more like a daze or confusion, almost, and I started heading away from the fence and toward the school building with my other colleagues in the school yard. As I was moving, I looked down the street in the direction the guy was facing and saw another man riding down the street on a bicycle away from him, though I didn't catch any signs that someone had been shot. One of my co-workers called 911 to report the shooting, and another ushered us inside as the principal of the school came out to close and lock up the chain-link gate that was opened up to the street.
Once inside, though, I had to hold off on any verbal or mental acknowledgement of what had just happened because I ran into two volunteers who had arrived an hour early and were wandering around the school building. I sat down in the hall with them for a while, making small talk and asking about how they had enjoyed their visit to New Orleans. Later, when the rest of the volunteers had arrived, I had found out that the police had already come and gone. They had barely taken any statements (obviously, since I, as a witness, wasn't even aware they had come), but were there long enough to see that the victim was taken into the care of EMS personnel.
The rest of the afternoon was filled with the helping lead the volunteer projects, along with the mental and physical distractions that that entails. Later on that evening, I attended an outdoor movie event that another colleague had organized, featuring the documentary "Soundtrack for a Revolution," which told the story of the civil rights movement through the motif of songs and music that activists and protesters used to express their demands for social change. It wasn't until I saw the video footage of Dr. King's following quote, that the events from earlier that afternoon had flooded my consciousness:
"The only way we can really achieve freedom is to somehow conquer the fear of death. For if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.To provide further context into the thoughts that had followed, it would probably be helpful to rewind my life even further back to 2010, when I was involved with a program called JustFaith. It is a 30-week program that uses the setting of a small community to explore social justice issues and understand Catholic Social Teaching. During the program's section on nonviolence, we had invited a volunteer with the local Catholic Worker community to share his experiences in practicing nonviolence.
He recounted a handful of anecdotes, but the one that sticks with me was his personal experience being held at gunpoint in New Orleans by a man demanding money. He gave the man all the cash he had in his pocket, a mere $3, and asked the man's name, as if to still treat him with dignity, to recognize that there was still a person standing in front of him, despite the violent premise of this situation. They were able to make conversation,ultimately, the man's aggressive intentions were diffused; although I can't recall one way or another whether he gave the $3 back. I suppose this testimony has always struck a chord with me because those of similar nature that I've read in Walter Wink's "Powers that Be" or random "Good Samaritan" articles seem like fairy tales regaled from far-off lands or fables that only have basis in the hypothetical. This testimony was real; it had that first-person credibility that reading text on a page can't convey.
One point that our guest speaker had raised was that it is culturally common for people to be willing risk their lives for violence: to join the military and engage in unjust wars, to retaliate for real and perceived wrongs against them, etc. Then he brought up the notion of people being willing to risk their lives for peace. Ever since then, that notion has turned into a question: am I willing to risk my life for peace? This question both latently and consciously lies within my conscience, and it is a question that I continue to struggle to answer. Since then I occasionally imagine, with an optimistic fantasy, what I would do if I were to find myself in a similar situation. Would I fall victim to the instinctual "fight-or-flight" reaction? Or would I be someone who was willing to die for peace? Someone who would still the recognize the dignity of someone regardless of whether or not they recognize it in me or in themselves?
These reveries have ventured off into hypothetical situations where I encounter street violence and I'm not the targeted victim. My fantastical optimism would like to have thought that in that sort of situation (cue heroic voice) I would be free of fear and be a champion for peace! Without hesitation, Hypothetical Traci would have spoken out against the atrocity of street violence and implored the aggressor to see that there is another way, that whatever their enemy had done, the person underneath is worth more than sum of their actions. Obviously, fast forwarding back to the shooting on MLK Day, Actual Traci and Hypothetical Traci did not take the same course of action; something that initially induced a sense of shame and disappointment, especially after hearing the quote from the documentary. People like Dr. King and the guest speaker at my JustFaith group have been able to make commitment to nonviolence a reality, while I had reduced it back to a fairy tale.
However, I have come to the realization and the recollection that commitment to nonviolence is something that takes time, and it often starts out by recognizing violence in our daily behaviors. The guest speaker had mentioned even he has to be called out sometimes on little things, everyday things by his wife that exhibit forms of violence. And he told us that commitment to nonviolence takes practice, and it is deliberate and it is a lifestyle that you work toward.
My work with HandsOn New Orleans concluded at the end of February, and since then I have been working in a 3-month internship for ATD Fourth World Movement. Some of my responsibilities are related to research the Movement has been doing over the past few years on the links between poverty, violence, and peace. I have felt a small sense of solidarity in learning about people's experiences with different forms of violence, especially with those, like myself, who have failed to speak out against violence that they've encountered, whether due to fear, to shock, or any number of other reasons that human reason seems to conjure in justification for inaction. There is always more that we can do to address violence - and it is a bittersweet relief to know that I'm not alone in my shortcomings.
There is more that I would like to write, but I think that I will save further reflections for another day.
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