By Jean Yeager
WHO AM I?
What part of the human
spirit sends a Tamir Rice to the most dangerous place near where they live, a
small city park, so they can be alone and play and dream and imagine with a toy
gun beneath a hard, bare, concrete picnic canopy littered with heroin needles?
What sends Tamir into such a place where adults would not go alone?
Young boys, the
Tamirs, like the Hucks of previous generations, have an indefatigable sense of
adventure up until the time grown-ups shame it, blame it, or otherwise
constrain it out of them. Adventure is the air which children breathe, they
“sense” adventures like people with eyes can see or people with ears can hear.
Children are a receptor for the spiritual medium of adventure which exists
around us all.
Grown-ups sense the
danger in adventures.
Grown-ups know the
reality. Grown-ups have grown into reality, have created the reality in which
they live. Grown-ups try to numb ourselves to adventure because life has
damaged us, beaten us down, told us we can’t win or covered up our adventure
senses.
Grown-ups are jealous
of kids who still walk hand-in-hand with Dame Adventure. Grown-ups warn
children against small cottages made of candy in the dark woods and the old
people who live there, of dealers in old houses with broken windows, of the
wild beasts who lurk and wish to devour them, of black sedans or squad cars;
and always, always grown-ups tell stories of young children who were never
clever enough, never strong enough, never brave enough because grown-ups want
the child to be what? Cowardly and fearful like ourselves? To avoid risk like
us? To not get involved?
WHY AM I HERE?
Young boys, like Tamir
and Huck believe themselves brave enough, clever enough, strong enough to
overcome an addicted Pappy, a lack of privilege like our friend Tom, a lousy
education from a poor school, a heartless community of auntie Pollys, and the
dangers of the River. Like Tamir and Huck, we started our journey breathing
adventure floating on a raft down a big, big river with deadly currents and
dangers. We loved it.
We are now grown-ups
who breathe anxiety. We are afraid to look upstream. We know what we will see.
Our River has been dammed and diverted. The water of our lives is now used for
watering golf courses, McMansion suburbs, and factories whose technologies
transform the living into plumes of acrid, killing smoke into the air and
dumping toxic effluent back into our lives.
Education for what? For a maintenance job that kills the soul and pays so
little, we have to get a second job or a third? How did we become fearful
Aunties or absentee Paps drunk on our self-importance?
Adventure in our
neighborhoods has been transformed into racial profiling sludge, Army-style
cops, soul pollution, and community doubt; far deeper and more treacherous currents
than ever ran in the River before.
Why can’t we
grown-ups be brave enough, clever enough, and strong enough? We live on
the River of life, too.
WHY AM I HERE?
We can breathe
adventure again, too. And, when we do, our spirits will light up. We have arrived
at a place downstream from where we started that we never imagined, at a future
we now dread. In a strange land with which we must cope. But, why?
We can put the past we
could not imagine, our fears we wished we could avoid, our shame, our blame, our
failures, scars, and weaknesses into the soles of our Nike’s and walk, like
Tamir into the park, the garden, the dark woods, away from our homes, in our
’hoods, away from the self-made prisons in which we have locked ourselves away.
Give away our privilege. Go where it is not safe. Go meet the danger we have
created, you know it well – it matches up perfectly with our personal
short-comings.
Go for adventures.
When you feel fear, you will know you are close. You have hidden long-comings
to transform the fear. Be a lonely Huck on a raft, floating away from un-civil
civilization. Be a Tamir and take a walk into the park.
Things will be
different when Tamir, like Huck, has a companion to journey with him. He needs
a powerful individual, once enslaved, but now free - you. You can
be free and strong.
Tamir would not be
dead if he had not been alone and someone like you was with him.
© 2016 Jean W. Yeager, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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