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Christopher

Noxon

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Blackout Tuesday

The more things change...

In the days after Charlie died, I learned something I had somehow never known before. It’s a tool, a trick, a way of being in the world when the world spins out of control:

Close your eyes.

Do it when the visible world around you feels charged with pain and you can’t bear to look. Do it when loss swells up in your throat. Do it when you’re talking and words feel insufficient and meaningless and hopelessly futile.

Close your eyes. Keep talking, keep thinking, keep feeling - just take a moment to be in darkness. Reduce the input. Breathe.

Our hearts break for George Floyd, whose breath was taken before our eyes. The brutality of the cops, the pleading of bystanders, the calls of Floyd for his mother - this was slow-motion murder, an unambiguous recapitulation and embodimet of centuries of state brutality against Black people. Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Delrawn Small - how many names, how many bodies do we need to see erased before we say: enough.

And oh yeah: we’re in the midst of a global pandemic and our president is a red hot pig without an ounce of empathy.

So here we are, the air swirling with smoke and aerosolized virus, deep in upheaval and upset and uprising. The past rears up to bark, the future bends and branches, events are charged with history. It is a terrifying and overwhelming time to be alive.

Working on “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook” revealed knowhow that feels especially relevant right now - especially about the deep spiritual and tactical value of nonviolence and the redemptive power of suffering. But now is not the moment.

Now I’m not a reporter or a writer or a person with opinions about the world. I’m a grieving father and what I know about this moment is this: close your eyes.

I mean it in the same way that activists have called on people to mark Blackout Tuesday. We’re not closing our eyes to pain we normally ignore that we now cannot. We are right to shout and rage and take to the streets. By all means, open your eyes for that (and for godsakes, wear a fucking face mask).

We need clarity and courage to get through this. And that means taking moments to stop, go dark and find that small quiet voice. It has vastly more valuable things to say than anything we see around us.