Preparations ©Lauren Helf
June 2, 2020
401 Years
Helicopters hover in the sky day and night. 8pm curfew. Two hours before, the streets are quiet and seem subdued.
But the atmosphere is ominous, like a storm is coming, something terrible that can't be stopped. Men are boarding up storefronts with plywood.
I don't want to see the damage done to looted stores. I don't want to watch fighting between protesters and police.
I don't want another person's life to get snuffed out by a knee on their neck.
This foreboding is familiar. It's like 9/11 and the pandemic. The ordinary made extraordinary and out of control. Danger and helplessness.
It's what the women left alone on the ranch at evening feel in the 1956 Western "The Searchers". Only this time, the threat doesn't come from without.
The threat is within us, among us, with us for 401 years since slavery first came to this continent.
And suddenly, I think I get it. This is how Black people feel all the time.
