Universal - feeling the stress

Yesterday I had lunch with a Chief of Police. We were both attending a luncheon celebrating the diversity of a mid-size City in Middle Tennessee. Clarksville is the home of the 101st Airborne Division and because of the military presence has an above average amount of people of color and professional women. The military has been working at inclusion for a while now and this is one of the positive consequences.

Our table came together mostly by chance. The Chief, I am guessing, like all people who deal with dangerous situations, wanted to sit on the edge of the crowd with his back to the wall. He was also the last to go through the buffet. We were at the table because Jasmin was assigned as table host and I had come with her party.

Chief Al Rivers Ainsley was there to advocate and represent his agency. He was pensive but approachable. I shook his hand and he measured me as no threat and looked past me. to the larger crowd in the room The seven other folks were Six of the seven people at our table have a claim on African heritage (including a dapper three year old boy) and  our seventh was female woman with some Latin heritage. We all spoke English as a first tongue and i would guess we were all somewhere economically in the indebted lower-middle-class, if that still exists.

The Chief and I were two of maybe ten white men at this gathering of nearly 200. I had come to the event under the wings of three brilliant and engaged black women and he had come alone, wearing a daily uniform of dark blue. He talked to Rashidah Leverett for a good while and you can check that out in a previous post.

The stress  on his face was undeniable. It became all the more evident when the Chief discussed how there was very little place to let off steam and decompress because he works with the suffering and loss of of life and liberty and most of what haunts him he can not share with most people. His stress reminded me of someone I had met in Charlotte, NC  last week and I could not help make the connection. His stress was as close to any I had felt, with the exception of Christina, a Durham, North Carolina transgender Latinx woman with no documents for living here in this country.

Her story was elevated in a short film entitled Entre Nosotros produced by the film makers at Define American. She is interviewed after the showing of this short documentary that introduced Forbidden : Undocumented and Queer in Rural America, another story worthy of absorbing.

What linked the stories of these two unlikely emotional mirrors was the stress emanating out of both of them. These two people are intentionally doing what they feel is right despite the diversity and the anguish of their path. In both of these people's stories there is proof of ample effort to shoulder the responsibility of their decisions.

Christina speaks guardedly of how returning to the community she grew up in would likely lead to her murder. The Chief alluded to a time he was investigated for his decision to use deadly force in the field and his face exposed the raw post trauma of a real and present danger to his identity.

The other similarity that rung inside me was perhaps best expressed by Christina during the post viewing interview at the Film Festival. She was asked by the moderator, "What do you want from us now we know your story? She said, in  pained and imploring tones, "I need respect." These two have made choices to stand for freedom, yearning for safety while they move through their day to day life knowing that they are more likely to be killed because of their choices. large percentages of people don't trust or understand them. They are haunted at night and choose to go forward each morning out of raw determination and inner resolve that they will not be defeated.

What does our society get out of this state of affairs. What would it take to release all this judgement and connect, person to person, with people we have so long boxed of as the other. In this world there are "so many colors in the rainbow, so many flowers in the morning sun" (thanks Harry Chapin) and if we were to open up our eyes we could see everyone with respect, compassion and acknowledgement that we are all a part of this fabric so mysteriously weaved together. What would it take and what would we do with all that creative energy after we redirected it from the stress we all feel?