When the Police Roll In

First, the sadness. It is as if the rubber bullets buffeted my heart. The LA police’s tank rolled over my happiness.

Okay, what part of me is like the greed that ordered that holocaust; is like the glee that ripped flimsy tents and spewed free food in the mud? When has destruction seemed the only and right course inside of me? When have I seen Truth and vulnerability and compassion, and responded with hatred and anger and violence?

When I am in the throes of terror (wrongly) that the only way I can get the thing I really need is by fighting for it. When my thoughts fall down a bottomless well of despair into my own childhood night terrors. When it seems I’m living a life-and-death primal jungle struggle that can only end with one winner standing.

No matter how much stuff I have piled up in my life, it seems there is a part of myself that is still in that jungle, fighting for his life against some unknown enemy.

It is the “unknown” quality of that enemy which is so insidious.

It allows us to project it on anyone or anything. It strips away the thin veneer of society and tears the fabric of our civilized life, and pulls us all the way back to the primal ooze.

How do we speak our desire for fairness, without scaring the warriors back into fight or flight?