#SandraBland: #SayHerName

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my friends is driving cross-country with her son right now as I type this. He turned 18 last week and this trip from New York to Yellowstone Park is a last family hurrah before he ships off to college and the rest of his life in a month or so.

I know deep down that they will arrive out west, have a grand time, and enjoy the long drive home, that the experience will be spoken of fondly for years to come between mother and son. If she happens to be pulled over by a law enforcement official in any part of the country for any reason at all, that experience, too, will be merely one more tale in the fun collection of anecdotes: “Man, don’t even THINK about speeding in” (insert state name). And we her friends will enjoy the story.

My friend and her son are white, as am I. If she gets pulled over by a law enforcement official in any part of the country for any reason at all, the anecdote will not lead me to wonder these questions:

Why was she asked to get out of the car? Why was she arrested? Did the arresting officer have a body camera on his uniform? Was it functioning? Was the dash camera on the arresting officer’s vehicle turned on? If not, why not? Why is my friend, or her son, dead today?
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(Im)mortality

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.”—G.K. Chesterton, “The Flag of the World.”

The suicide is committing, from his or her terrible and terrifying and terrified point of view, genocide. Humanity-cide.
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Noisy Inner Peace

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Take my advice—I’m not using it.” I can tell you to keep calm. I might insist that you keep calm. But as someone who can introduce stress into the least stressful, sweetly innocuous, and even pleasant experiences in life, when I am confronted with the parts of life that others find truly stressful, I hunker down and find the effort deep inside myself to make them yet more stressful.

In one of my lesser achievements in the field of stress management, I gave myself a black eye while tying my shoes. These were boots with leather laces (I am not a cowboy) and such laces take a little effort to yank into position. While securing my “half-knot” on my right shoe, the length of lace in my left hand broke and I clocked myself in the right eye. At the time, I was 34 years old, not 11.
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