Chase Hope

“What the fuck is that truck doing there?” I exclaimed to my wife as we drove through our local main drag in the late winter morning of a weekend. The air was balmy, having been unseasonably warm the last few days. There was a gray haze lingering in the air. To my left, parked on the shoulder across the wide whitewashed road from a school, sat a black American pickup. GMC in red letters, like an EXIT sign in a dark hallway, was spelled out on the grill. It’s a newer model, towering over the head of an average man. 

I knew it was coming. Not because I am some sort of Nostradamus or soothsayer. Nor because of my degrees or experiences in community building. Anybody paying attention to an iota of the moment we find ourselves in could feel the presence. The feeling of hair standing on end. The feeling of being watched, the feeling of seeing the monsters from under your bed coming to life, but just out of your eyeline. Catching them out of the corner of your eye, but not being able to catch them in your sights. For months there have been rumors that locals a few towns over had seen them. Witnesses sounded beleaguered, wide-eyed, and in shock. By the time the reports make it to me—in the course of an hour—there’s nothing to be done. As quick as the monsters reveal themselves, they vanish. 

My reward for seeing it coming is a feeling in the pit of my stomach that won’t leave. It’s hyper-vigilance in the form of looking for odd license plates and out-of-place cars and letting my neighbors know I am available as a resource if they don’t feel comfortable leaving their home. 

There is still a brutish and naive boy that resides inside me. The voice of revolutionaries sometimes becomes the overwhelming sound in my head. Not for glory, not for money, or fame. I have no illusions of being someone whose name appears in the pages of history texts. I only want to do what I know to be right. What millions of other people know to be right. What makes me use the word right? To spend any time as a student of history is to know that we are the next generation of people who come from a line of folks who clawed, scratched, fought, and died for the struggle of freedom for themselves or for others. It would be a slap in the face to the legacy we fill to demand or expect to be remembered. 

Not everyone is as risk-seeking as a teenage boy, but those who were know they tend to prefer to drive fast. They envision themselves in the heist scenes from the lost plots of Fast & Furious movies. I don’t mean to generalize. Maybe it is my own experience getting a speeding ticket at 16 years old for doing 21 mph over the speed limit in an illicit street race. When feeling the thrill and terror of watching the speedometer glide forward - there is freedom. At 16, you cannot always—reliably—be counted on to see the forest through the trees. When you’re 30, with obligations and responsibilities, the time for pretending like you’re going down to the final lap at Daytona is borderline non-existent. 

Yet, on this balmy, gray Saturday, I found that feeling rising from the gas pedal beneath my right foot. Rising quickly through my body. The muscles in my calves and thighs tightened around my knees. I tasted the bitter spit in my mouth as the feeling hit my stomach, and my breathing became shallow as it reached my chest. The thoughts in my head came in quick succession. 

No Front License plate. Occupants wearing the sickly-looking green-brown fatigues. As you pass, make sure you check the backplate. Where should I turn around? Why the hell are they at a school on a Saturday? The license plate on the back is all black with bright yellow lettering. A plate I cannot recognize. 

There’s a row of businesses kitty-corner to the school with a small parking lot. I immediately turned the car into the lot and whipped it around to be facing the entrance I just came in. As I looked to make sure traffic wasn’t coming, the wheels of the truck turned to their left, and they spun in a small screech as they pulled off. 

For a half-second, the thought did cross my mind: what if it wasn’t? What if I was just scaring some poor guy who needed to pull over to send a text or for some other innocuous reason? These thoughts were interrupted by the action in front of us. The truck soon made an unexpected right turn and sped out of our eyeline. 

I am not positive I can place the feelings my wife was having. She didn’t say much when I called out the truck. She didn’t object when I made the quick three-point to flip the car around. She calmly and coolly pulled out her cell phone and began recording. She always knows how to remain steadfast. In this moment she remains steadfast. 

The black putty paint of the truck blurred as it turned right again into a neighborhood we haven’t often traveled near our street. It has several twists and turns, a Y intersection, and eventually leads to a series of dead-end streets. She started narrating as the car tried to hurry through the rows of mid-century family homes. Trying to maintain a safe distance, digging into all my military and spy history that has sunk to the bottom of my consciousness. Like some bizarro twilight zone where I am now cosplaying as the operator. In the position of Tom Cruise during one of his numerous Missions’ Impossible. There was a silliness to it that I couldn’t shake. This is what we are reduced to? This quickly gave way to anger—this is what we are reduced to. 

I hesitate to call it a chase. The reality, though, is clear. It was a chase. 

Eventually we came to an ‘S-curve’ that seemed to carry on its curve for seconds longer than it should. Somehow the truck had disappeared. Seeming to vanish behind a row of trees for a moment. The red light around the bend was visible, and as we rounded there, they were. Sitting at the red light waiting for us. 

I said out loud, half to my wife, half to myself. I almost wish they had not caught the light. I think it was so I could keep following from a safe distance, but I do think a small part of me wished that it didn’t have to continue. The light changed from red to green. The black truck lurches forward through the intersection. Strange, I thought at first. That’s a dead end. Anyone local knows that. So I decided to swing a left and try to catch them as they circled back out of the dead end. I almost felt relieved. As I turned left and then right to begin my process of turning around on a separate side street. As I reached the main road again, I did not see their truck at the light. Had I missed them? Stop lights don’t allow the most time for thought, so quickly I decided to follow their path into the dead end.

Did we chase them to someone?

The car lurches forward and begins the process of swinging us left as I turn the wheel. Somewhere between 20 seconds and 3 minutes passed as the vehicle moved us. Seemingly in the blink of an eye, there they were again. About 150 yards back from the light, in the middle of the road, was the black GMC pickup. Like a beast lying in wait for its prey. At this moment, the prey is us. The dichotomy between their towering pickup truck and our small sedan is the microcosm of the wide time and space Americans find themselves in. The mighty power of the State versus the tools available to us as individual people, our personal cars and cell phones. Time resumes, and as it does, it is with them staring at us. The narrow neighborhood road. The distance makes it hard to know for sure, but I promise, I could feel their stare through the glass of their windshield over that distance, through our windshield, and into my being. It wasn’t hatred, but it was sobering. The feeling that I got was that they thought it was a game. Or maybe like a cat that trapped a mouse. 

This story doesn’t end in any spectacular way; we pass each other on this narrow side street, the tint of their windows obscuring any chance to glean humanity. What chance of humanity is there to see? Masked, faceless agents of the state. They could see us; did they see humanity?  Before we got the car turned around again, they blew a red light and sped left out of the neighborhood.

I acknowledge I am not alone in fury and rage at the moment with only paper to scribble on and a message to the world. The words are acidic. Like the spit before you puke. It’s bitter. Since I can’t speak to them, I feel my hands tremble in anger. Patience is a virtue, and I’ve never been one to be virtuous. Biding time now feels like waiting as the drops of water drip slowly onto my skull. Each drop, wearing the skin down, burrowing just a little deeper through the calcium. How much longer till it hits my frontal lobe? 

How many more pictures of emaciated children in Palestine? How many more innocent people will be gunned down by ICE in the streets of America? How many more righteous men can I see thrown into a black site from Hell before it becomes too much to bear? When do the spoils of this life become insufficient? When does a higher law apply? 

Not the laws of man, but the laws that feel like they are etched within the inside-facing part of your ribs. The laws passed down by Allah, or God, or the spirit of the universe, the twinge of fire in your belly when you see an injustice. The feeling that washes over you as you see new photos of the most recent government-sanctioned murder. In between your eyes seeing the crimson stains that have dyed the airbag and the overflow of stuffed animals above the glove box, did you feel it?

When a gun-loving ICU nurse steps in to be a helper against masked paramilitants, his last words being “Are you okay?” before he is martyred for the world to see, did you feel it? 

Your nerves fire, your hands clench into fists, your breath becomes shallow, and your heart is beating through the gaps in your ribs; that feeling is the rage and sadness, and the taste in your mouth is adrenaline. You are forced to breathe and slowly swallow it back down.  That is your humanity. That is Hope speaking to you and saying it is not going to be easy. That is the fury of ancestors watching you allow us to be run roughshod over by people who have no humanity. The Bible says the Kingdom of God is within man. The powers that be are building and have been building their own kingdom, and in that kingdom they believe they have freed themselves from this humanity. Freedom for them involves chains for everyone else. They think because they won the day, they have won the war. 

Since they have won days, our path forward will be truly awful; the pain will be immense—but we will win. We weren’t raised to be murderers; we were raised to be martyrs—we were told “never again” is supposed to be “never again.” The struggle for freedom, unmitigated freedom, is long. It will not be finished in my lifetime; probably no one who is drawing breath as I clack away on this keyboard will be alive to see it. We grind ourselves into whatever tool we need in order to meet the moment and fit the need of the moment. Not everyone is a spear or sword. Be a hammer, be a wheel, be the spokes of the tire.  We must all fill the gaps in our community because there is nobody coming to save us. Not an opposition party, not the army, not your local politicians. The only reinforcements coming to anyone’s defense are the people on your block, in your neighborhood, or around your city. Hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder. Clawing, scratching, and fighting for our freedoms.

I cannot promise it to you, but I feel it in the calcium deposits in my bones: we are going to win. As long as we continue to show up for folks - they do not have the popularity or the numbers to stop us all. When we do win, we will tear down their monuments and idolatry. We burn their false promises and gross ideologies and use the ash to mix into the cement we use to build our new world. 

Tiocfaidh ár lá—our day will come. 

It may not come in our lifetime, but we do our share of the work while we’re here to try and leave this place better than we found it. They want us demoralized and scared. They want us to give in to the fear that screams from the depths of our fight or flight. Settle and steady your mind by listening to your heart and use what stirs inside you to muster the bravery to live free in the face of the people who want to kill us. It feels like the tides have turned for the general populace. After Trayvon Martin, Ferguson & Mike Brown, Minneapolis (twice with Philando Castile & George Floyd), and all the others whose names aren’t remembered and don’t get protests, it's to see the average American finally angry and engaged. It is not lost on me that it took longer for white people to come around, by having to have their own experience because they can’t believe the experiences of Black and brown folks—experience is undefeated as humanity’s best teacher.

In the main hallway of my grandmother's house, she's had a lithographic print showing a woman in a bonnet and glasses and a quote hanging up my whole life.  It reads:

Fighting is not only facing off in the streets against state-sanctioned murderers. It is checking in on your neighbors, shoveling sidewalks, and running food for families who cannot leave the house. It’s being on patrol with parents of children you didn’t know before the last several weeks. It is joining local groups who had quietly and thanklessly been fighting this oppression. They are hoping to divide and scare us. So be not afraid, and fight like you and your families' lives depend on it, because the only other options are bondage and death.