PHOTO/EINO SIERPE
DENVER, CO — I’m sort of shell shocked from my time in Baltimore during the unrest. First thing you see is the National Guard holding huge automatic assault rifles in the middle of the city and instantly you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. Then police and the military and tanks, are rolling down the streets, and sitting idle next to parks and museums with men in uniforms on top jeering at you and looking at you like you are the imposition and not them.
Baltimore was a spectacle of horror long before Freddie Gray died but it holds an unspeakable hopelessness now. Row after row, block after block of boarded up homes, trash everywhere, no playgrounds, the schools are filthy, their doors boarded shut, no produce in the grocery stores, no money in the ATM machines.
It’s helter-skelter and it’s all happening in an American city and there are kids everywhere and none of them look clean; all of them were hungry . . . every single one I met . . . hungry. But, stoic and resolute. I never saw any victims in Baltimore. The only thugs I saw were police officers.
I was personally chased by riot police who pepper sprayed me and the students I had with me for defying the curfew by one minute. They pointed their M16’s at us. We were sprinting down dark streets in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore where Freddie Gray lived, trying not to be captured. I/we ducked into the projects while many, many, people behind us were hit with billy clubs and pulled down by police who then kicked them and tossed them into a van.
I saw them clothesline a girl who looked to be about 13. (That’s a wrestling move.) She hit her head hard on the concrete. Two women heard us, came out, and let us come inside their home until much of the chaos subsided, but we still went through hell getting back to our hotel rooms.
I can’t stop thinking about the people there. The five-year-old I played basketball with while men with assault rifles were all around . . . how he couldn’t go to school because it had been closed down. How 80% of the children in that community rely on the breakfast and lunch provided to them at school and so when they closed the school they effectively starved the children.
I can’t stop thinking about the 11-year-old in the gas mask I walked with in defiance of a militarized police state and how he was sooooo much braver than I . . . how he had been starved and brutalized so long, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to escape the degradation. And I think about my own privilege (it’s difficult to be radical in Denver . . . one can be lulled right to sleep by the idyllic snow-capped mountains and trendy cafes that suggest there is no crisis here) and how I have never been so acutely aware of it in my life. See, I got to leave . . . look how lucky I am. I got to leave hell . . . while so many others are burning.
