From my apartment window I see the blind spot on the corner. Over the course of eight years, I witnessed countless close calls and a handful of accidents. On one occasion during early lockdown, I heard the not-uncommon sound of screeching tires. Peering down at the street, I saw two men jump out of their souped-up sports cars. In their shock, trembling, shaking clenched fists, they yelled unintelligible threats at one another. Circling like two rabid dogs waiting to pounce, they snarled and foamed. From my perch, I could see the veins in their necks throbbing. Neither advanced and eventually they both drove off indignantly, perhaps both realizing they could have killed themselves. And yet unwilling to take responsibility, unwilling to yield.

Lockdown turned me into a street-corner voyeur, peeping through my window at the clash of cultures, the contention, the constructed absurdities, and the mean-spirited, often-brutal narratives that are woven into the world. While I tiptoed around the shadows of my apartment trying to observe the goings-on of the world outside without being seen, I realized over a year had gone by and I had tiptoed around myself and everyone else, avoiding being at all.

I woke up one morning during the pandemic spring to the sound of James Brown blasting down the block. I went to the window to see what was going on when I noticed a white guy who lives across the street stomping back up the block away from the source of the music. A few doors down, a black guy turned and walked towards him, just as a cop car was pulling away. He glared down the block at the white guy, pointing his finger and yelling: “I see you! You fucking racist! Call the cops on me? We supposed to be neighbours. You are a racist! I see you now!”

The white guy stopped in his tracks in front of a white woman with a Black Lives Matter poster hanging in her window, who had come out on her porch next door to check on the commotion. He asked: “Did he call me a racist?” Then he turned around and took a few steps towards the black guy, who had turned the music up a notch by now.

“I’m not a racist! You’re the racist!” he yelled, pointing back at the black guy who waved him off as he walked back to his yard. The white guy turned towards the white woman and threw his hands up. “Can you believe that?” he exclaimed incredulously. Shaking her head in what looked like a mixture of confusion and disgust, she replied: “Unbelievable. Of course not, I don’t think you’re a racist.” He thanked her, glaring back down the block, his naturally pink skin now turned red. By this time, the music had been turned down and within a half hour completely died out.

A few months later during the pandemic summer, I heard a skittish caw coming from the sidewalk below. In my irritation, I peeked out and saw a woman pushing a shopping cart stacked with boxes and bags park in front of the hydrant downstairs. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but it sounded like she was having a heated argument with someone who had wronged her. She proceeded to unpack the contents of the shopping cart, which may have constituted all of her worldly possessions, and organize them on the sidewalk. What began as a meticulous exercise quickly turned haphazard, anxious, chaotic. She paused and looked around—a 270 degree scan, as if to make sure no one was watching—then tossed a box on the cart, which quickly fell off, spilling the contents across the sidewalk. Perhaps sensing my lurking presence, she hastily stuffed the rest of her belongings in the cart and pushed off down the block and around the corner, stopping every few feet to reorganize her collapsing life.

For the last eight years, I have lived above a young couple with three kids and have been a witness to their trials and tribulations, struggling to survive in NYC. I’ve heard the screaming matches and tantrums and felt the feet stomping in and out, doors banging open and shut. During the pandemic fall the husband was still furloughed from his hotel job, the kids were out of school, and the mother was constantly ranting; the whole lot were clearly going stir crazy. When I took out the trash, I would find brown paper bags full of empty whiskey bottles, and once, while I was talking to the father, a bag of coke flew out of his wallet and landed at my feet, just out of eyeshot of his kids.

Things got worse from there, and before the ambulances and cops were called to his house a third time I heard him bellowing and threatening to kill himself. He was taken away and returned some hours later, looking run down. A few days later the wife and kids moved out. I haven’t seen them since. Over the months of lockdown, his face bloated and his eyes became permanently bloodshot. He would ask to borrow money, starting with $100, bargaining down to $50, and finally accepting 20 bucks as consolation. He wasn’t a bad guy, and I empathized to the degree that I could, but eventually I started avoiding him. When I returned from a trip in March, I discovered that he had moved home to Bangladesh. The apartment downstairs has been empty ever since.

Going “back to normal” is not a sentiment I relate to. I did not like the way things were, any more than I like the way things are now. Was it better 

 than it is now? I think many people—here and elsewhere—would agree that while the pandemic’s impact on social, political, and economic structures has been unprecedented, the uncertainty, tension, and collapse that people face on a daily basis is not.

The story of my neighbour, like any of these incidences, did not begin with COVID. 

 who leave the devastation of our parasitic existence and its brutal impact on one another and the planet, to fate, and God, and all our best intentions. Triage is all we know how to do now, oblivious or fully aware, that the wound is far too deep to recover. The only thing left to blame is our lack of imagination. The only certainty is that no matter how obvious the blind spots, at any moment now we’re most certainly going to crash.

Global

Blind Spots

I am a passenger in this neighborhood, in this country, on this pale blue dot hurtling through the cosmos. I race my three-year-old daughter up the stairs of the 

 pyramid in Denver's La Raza Park to show her David Ocelotl Garcia’s sprawling four-sided mural 

 for the first time. She holds my hand and twirls in ever widening circles, marveling at the spiraling Nahuatl iconography depicting the travels and travails of the people of Aztlán. She may not remember these stories, they are so easily forgotten, so ephemeral. They shape-shift, metastasize, migrate. They are the journey and we the pilot.

As the story goes, Ruben Salazar ducked in to the Silver Dollar Café when the Los Angeles riot police turned the Chicano Moratorium march into their own private hunting grounds. He wasn’t the type who panicked when things got hot. He’d served as a 

 war correspondent in Vietnam, covered the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, gone undercover to report on drug cartels, witnessed the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City. Salazar had just propped himself on a barstool near the entrance to the Sliver Dollar and was about to take a sip of beer when a 10-inch wall-piercing projectile of tear gas was fired through the doorway. It struck him in the head, likely killing him before his body hit the floor.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department called his death an accident. They argued that officers were attacked by rioters while responding to a call from the owner of the Green Mill liquor store who had requested protection from looters (a claim he later denied).

“Salazar was killed," wrote Hunter S. Thompson in 

, "because he happened to be in a bar where police thought there was also a 'man with a gun.' They gave him a chance, they say, by means of a bullhorn warning...and when he didn't come out with his hands up they had no choice but to fire a tear gas bazooka into the bar...and his head got in the way. Tough luck. But what was he doing in that place anyway? Lounging around a noisy Chicano bar in the middle of a communist riot?”

After he joined the prominent Spanish-language television station KMEX as News Director, Salazar continued to write a weekly column of unapologetic, incendiary, erudite articles on Mexican-American affairs for the 

. But at KMEX, he had license to give the Chicano anti-Vietnam War movement a legitimate platform. He exposed police intimidation and violence in Mexican-American communities. He amplified the voices calling for education and social reform in the barrios of East LA. He waded into the deep and sordid injustices occurring on the homefront that his previous editors wouldn’t (or couldn’t) publish and ended up a martyr—one whose name is whispered by few.

Ruben Salazar was killed on August 29, 1970. Three days later, police “discovered” his body among the debris inside the boarded up Silver Dollar Café.

A thousand miles east of Los Angeles lay the deserts of Aztlán, a mythical homeland of the Aztec diaspora corresponding to the southwestern United States. The term refers to the conquered lands of northern Mexico that were ceded to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. When Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales introduced 

 at the first Chicano national conference in Denver in 1969, he redefined Aztlán to signify not just a homeland of myth and legend but a polity of disposessed peoples stretching from California to Colorado. The land of 

“Aztlán,” wrote Gonzales, “a mythical land of the Aztecs? Aztlán an abstract illusion of a Nation? Aztlán a common denominator that 

, the mestizo, the Chicano can agree upon is not based on a 

 of romantic delusions. It is conceived on the foundations of history and the reality of its existence can and will be proven by law; not a law based on political courts of injustice and cold Anglo legalities, but based on human fact and historical inheritance.”

The public pool at Columbus Park in Denver’s Northside neighborhood was 

 place to bein the summer of 1971. A place where young people could ride the wave of Chicano pride—where 

(the community) gathered for “splash-ins,” hung out, networked for jobs, and forged cultural and political identities. What outwardly resembled a cool refuge on hot summer days signified a social inflection point: Mexican-Americans finally had a place to call their own. It seemed only fitting that those who gave Columbus Park vitality and meaning should rename it La Raza Park.

Ten years later, a crowd gathered at La Raza to commemorate the anniversary of the park’s renaming. They were waiting to see Corky Gonzales, the Denver-born featherweight boxing legend and founder of the national Chicano movement Crusade for Justice, who was scheduled to attend. The day Ruben Salazar was killed, Gonzalez had been laying low in an East LA hotel near the Chicano Moratorium demonstration—barely evading police by huddling in the back of an innocuous flatbed truck as cops searched the area.

The celebratory mood at La Raza was tempered due to Gonzales’ presence and residual hostilities from a Brown Beret demonstration at nearby Highland Park the previous day. At noon, a phalanx of police cars arrived and the SWAT team surrounded the park. They ordered nearly 400 people to disperse, claiming event organizers had failed to secure a permit. (This was disputed by Arturo Rodriguez, the longtime manager of La Raza Park who spoke as a respected community member and city employee.) Protesters hurled bottles and rocks at the cops, who retaliated by firing tear gas into the crowd and unleashing dogs on those who refused or were too disoriented to flee—demonstrators, park employees, children, women, the elderly.

Corky Gonzales never addressed the crowd. But the enduring tragedy was that the city council decided to fill the pool with concrete and restore the name Columbus Park. A farewell fuck you from the city to la Raza. Years later, a faux Aztec pyramid was erected on the site where children used to learn how to swim.

I bring my daughter to the playground at La Raza Park on a blazing afternoon in early September. We race up the steps where two homeless men are sitting in the shade of the hollowed out 

 pyramid, leaning against their tattered belongings. On a picnic table next to the playground, surrounded by spruce trees, a grandmother is enjoying an afternoon 

with her grandkids. Across the park, a biracial couple lounges under an elm tree smoking a joint. Northside is now called Sunnyside. A once-inimitable Denver barrio is in the throes of gentrification, its past memorialized in a thin coat of spray-paint on the walls of the last taqueria.

There are no signs of the gathering that took place here in late August when community members commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium and celebrated the removal of all Columbus Park signs from La Raza Park. The signs were taken down quietly on June 26th when shelter-in-place orders were still in effect.

David Ocelotl Garcia’s mural adorning the interior ceiling of the 

 pyramid is one of the few reminders of the public pool where the community once gathered at La Raza Park. He describes 

as having been composed like a book. “Each scene flows into the next story. It goes from creation, to a tribal ceremony, to the Mexican Revolution, to the Mexican-American war, to the journey of the people who came to the States...and ends with the characters going back to the earth.”

It has taken fifty years, but someday soon La Raza Park signs will be driven deep into the earth and the 

 will represent a hard-fought home on the journey of the people of Aztlán.

*To see more of David Ocelotl Garcia’s artwork visit: 

United States

Dispatch from Aztlán

 occupy a massive white room in the Prado in Madrid. I’ve never stood before them, but as a painter I’ve long studied his work. The paintings are confounding—considered too dark and depraved to be enjoyed, while the artist himself was too celebrated to be subject to critique. It was initially painted on the walls of his farmhouse, 

 (House of the Deaf Man), on the outskirts of Madrid. Although Goya himself was losing his hearing, the estate was in fact named after its former owner. 

After Goya’s exile and death, the plaster was stripped and stolen and eventually found a home at the Prado. Considered by many to be a series of abominations, there are presumptions in art historical thought that the images' harrowing themes were a manifestation of Goya’s intense depression, disillusionment and/or dementia from war and illness, reflecting his steady mental, emotional decay. The nightmares of a pathetic, feeble-minded, dead man walking, albeit still a master.

 as mindless or paranoid ramblings. They are distinctly Goya, farcical nightmarish expositions on human ugliness. Nor are they cynical, which disturbing images often are typecast as. They are as funny as they are sad.

Like Goya, director Milos Forman—who passed away in April 2014—was witness to the horrors of war and the degradation of the human spirit. Forman lost both his parents to the Holocaust. Two decades later in 1968, he fled the Russian invasion of Prague, emigrating to the United States. Forman's last film was 

, itself an analysis of the madness of war and the requisite human ugliness.

Watching the lead up to the 2020 U.S. election brings to life Goya’s 200-year-old caricature studies of humans in grotesque states of uncertainty, fear and greed. Clamoring over one another, howling and burning in Boschian landscapes, all these self-proclaimed “leaders” shout their slander and vitriol over one another, never putting forward consequential ideas or fruitful plans. Disgracefully subsumed in wresting power from another depraved and disgraceful opponent, the bar for decency isn’t just low any more, it’s dead and buried. It harkens to the madness that is fomented when institutions completely forget the basic needs of people they were created to serve. The ugly, divisive politics of the U.S. at present is unsettlingly similar to the madness of the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and Cold War Czechoslovakia; all the ways that repression through the puppet politics of human deprivation leads to individual and collective psychosis.

The fate of Goya’s farmhouse and estate, the House of the Deaf Man, seems a fitting metaphor for the deafening of reason amid the din of global populism and the continual pillaging of the earth along with our sanity and dignity. Goya’s work, like Forman’s, shows that tragedies resulting of human greed can—through painting, film, music, theater, comedy and all forms of creative expression—be translated into honest and powerful learning experiences. Sarcasm is not necessarily cynicism. A dark interpretation is not always the same as a dark intention.

House of the Deaf Man

At the age of five, Gamboa Jr. left school to carry out his self-education in the rich milieu of this multicultural, working-class corner of L.A. Reading and writing were crucial, and he found numerous ways to sharpen those skills—from the newspapers left lying around at diners to the comic books he'd buy whenever he had the money. Still enrolled in the public schools (and moved forward year after year despite not attending classes), Gamboa Jr. spent his time wandering from Boyle Heights into downtown L.A. and more distant parts of the city. By 1968 he'd joined the coalition of young and older activists who carried out the L.A. high school walkouts and sparked that city's Chicano Movement activism. F

our years later, in 1972, he co-founded the multimedia collective, ASCO.

 Gamboa Jr.'s story is further proof that literature happens where and how it must.

The Lorena Street School playground in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, was once a manicured, park-sized lawn where mid-20th century elementary-school children could play happily in the perpetual sunshine of Southern California. In 1956 the Los Angeles Unified School District acted on public health warnings by covering the grass with noxious blacktop that simulated the burgeoning urban environment by mimicking the features of the nearby Santa Ana Freeway. The blacktop was a modified oil/tar-based asphalt infused with lead and copper shavings meant to stave off the predictive effects of nuclear fallout from ongoing U.S. Military atomic tests in Nevada, which had caused the grassy playground to mutate into a field of prickly weeds infested with fluorescent, biting insects in the first place. Many of the children recently exposed to the playground suffered unknown medical syndromes that would later be identified as precursors to fatal childhood leukemia.

“Want to get squashed by the steam roller before the men fix the playground? Get away from the chain-link fence and stand in line. No talking and stop playing.” The toxic smoke of poured blacktop mixed with the usual acrid smog as a tall male teacher tugged the ears of several boys and knuckled the heads of girls who quickly aligned into a nervous queue of kindergarteners.

“And you? Don’t you understand a fucking thing? I’ll teach you.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and bum-rushed me toward class. “Everyone follow me.”

The children marched to the door of Room 33. The teacher squeezed down hard on my shoulders, but I wouldn't cry for mercy. Miss Flint greeted us with a warm smile and the man let go. I was glad to be freed from the usual early-morning assault but I was unconvinced it would be a pain-free day for learning. Three weeks into my first semester, public school had already shown me the punitive techniques the system employs to induce conformity. On the first day of kindergarten, Miss Flint sat me on a small chair in front of the assembled parents and children after she realized that I didn't speak English. She placed a paper dunce cap on my head, colorfully emblazoned with the word 

. Everyone laughed and applauded, but the attempt failed to induce the desired fear and submission. I was little, but I wasn't stupid. I saw immediately that the purpose of compulsory education is to assimilate children into the norms set forth by a dominant culture. For the next twelve years I would endure whatever they threw at me, while decoding the dehumanizing efforts of the adults, children, buildings, and the cordoned-off areas of the vast dig that was about to change the physical identity of the elementary school that objected to my presence on Day One.

My father was a skilled letterpress printer who operated massive Heidelberg presses, working overtime six days a week at a vinyl record manufacturing plant in the nearby city of Vernon. His pay supported us and covered the mortgage on a two-bedroom, single-family home a block away from school. He was fluent in English and Spanish. My mother was in many ways a trickster, an absentee role model who hosted gatherings in our kitchen with my uncles, who had fought against Nazis during WWII; and my aunts, who had given birth to my many cousins, engaging in day-long fantastical conversations in their inherited resistance dialect called Caló 

The 1910 Mexican Revolution left its traces in the international and multicultural amalgam of Mexican-Americans in El Chuco, as my aunts and uncles called their beloved hometown, El Paso, Texas. Spanish and English were widely used among the Chicano people there, but they also needed secret codes of communication to ensure survival under the adverse social conditions of racism, poverty, and official violence. The Pachucos

proud in their criminalized zoot suits and other stylish clothing, were targets throughout the barrios and cities of the Southwest U.S. In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported coordinated attacks by military personnel against Pachucos in Los Angeles. This set the tone for brutal policing, courtrooms, jails, and school for the post-war generation. Caló was their language of survival.

I preferred Caló as my earliest mode of speaking, but was confronted by a modernist situation that would ensure my perpetual punishment if I persisted in my rejection of English. The use of Spanish was forbidden in all public institutional venues. On my fifth birthday, after several weeks of verbal and physical abuse at school, I decided I would master the use of English. I already knew how to read and write the letters of the alphabet, and I discovered that words could be formed from letters to create chains of ideas to form meanings. At school I saw 

 in a 1930 edition of Elson-Gray Readers atop Miss Flint’s desk. After thumbing through the pages I concluded that 

 was insufficient for the task of providing the information I needed to succeed in my early effort to circumvent institutional brainwashing. I would have to avoid attending school as much as possible. I chose to never complete homework or tests and vowed to reject school to pursue my personal goal of self-education. I would also need to establish a broad-based support system involving classmates, children and adults from my neighborhood, and others in the surrounding city, often called "L.A

by the mythical beings that appeared on the electrified television screens to assist me in achieving control of spoken English in a variety of colloquial styles and accents. It was also important for me to secure some form of financial independence so as to induce others to assist me by way of payment or to ensure protection through outright bribery.

My initial rejection of school evolved over time into adaptable behaviors that allowed me to make friends with many students of diverse heritage and, in third grade, to receive approval to work early mornings in the cafeteria three times-a-week doing various chores, including laying out cookies on the stainless-steel counter, folding napkins over metal forks and spoons and putting them in a neat pile, and distributing three hundred paper cups that would later be filled with hot cocoa. I was eight years old. I received a cookie each workday and a partial lunch on Fridays. Every week I gave my sweets to the toughest boys and smartest girls in exchange for unspoken loyalty. I never ate during the school day. I was a small-framed, polite child, visually aware of my surroundings and hyper-vigilant at all times. I had learned to speak, read, and write English at an advanced level that I kept hidden from the teachers and administrators. I left most of my class assignments uncompleted and all my tests intentionally blank. I was absent two days of every five, with the excuse that I suffered from upper-respiratory problems. On those days, I mostly watched TV, including cartoons, recycled wartime propaganda, 

, and daytime live interviews with faded movie stars, artists, fashion designers, and alarmist cult leaders. TV's wide-ranging conversations and divergent subject matter provided a vast amount of information that complemented or contradicted what I had experienced in school or on the streets. Stories of fancy parties, foreign travel, surrealist animated dreamscapes, and questions surrounding the possibility of nuclear war fascinated me. I easily memorized the English words spoken on television, which I would then seek out in the large dictionary at our little-used, nearby public library.

The brick and mortar library was built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style of the era when it opened its doors in 1927. The original stock, placed on the shelves around that same time, was readily identifiable by their stiff primary-colored hardcovers with white numbers in bold type on the spines. I would sometimes place a stack of old books on the hardwood table and flip through them to find words or ideas that might trigger a mental image or convey an important message from the distant past that I could put to use in my present condition that already betokened a complex future. The yellowish incandescent lights, polished linoleum floors, and the hard interior decor generated echoes or other disturbances when I pressed my graphite pencil tip to the scrap-paper and wrote down titles and authors' names:

Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence by William Bateson, 1902
Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West by Dale Lowell Morgan, 1953
The Plague by Albert Camus, translated 1948
On War by Carl von Clausewitz, 1832

I felt heavy breathing on my neck while thumbing through the S-words in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2nd Edition (1942).

“What are you looking for? It must be a very important word for such a young Mexican boy like you to be sticking his head into a book like this.” The hovering librarian must have been suspicious of my presence during a school day.

“Hey, muchacho, are you threatening me with a weapon?”

“No. Sticks and stones can break your bones but words can get you into bigger trouble. My mother says I have incurable tuberculosis.”

The librarian reeled in horror as I ran out the door and into the rear alley where I encountered a man standing in a pool of blood that poured profusely from his head wound. “Hey kid, take this ten-dollar bill and buy me a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. Don’t worry, it’s good money.” I was frightened, but intrigued by his cool demeanor. “And buy yourself a comic book or something. Hurry before they come back.”

I walked to the liquor store that sold comic books, pornography, and day-old newspapers. I picked an issue of 

 magazines contained, but they were beyond my reach. I pointed to the pack of cigarettes and put the ten-dollar bill on the counter. The proprietor examined it carefully and gave me exact change in pennies and nickels that filled my pockets. The rolled-up comic book felt powerful in my hand, even if it wasn't. I returned to the alley in time to see four young guys beating the man with metal pipes and a crowbar.

“Fucking puto, get out of here unless you want the same thing to happen to your familia.” I knew of gangs from classmates but was surprised to see violence like this so close to home. On TV, killing was simple and clean, but the murder in the alley was a crazy mess. “I’m loco, ese, don’t get me wrong.” He threw a pipe at me but missed. I ran away. Their faces remain etched in my memory.

At the streetcar stop I looked back to make sure they weren't following me. The Los Angeles Transit Line R streetcar pulled up and I boarded, paying my fare with one of the dead man’s coins. The wooden seats were all taken so I rode standing and read 

 until we reached downtown, 7th Street and Broadway. Many thousands of people shopped, walking, talking, laughing, and some even danced on street corners. I had visited downtown several times in the rare company of my father. I found my way to Clifton’s Cafeteria and went inside, following other customers through an interior environment alluding to the redwood forests of Northern California. On my tray I put a cookie and a cup of hot chocolate. I paid for the meal with a handful of nickels, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and sat down in a dark corner lit by coloured neon. Superman battled archvillains while avoiding exposure to Kryptonite. When I finished the comic I took an outdated 

 from the empty table beside me. The headlines reported executions in California's gas chamber in the San Quentin State Prison. I read a feature on the strange lights illuminating night skies after nuclear explosions, and found it ironic that the death of John Hamilton, who played Perry White in 

“You’re going to have to move it, boy. This is our table. We got more important things to do than to babysit. Now, scoot.”

A disfigured man led a pack of men who all appeared to be physically damaged, some using canes, others missing hands or limbs, and one who was obviously blind because his eye sockets were empty. I made out the word Korea on the lapel pin hanging loosely from one man’s torn jacket. They sat down without making any further effort to oust me. I kept my head in the newspaper.

“Now if you ask me, I’d rather be kissing the girls in Tokyo.”

“No way man, they are too beautiful to be bothered with the likes of us.”

“Well then, I guess I’ll have to settle for this stack of pancakes. Hand me that maple syrup and I’ll just pretend it’s honey from God.”

The one nearest turned to me. “What you reading about the world’s troubles for, son? Ain’t you supposed to be in school.”

They laughed and told stories while smoking and drinking coffee. The men refrained from using curse words that might have an adverse effect on a child. I sat with them for more than a couple of hours, trying to absorb as many of their cheerful phrases as I could remember. It was time to head back home, but I wanted to impress them before leaving the table. “Do you know that the State of California gasses people to death like the Nazis did? Hitler wanted a super race and America’s hero is Superman. Everything on TV is fake but we are all real.”

“Wow, child. You just gave me the chills.”

“Take care, niño, it’s tough out there.”

I walked out the door to bustling Broadway, my pockets full of change. Many people carried shopping bags with most men dressed in suits and women in dresses. Nearly everyone wore hats, the women’s with full- or half-laced veils. Almost all the shoes and boots pounding the pavement were made of leather. I wondered how much it would cost to buy a new pair of shoes, so I walked until I came across a store with a hand-painted sign:

Atomic Sales War! 2 pairs of shoes for the price of 1

The store was vast and brightly lit by rows of fluorescent lights. On the long mahogany counter a golden cash register sat in plain view next to a device that looked like an oversized TV console with buttons, knobs, and a periscope for viewing the screen. A tall saleswoman with a pencil-thin neck leaned down and looked into my eyes. “Want to see something that will change the way that you think about shoes?” She led me to the counter, took the rings off her fingers and put them in a locked drawer, then picked up a rubber vest and dark goggles. “Help me with this, will ya?” She put on the goggles and turned around so that I could assist in securing a rear button on the vest. The rubber felt like dead skin leaving me cold as I snapped the button shut. “You really are a dear boy. Come around to this side so that I can introduce you to our very own Pedoscope. Now, watch your step and climb on.”

I grabbed hold of the console's protruding handles to lift myself into place. The woman told me to put my feet in the opening at the base of the platform. “Now lean into the viewer and stay still while I fire it up.” She pressed a button and pulled a lever. A thin whine got louder as the periscope's glass screen began to show fuzzy shadows and sketchy lines—the flesh of my feet and fabric of my shoes surrounding a real-time X-ray moving image of the bones inside my feet.

“It’s a real treat when you bend your toes.”

This was the first time I'd been fully aware that I was literally made of bones and flesh. I wiggled my toes for several minutes, enchanted by the sight of my ghostly skeleton.

The lady grew bored. “Oh my, maybe we’re spending too much time having fun.” My feet tingled and felt hot. “Please come back with your mother and tell her that you want the best shoes that money can buy." She switched the power off and removed the goggles. I jumped down and waved goodbye, smiling to her in gratitude for this unexpected experience. “Cute dimples," she said. "Au revoir.”

I walked out onto Broadway and retraced my steps to 7th Street where I boarded the streetcar back to East L.A. It was early afternoon, less crowded, and this time I got a seat beside a teenager. I was sure that no one would have missed me during my absence from school and the neighbourhood. I sat, writing down many new words—

radioactive shoe-fitting fluoroscope, cyanide gas, atomic

—on a folded sheet of paper that I kept in my back pocket. I planned on checking for correct spelling and definitions when I had a chance to return to the library. My feet felt uncomfortably hot and itchy. I was slightly nauseous and my eyes hurt.

“Who in the fuck do you think you are writing down words and shit? And besides, that’s my pencil. Give it to me. You got money?”

The boy looked mad as he took the pencil from me and stuck his hands in my pockets to steal all the coins, the comic book, and the unopened pack of cigarettes. I offered no resistance. I'd seen him before, on one of my recent outings, talking to a few girls near Fresno Park. He punched me once in the chest and got up from his seat.

“You better have more money for me the next time I see you on the streets.”

He got off at the next stop. I watched him walk away, lighting a cigarette. My nausea increased now that my unknown tormentor was gone, and my pencil with him. At Whittier Boulevard and Esperanza Street I ran home, arriving an hour before my father was due from work. Everyone was gone. In the bathroom I took off my shoes to find both feet covered in red, blistering skin. I opened the medicine cabinet above the sink and took a small bottle of Mercurochrome and spread the red liquid across the top and bottom of the left foot and then the right. I put on my socks and shoes so no one would see that my feet looked refried.

The next morning I woke up early enough to have breakfast and get to school by 7:00 a.m. to work in the cafeteria before the bell rang at 8:15 a.m. when I was supposed to go to my assigned desk in Room 24 for lessons in arithmetic, penmanship, civics, and other common subjects. I enjoyed the company of my friends and classmates who I always called by their surnames: Mechikoff, Watanabe, Hanamakai, Thrush, Medina, Armijo, Peoples, Caine, Stein, Gonzalez, Baroux, Martinez, Fantoni, Rodriguez, Oss, Gutierrez, Andersson, Perez, Wilson, Licon, Furukawa, Chin, Kilgallen, Salikoff, and del O. 

“Where is your parental note to be excused for yesterday’s absence?”

Mrs. Childs, the 3rd Grade teacher, asked the same question two times-a-week, and I always handed her identical notes copied from a letter my friend’s mother wrote for him a year earlier:

Dear Teacher, My son has an illness that comes and goes. The doctor says it is an -ISM. Please excuse his absence. Thank you, Mother/Father of the boy in question.

I made an illegible squiggle for the signature that I could attribute to either parent. The unread note, taken and filed away, granted qualified immunity to all involved parties. I had failed kindergarten through 2nd Grade and would soon be moving on to the 4th Grade by failing the 3rd. The school advanced me based on age and to manage classroom space. Glancing quickly through the various schoolbooks gave me enough knowledge to raise my hand and provide correct answers to most questions the teachers asked. That morning I sat quietly, reading a history book when I felt my feet get wet inside my shoes. I asked to use the restroom and was given a hall pass.

In the restroom I locked the stall door and saw that my foot was covered in what appeared to be a single blister that had burst, releasing translucent fluid while peeling away most of my skin. I assumed the same was happening to my other foot. Oddly it was not painful, and I hoped that the affliction would just go away. I tied my shoelaces tight, washed my hands, and ran back to class. When the lunch bell rang, I went to play on the blacktop. Mechikoff, Gonzalez, and Andersson joined me in a game of one-upmanship.

“I witnessed a murder, was exposed to radiation, got robbed by a gangster, and was given the secrets of love and war during the few hours yesterday when you all were struggling to add, subtract, and divide. None of us are going to live forever. This is no time to be good little boys and girls.”

Mechikoff was the prettiest girl in school and she gave me a look of complete disapproval. “You’re going to grow up to be a wino.”

Gonzalez laughed. “Yeah, if you grow up. Maybe you’ll go to jail for a hundred years.”

Andersson was concerned and amused as he pulled Mechikoff and Gonzalez away from me. “Hey, your nose is bleeding. You're a mess. It’s too hot and smoggy out here." They ran away to play at the other end of the playground while blood flowed out my nose and sizzled on the blacktop.

The new principal, Miss Dennis, held weekly assemblies on the blacktop. The students and teachers lined up according to their grade levels and class placement. A portable public address system, cranked up to maximum decibel level, ensured that everyone could hear her raspy voice.

“You will all soon be tested for mental competency, I.Q., hearing, vision, latent degeneracy, and lice," she announced. "Comprehension of the English language will be measured. You have received the Sabin vaccine and will now receive booster shots as well as vouchers for Thalidomide, Thorazine, and Benzedrine that your parents can redeem at local pharmacies. The school orchestra needs volunteers for clarinet, flute, bassoon, and triangle. The 5th Grade has been selected to take part in a field trip to the La Brea Tar Pits. Thank you. Have an excellent day in the Land of the Free.”

The sky's usual brown haze and gray smoke made it hard to breathe and teared my eyes. Miss Dennis looked like she was melting in a misty fog when the sky suddenly shifted to a faint pink followed by an instantaneous brightness that turned everything blinding white. The kids were quiet, nonplussed by a familiar sight that lasted only a few seconds. Not-so-secret above-ground thermonuclear explosions were common, more than a thousand in the 1950s.

“If only the bomb would blow away the smog.”

“Young lady, national defense is no laughing matter. I want you in my office in five minutes for the mandatory three swats for bad behaviour. Teachers, instruct your students on the value of obedience. Everyone is dismissed.”

I walked in the other direction and climbed the chainlink fence between school and the freeway. The authoritative Miss Dennis did not impress me, but I was becoming concerned with the possibility that everything and everyone could be obliterated in a split second. Staying in school for that made no sense. Usually I exited via the pedestrian tunnel under Lorena Street, an unlit concrete cavern covered in uniquely Mexican-American calligraphic graffiti by WF or VNE gangs, accentuated with Caló terms 

 to claim territorial rights or make threats of revenge. Several more broadly popular slogans also appeared there: Nepantla vs. Magonista, or La Raza Cósmica/Atómica. But sometimes the tunnel scared me and I walked along Lorena Street, balancing on the low metal guardrail overlooking the freeway. This time I nearly lost my footing, but made it across.

“You are either going to die young or be around for a very long time. We could use someone like you.” A well-dressed young Mexican-American couple applauded me quietly. The woman came forward to shake my hand and I was surprised when she squeezed it warmly. The man lifted up his shirt to show a small pistol tucked in a holster on his belt.

“We're not gang members or police," he said. "Think of us as your neighbourhood protectors. It's good you didn’t go into the tunnel. It's a mess in there because we just got rid of a big problem. He won’t be hurting little girls anymore." The man stepped toward me. "Call me Él, and call her Ella. There are many protectors out here. We’ve seen you hanging around when you should be in school. Good for you.”

Ella smiled broadly and handed me a mimeographed pamphlet with tiny-font texts in purple ink and no illustrations. “We're happy to know that you are being so experimental with your life," she told me. "Bravo.”

Their carefully enunciated English reminded me of the way my uncles and aunts spoke when they wanted to tell a serious story. I thought they must be from El Paso, they seemed so brave and cool. “I’m not old enough to be in a group, but I will keep my eyes open in case I see something. You know, trucha.”

Él wore a gold-plated radium dial watch. “The English word for 

 is astute," he said. "Be careful who hears you speaking Caló.”

Ella shook my hand again. “We can see that you know how to take care of yourself. I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

Él and Ella walked down Lorena Street and disappeared into the entrance of the Resurrection Catholic Church. Their elegant manner inspired me. I had never known that Mexican Americans could act and talk like movie stars. I headed down Beswick Street and found myself strolling through the grave markers in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, within walking distance from home. The cemetery was better than Fresno Park or any park because no one went there. I could avoid interruption while reading my comic book or magazine or newspaper. I sat next to a tombstone that contained the year of my birth

28 May 1875 - 6 Jul 1951 
Pvt Christopher E. Hoerig
COMPANY M 2nd ILL. INF. 
SPANISH AMERICAN WAR

and read Él/Ella's pamphlet cover to cover. I circled twenty-six words in the pamphlet using a red pencil that I'd carried in my left sock since the boy robbed me on the streetcar:

Anarchy
Belligerent
Catastrophe
Despot
Eloquence
Fascism
Gamut
Hemoglobin
Inheritance

Jaywalk
Keepsake
Lament
Machination
Nonchalant
Obstacle
Plutonium
Quicksand

Revolution
Sacrosanct
Terminate
Utopia
Venerate
Waffen SS
X-Ray
Yesteryear
Zero-sum

In the 5th and 6th grades I took jobs to pay for reading materials, bus fare, and movie tickets. It was then that most of the non-Mexican families moved away to suburbia, as Los Angeles continued to grow in size and complexity. The physical landscape of Boyle Heights reconfigured around the expansion of the East Los Angeles Interchange, involving multiple interstate freeways that formed the largest, busiest highway system in the world. Brutalist multi-lane monoliths and concrete walls encircled Lorena Street School and the neighbourhood to transform my previous playful pathways into inescapable dead ends.

I continued missing at least one day of school per week while holding onto my job in the cafeteria in exchange for food. I left empty space on test papers where answers should have been written. My schoolbooks stayed unopened. In class discussions I was happy to tell stories and amaze the teacher and students with the delightful possibilities of the English language: “The smartest scientists have figured out a way to stop pain and suffering by igniting the atmosphere and burning away our precious oxygen. Take a deep breath while you can. The story is told in either 

, but you won’t find it in your textbooks.”

The hottest days in 1963 reached past 100 degrees, melting the playground's poisonous blacktop, and Santa Ana winds blew dust and soot for us to choke on as the humidity dropped to zero. Students huddled in whatever shade was available. On the playground I continued my storytelling, fed by my reading hundreds of comic books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, as well as street/freeway signage, and publicly posted notices. I told my friends that I watched four hours of television daily and two feature films a week. I said the atomic age imposed an existential time limit on everything. I warned them that we might not be able to complete our studies before mushroom clouds erased us from the surface of the earth.

“You’re just making it all up. There's no such thing as total annihilation." Mechikoff was full of opinions. "Medina, Caine, Baroux, Martinez, and Andersson died because they wanted to go to heaven; radiation didn’t kill them. Perez, Chin, and Saltikoff are in jail because they are stupid, not because of poverty.” She had grown taller than the others and was already looking like a teenager. "I'm going to be a rich doctor and I'll operate on your brain when we grow up.”

Thrush, Wilson, and Kilgallen laughed out loud.

“Besides, we'll all be moving to Orange County next to Disneyland. Fuck this Mexican place,” Wilson said. Oss took offense and shoved him.

Graduation was coming soon for all of us regardless of our grades and credits, earned or unearned. We would all receive a printed onion-skin diploma marked with the school's official golden seal and rubber-stamped with the California governor’s signature granting admission to Junior High School.

A week after graduation my mother woke up early and piled my entire collection of comic books, magazines, and notebooks, containing vocabulary lists, quotations, and reference information, onto a rusty Radio Flyer wagon and rolled it more than a mile to dump everything over the 6th Street Bridge into the dry concrete bed of the Los Angeles River. She was always walking and talking without regard to whoever might care to listen. She returned home in the early afternoon before I realized that my prized possessions were gone. “Don’t believe everything you read. You’re not smarter than everybody else.”

I was shocked, but not at all surprised by the negative sentiment or the vile act. I realized that I would never again tell her or my father any of my private thoughts or give them access to my personal property. I was glad to have a roof over my head, but this was not my home. The streets were more welcoming and I had no expectation that anything would ever change for the better. It was clear that I needed to figure out how to continue surviving. I didn't read or talk to anyone that summer. I rode buses all day long, all over Los Angeles and sometimes across town to Santa Monica to look at the waves of the Pacific Ocean or to walk on the sandy beach. At the age of eleven I spent almost three months thinking about how to live, in case I faced actually living into and beyond my teen years.

When 7th Grade began at Stevenson Junior High I hadn't come up with a suitable plan of action yet. In this new, unfamiliar setting all the seventh graders reported to the auditorium for orientation. Mr. Zedro, the Boy’s Vice-Principal, was very tall with an imposing voice and ominous presence. He gave a brief speech that would suffice for the coming three years.

“You are here to learn. Learn that rules cannot be broken. Learn that I will catch and punish you if you break the rules. Never be absent, never be late, never fight, never talk back, respect school property, this is an English-only school, so no Spanish, never think that you are beyond my reach. I have the right to punish students who make mistakes. I will hurt you if you do it on purpose. Welcome to Stevenson Junior High. We will turn you into decent citizens.”

All 7th graders were assigned gender-segregated homerooms. Mine was with Mr. Coursey in Room 19. I recognized a few boys and wasn't too worried about being the shortest, skinniest kid in school. The mandatory Pledge of Allegiance was followed by roll call. Lacking any other plan, I decided that I would refer to every student I met by their initials, and not their first or surnames. I hadn't realized that I would have to attend multiple classes in different buildings and classrooms. Only a few minutes were allotted to go from one place to the next, all in response to industrial bells ringing loudly in our ears. It took only a few weeks in the first semester for me to make friends and to explore the limits of the school rules. It was no longer possible to climb fences or walk away from the campus. Policemen and detectives were often seen dragging away hapless boys or girls who had somehow been charged with serious crimes. Mr. Zedro proved to be sadistic in his punishments. He'd hit boys in the ribs with his fist wrapped in a black towel. Everyone feared him. I thought he looked comical, but I never laughed in front of a teacher or administrator.

I read the assigned textbooks to sample what might be needed for class discussion, but continued failing each test by deliberately writing down the wrong answers. I knew being smart was safer in private. I wouldn't let teachers or administrators see my cognitive process. My homework was on time but I left most of the answers blank. I learned how to thread 16mm film and to operate a projector so I could be excused from classes whenever others had to view propaganda or educational films. The projector was on a rolling cart with cables, a large speaker, a clipboard, and film reels, making it heavy to push. A small lamp attached to the rear of the projector illuminated the dials. While everyone else watched the films, I read by its light whatever clippings I carried in my pockets or I studied the disposable word lists I gathered from conversations and TV or film viewing.

All the students at Stevenson Junior High were Mexican Americans who never spoke Spanish in public. Only a few words in Caló were uttered as teenage slang, but never within hearing range of the authority figures who were all white. Teachers were encouraged to unleash their own personal punitive actions against students whenever they pleased. Mr. Plang, the music teacher, hit students with a long wooden board. Mr. Taylor, the math teacher, used his fists. Mr. Petrushkin, the Boy’s P.E. teacher, used any heavy object he could wield against unsuspecting victims during the communal showers of prepubescent and adolescent boys dodging water spray tinged with mercury and lead leached from the old plumbing.

“And where do you think you’re going?” Mr. Petrushkin grabbed me by my neck and started hitting my back with a metal and sand-filled baton. I fell to the shower floor naked, as numerous wet bare feet gathered around me. “Go on boys, kick him until he learns some respect.”

Lying there I recalled my maternal grandfather, Mariano, who had honed his survival skills growing up in Mexico City. He once told me I should laugh when it hurts and laugh even louder when I'm attacked, so as to deny my attackers the pleasure of seeing me cry. I laughed or giggled each time I was kicked. That made Mr. Petrushkin very angry and he swung the baton against my right clavicle, dislocating it permanently. I was delirious with pain but continued to laugh weakly, taking a good look at all the faces of the boys who joined in this orgy of violence until an older student dragged me away and leaned me against the gym lockers.

“You have to be careful, loco. Some of those guys are in gangs and the other putos are gonna be cops one day. Get dressed quick, before they get other ideas.”

I didn't dry off, but quickly put on my pants, shirt, and shoes. The bell rang and I stumbled out of the gym in time to be counted as present in English class where the teacher, Miss Vovve, would have each student read aloud from whatever tattered book she'd brought to school that day. We passed the book from one student to the next until the bell rang.

“Why should I read the book if all of you can read it to me?” Miss Vovve said. She said the same thing every day.

I was about to be handed the book when the fire alarm shrieked. We followed directions and headed to the main assembly field next to the faculty parking lot where Mr. Petrushkin’s prized 1955 MG Magnette ZA automobile was enveloped in a raging fire and thick black smoke, with occasional electrical sparks. I was very happy. It took nearly an hour for the emergency fire units to arrive and extinguish the flames that had spread to a nearby storage shed. Mr. Petrushkin yelled at the police arriving in unmarked cars.

“Somebody torched my car and I’m going to kill them when I find out who.”

Él was in the crowd of joyous students, happy because classes had been cancelled for the day. He came over and showed me a burnt wooden match in the palm of his hand. “The other guys will get theirs, when the time comes.” He disappeared in the river of dispersing students.

Nosebleed on Blacktop

As a kid growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, my older sister and I spent hours exploring the creek behind our house. We conjured stories and played the parts. My father showed us how to form things with mud and fire them in mom’s oven. Using sticks and my bare hands, I’d dig holes on the banks of the shallow rivulet in search of dinosaur fossils, which I was convinced were my destiny to uncover.

In the summer of 1989 we moved to an apartment in Queens, New York and my tenure as a dinosaur hunter came to an abrupt end. As field research was no longer possible, my obsession was commuted to the local library and to television. At the time, my curiousity about the prehistoric began to dovetail with interests in the mythological, the supernatural, and eventually, the criminal. The 1990s were rich with resources on the subject: the 

, an endless string of PBS educational programs, 

and news segments speculating on Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. I remember being particularly enthralled by Walter Kronkite’s special on Archaeopteryx, the missing link between bird and reptile. There was no doubt in my mind that I was to become a paleontologist, and so the library became my office, where I poured over every angle and available source. But my dedication to these pursuits waned as I discovered music, graffiti, girls, and weed, and made my way through the brutal gauntlet of high school socialization, quietly relegating these interests to the naiveté of childhood.

A few weeks ago, on our way to Santa Cruz, California to report on climate change and wildfires in the region, my colleague suggested we stop by the Bigfoot Discovery Museum. I didn’t see a direct connection to the story at hand, but upon walking inside the ramshackle wooden structure, I was, with a rush of elation, transported back to the library in Queens and to the creek in Mankato, where my own scientific inquiry into the unknown and prehistoric began. No bigger than my modest living room in NYC, the museum’s walls are crammed with glass cases, reaching up to the low hanging ceilings, filled with all manner of Bigfoot ephemera: photos, magazine and newspaper covers, comic books, plaques, patches, trinkets, toys, plaster casts of footprints, and a scattering of postcards, t-shirts and stickers for sale. Behind the reception desk, a handwritten sign in front of an overstocked wall of books on Bigfoot (Sasquatch) and his mythological cohort—Yeti, Yeren, Almas, Chupacabra, Nessie—reads: “Available for use on site for students of the supernatural.”

Mike Rugg, the museum’s founder, has been researching, documenting, and collecting Bigfoot memorabilia since 1952, when he first read about massive hominoid footprints found on Mount Everest. Not long after, he claims to have had his first sighting of a cryptid hominid. He recalls reporting the encounter to his parents at the time, who told him “not to worry, it was probably just a tramp.” His interest persisted, even after graduating Stanford University in 1968, but needing to make a living and being a visual artist and musician, he opened the space that currently houses the museum as a commercial art gallery.

After a long stint as a commercial artist, Rugg, a self-taught technologist and programmer, joined the rank and file of the Dot.com boom, “pushing pixels for Silicon Valley.” When the Dot.com bubble burst six years later, he was downsized out of his position. Some years after the financial collapse, Rugg noticed that many people in his circle of cryptozoologists and enthusiasts were dying, before they were able to prove or disprove Bigfoot’s existence. To honour those efforts, he decided to transform his art gallery into a public archive—a space to share his decades-long research and inquiry into the supernatural.

Standing in the cramped main gallery, taking in a lifetime of one man’s obsessive curiosity, I wondered: does it really matter whether Bigfoot exists or not? Holding onto the sliver of possibility and our desire to explore the obscure folds of this world feels more important these flat, vapid, digital days. And so, Rugg’s labor of love registers to me as an extraordinary act of cultural preservation that helps cultivate a society that validates child-like wonder, intellectual curiosity, and an appreciation of the unknown. It comes with the personal risk of scorn and ridicule, evidenced by the hordes of travelers who stop by for a tongue-in-cheek selfie in front of the Bigfoot Discovery Center but don’t feel compelled to enter, offer a donation, or validate Rugg’s life’s work.

According to EcoWatch, University of London scientists identified 503 new species in 2020, many of which will be reevaluated, reassigned or discredited through subsequent scientific study. Every day, new species and natural phenomena are “discovered” on land, sea, and ice. It deserves acknowledgement that while humans have made extraordinary scientific advancements, and created technologies for expansive exploration, we are still largely ignorant to the intricacies of the natural world.

I’ve tasted a little of Rugg’s medicine these past couple weeks, as I’ve extolled the Bigfoot Discovery Museum to friends and strangers, most often received by an eye roll and a “Really? Bigfoot? That’s what you’re working on?” In those moments, I became the crackpot. But given that we agree on the premise of evolution, how is the existence of a cryptid hominid less incredible than the existence of God? As absurd as it may seem, Bigfoot is a metaphor for our intrinsic sense and intellectual curiousity. Rugg’s life’s work archiving the subcultures of cryptozoology and conspiracy theories is an archive of a sociocultural phenomenon that, like God, is ubiquitously present in the human imagination—infused within the art, music, written and oral histories, and creation narratives of cultures across the planet.

Rugg’s long career investigating the supernatural, or as he suggests, 

, has seen a number of scientists and cryptozoologists turn up at his cabin with the express purpose of discrediting his theories and casting him as a nutcase. He doesn’t seem to be bothered; he is a man grounded in the conviction of his beliefs and is willing to debate and educate. Despite his respiratory condition and macular degeneration, 

 is open six days a week from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Mike Rugg is amenable to discussing any and all things supernatural with curious strangers.

Squatch: A Big, Hairy, American Metaphor

The day after the massacre in Uvalde, I drive my five-year-old daughter to school and park in the lot designated for parents of the youngest students and those with special needs. We race up the three flights of stairs toward two heavy metal blue doors and take our place in line amidst a scene of controlled chaos: losing struggles with tangled backpack straps, hopeless attempts to re-braid hair, awkward hugs at the door. There is no police presence. There is only the unspoken transfer of responsibility from parent to teacher—a sacred conveyance of duty and sacrifice.

I kiss my daughter goodbye, let her slip from my grasp, and watch her whisk around her teacher’s legs toward her classroom—her friends; her unfinished artwork; her delicate, perfect imaginarium. A sense of dread and impotence wells up as I turn away and descend the stairs. I don’t make it to the parking lot before I turn back, climb to the platform, and pull the door as hard as I can. It holds. And for the first time, I read every one of the colorful stickers plastered to the bulletproof glass: The Future is Female, Black Lives Matter, 

The imposing brick, brutalist structure is strangely reminiscent of a Norman castle. Every window block is bolted and enmeshed in steel, every vulnerability considered. What a tragic paradox that our places of learning must be fortified against a siege. What cognitive disassociation must I adopt, what lies must I tell myself, to believe that old grey turrets and faux arrow slits will somehow ward away a school shooter or protect my daughter against the caprice of The Fates.

I walk back to my car resigned to a painful truth: Evidently, in times like these it takes more than a village to raise a child; it takes a fortress.

If all goes to shit today, my daughter’s teacher will take a bullet for her. The ineffable oath that I took as a parent will be broken. I’ll tear across the streets of my city toward those heavy blue doors knowing that my daughter’s teacher will be with her in her final moments of terror. But I’ll take no solace knowing that the last image my daughter may ever see will be her teacher sprawled in a pool of blood, a hot muzzle, and a sick, satisfied grin.

Our schools are targets and our children are prey.

If you live in the United States of America someone has surveilled your local school. We have every reason to 

 that predators roam our streets, that all across the United States men with murderous intent are in the process of purchasing military grade weapons and tactical gear in preparation for a terrorist attack on one of our communities. And they have every legal right to do so, as long as they are willing to 

by the rule of the gun. They know that if they agree to the terms of a mass murder-suicide pact, they get to dance across the scales of justice with impunity. While we as a society get to mop up the blood, brain matter and broken lives, struggling not to vomit while we stave off the violent thoughts and feckless prayers.

The greatest lie the American citizen was ever told is that the “Founding Fathers” considered the Bill of Rights to be a set of “divinely-inspired” Commandments, an immutable covenant between future citizens and the nation’s Supreme Creators. Very much to the contrary, Jefferson wrote in a series of letters Madison leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1789 that “...

no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation…Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”

Society is an animate being—mutable, fallible, delicate and vulnerable to all of its citizens’ sins and virtues. It should therefore not come as a surprise that the Founding Fathers considered the 

 of every generation to understand the Bill of Rights as it relates to the changing times—to interpret its timeless, universal values as they are reflected in the zeitgeist. A society that lacks the political will or moral courage to deem the protection of children as its primary function renounces its 

. When the will of the individual supersedes the well-being of the whole, society will naturally begin to cannibalize itself and eventually collapse.

Rarely is it mentioned that the “Founding Fathers”—genius, moral herpes and all—never intended the Second Amendment to justify domestic terrorism or the rule of the gun. They were revolutionaries, scientists, lawyers, idealists, and parents. Brave enough to sacrifice their lives to secure a democratic future for this nation, they would recoil at the sight of our generation gathered in cemeteries en masse, weeping and suicidal as we lay the broken bodies of our children in tiny coffins and cover them with the soil of a nation that failed to protect them. They would look upon us with shame and disgust.

If parents are to fulfill their oath to their children—and society its oath to its citizens—then we are left with no other choice but to resoundingly reject the ethos of the 

 mantra for its calloused irony and cruel indolence, and deem it our generation’s moral imperative to dismantle the fallacy of Second Amendment “originalism”: that the finger on the trigger is more sacred than the life at the end of the barrel.

As long as we lack the courage to protect the lives of our children and the health of society, we can expect every Fathers Day and Independence Day to end in a massacre somewhere in America.

The Rule of the Gun

Provocations, ponderings and perspectives examining the sociocultural, economic and environmental changes occurring locally and globally and how they are redefining the fault lines of modern society.

Editorials