“Fresh Trade”

This afternoon was walking back from the corner store carrying a bottle of juice for my co-worker Yolanda and as I was about to cross a side street this big fat older dude pulls up in his shiny new silver van and asks me “What are you doing!”

Of course I first thought he was a plain-clothes cop so I didn’t answer not that it was any of his business then he reaches for himself and asks if I “Want to make some money!” Here I am, a grown man and CEO of an 8 and half year old non-profit corporation and still… STILL I’m just an object to be consumed. It blows my mind the nerve of some of these people. He just decided to drive through my hood and see what he can consume.

I know I don’t look like somebody to be messed with– I wouldn’t approach me on the street. But I guess if you own the world and are protected inside your big expensive vehicle with your foot on the gas pedal, you just go and consume whatever you want. You can buy anything. I know I’m supposed to be the upstanding citizen, and I most definitely am for the most part, having long ago learned how to convert helpless rage into positive action, but I should’ve punched a hole in his van.

I didn’t because my mind was so focused on work and saving prairie dogs and our upcoming Youth Summit that I just let it go. Was I a punk for just letting it go?

A couple weeks ago I was walking down the sidewalk of an upscale area with lots of shops to get some fresh squeezed wheatgrass juice at a Jamba Juice and a cop passed, slowed down upon seeing me, and suddenly did a U-Turn into the parking lot, startling me. I stepped off the curb, and he turned on his sirens and made me sit down on that curb for a whole hour, his car hovering over me as he sat smugly in the driver’s seat trying to find anything he could haul me in for, enjoying how much he could humiliate me. And when he couldn’t find anything to hold me or take me in, he gave me a $200 ticket for stepping off the curb — “jaywalking” — which I had to pay cash for downtown.

All this stuff tries to pull me back down and make me mad and yeah it does make me angry but not to the point I will be pulled back down. I am way too productive and healthy to let them get me like that again. I’m not complaining, and I definitely thank God for how blessed and easy my life is compared to so many others, especially folk living in Darfur or any of a thousand other places, and especially animals, too, but still… It’s like they are constantly trying to break me. Distract me from my success and life’s work. Pull me back down. It never ends.

But nobody and nothing will get in my way. Nothing can stop me and others from working to build an empathy-based civilization where we get past the hatred and ugliness and violence of the past and open a door into the longest health.