Last week I went downtown, for the first time since early March. I wasn’t sure what to expect, exactly, since my bus stop and the errand I needed to do are both adjacent the Justice Center (a block that holds the central police station and jail) and protests have been happening there every night. In that immediate area at mid-day, there wasn’t really anyone but law enforcement hanging around. They did not wear masks. But as I walked around in the sunlight, what I saw everywhere was art.
It’s a little hard to understand from photos what it’s like to be in the middle of the city, on a quiet day when so many buildings are boarded up, businesses are closed, and everywhere there’s the name or a picture of someone we’ve lost. There’s an eerie kind of peace to it, echoing grief and endurance and love.
I’m reminded a little of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, a street where artists have turned the devastated surroundings into an artistic installation and gallery. It’s raw, messy, brightly colored, and a communal expression of history and hope.
There are images of clocks everywhere on Heidelberg Street, which is a reference to a question Grace Lee Boggs would ask: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” It’s meant to be open-ended: What is this time like for us and others? Do we know our history? What’s our role in this moment?
It’s not incidental that she asked a question about time rather than place. Time is how our lives are defined under capitalism. Our days are, even now, broken into schedules of work and sleep. To be imprisoned is “doing time”. We have to get our hours in or we don’t eat.
Remembering her question helps me understand this feeling I have right now, like a cacophony of alarm bells going off. Do you feel it too? After painful months of isolation, days that all bleed together because so many of the activities that tell us what date or week it is have stopped, a clock in Minneapolis counted off the seven minutes and 46 seconds of George Floyd’s murder. We all heard it tick.
Another way I could say this is that this moment is very, very hot. Literally, because global warming and summer. But hot as in people with guns protesting against public health outside government buildings. Hot like a burning police car. Hot like the scorch of a tear gas canister. Hot like Jeremy Christian in a courtroom yelling to one of his victims that he should have killed her. Hot like the loudest of midnight fireworks.
I’m torn between the idea of trying to imagine what could cool the moment down, and grim harm reduction. I think I’ll have to leave the calmer visions to someone else today, because everything that comes to mind so far is more like hitting a snooze button, a few more moments of sleep while people continue to die.
So wear a mask. Clean up your online presence before you go to a protest so I don’t have to worry about you being doxed. Eat something (god I hate food right now). Look at the tomato plants you started and appreciate that they’re flowering so early, even though you feel bad about not watering them enough. Call in sick when the nightmares are too much. Stay away from men in Hawaiian shirts who carry guns. Remember that you are still alive.
In this moment, we’re learning so many painful things about grief and history and the lies we tell in the name of cohesion and false peace. There are a lot of lies, and we don’t have to wait until we’ve excavated each and every one before we understand what they mean. This is not the time for you to start another book club. Know that hidden in all of this there’s still love and connection. Let it be the root of your actions. That’s what the clock is about too.