What do we do in times like these?
What to do?
I don’t know, I think, just like I didn’t know when I was 26 and having a baby, knowing I’d be alone. But I did it. He’s here, next to me now, as we board a flight to London. He helped me heave my heavy hiking pack onto my back and then put on his own.
You can not know and go ahead anyway, the way we drive onto the freeway in Chicago accidentally, cussing at taking the wrong turn, and just figure it out, even when the paper map has fallen onto the passenger side floor; the way we shove tomato seedlings into the dirt in our yards and remember to water them sometimes and end up eating Cherokee Purples all through July.
We do a lot of things both not knowing and scared. We feel our way along the side of the tent in the dark until our hands land on the cold metal of the flashlight. Then, we send the beam into the dark forest, looking for the sound we heard.
None of us were born defenders. None of us knew we would be tasked with this moment. We dreamed of being marine biologists, firefighters, and artists, not people who had to run outside because the police have another Black boy pinned to the ground or because unmarked cars are patrolling the neighborhood looking for immigrant mothers.
None of us were born protectors. As children, we couldn’t see what was coming, that the food our sweet aunties served us could someday become scarce, and that the forests we played in would be sold for corporate profits. We didn’t know we would have to drive boxes of cereal and vegetables to families living in tents or chain ourselves to trees.
None of us were born freedom fighters. Just a few short years ago, we couldn’t imagine the military being mobilized against civilians or fathers being disappeared. We didn’t know what it looked like to write an opinion piece and end up in jail or to have the richest men in the world control all the channels we have to speak to one another. We didn’t understand that we’d have to delete those apps or show up in the streets, instead of catching up with a friend at dinner.
Defenders. Protectors. Freedom Fighters. Those are things we now become, not through study or through planning, but because of the time we were born, the year, the day, the hour. We don’t do them with confidence or skill or preparation; perhaps it’s not even our calling. We become these things because we must; because this is the baby we now hold in our arms and must rise to the challenge of; because this is the freeway we drove onto; because this is the seed and this is the dirt we possess; because this is the beam of light we have in our hands.
