Where do we go From Here?
By Albert B. Kelly
Over the past week the
question, “where do we go from here?” has been foremost in my thoughts. Maybe
the question stuck because it’s the title of a Martin Luther King speech given
in August of 1967 and we’ve just celebrated the MLK holiday.
The holiday may be part of
it, but I suspect the question sticks because over the past 3 weeks, since the
police-involved shooting incident involving Jerame Reid at a traffic stop
, we are in the midst of dealing with
some of the hardest things any community must confront; doubt, fear, suspicion,
mistrust, anger, sadness, and bitterness.
From that night on, these
thoughts and emotions ran in several directions; lacking a fixed point of
reference, these had not yet become fully formed opinions and they hadn’t yet
hardened into belief. With the release of the video last Tuesday showing those
minutes, the thoughts and emotions of many found a point of reference and the hardening
began.
Perhaps this “hardening”
was unavoidable because for some, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, then
maybe a dash-cam video’s worth a hundred questions and still the picture won’t
be complete because the investigation is
ongoing and the process must run its course.
I don’t know what the end
of things will be and I refuse to speculate. I know that some, regardless of
anything else, insist on seeing the events that took place at the corner of
Henry Street and South Avenue as part of a larger template that includes
Ferguson, NYC, and Cleveland.
Such insisting and such
“seeing” is probably necessary and certainly convenient if you’ve already
decided that all police are one thing or another or all minorities are this way
or that way. But people are never that
simple, only stereotypes are.
It’s easy to draw whatever
conclusion you need from the video, while assigning motives and reviewing all
the shoulda-woulda-coulda’s from our laptops and iPhones in the safe calm of
home. But things unfold in terrifying seconds, where human beings are forced to
react through a rush of fear and adrenalin and that’s never simple.
Whatever the outcome of
the completed investigation, some will remain dissatisfied. And whatever
actions are taken, it won’t change the events of that evening and for the
people involved; their lives will never be the same.
If the echoes of Ferguson
and NYC; namely that black lives matter, is now to be made front and center in
Bridgeton, I would only say that all lives matter and they always have. Over
the last four years, whether it involved community action teams, police
chaplains, town halls, Code Blue or gathering to lift our voices against
violence; we’ve done it together and that’s our currency.
As for the process, if
there’s anything to insist on, it’s that it be exclusively about what happened
on that night, on that corner, among those individuals and that it not be
shaded by what did or didn’t happen in other cities at other times.
As for justice, everyone
wants it, but justice means different things to different people. Whether you
think justice will have been served when all is said and done, will largely
depend I suspect, on what you brought to the table before you ever clicked play
on that video.
As for where we go from
here, that depends on us and the currency we’ve built together before December
30th. Some things won’t change, like the fact that we all want to make it home
safe at the end of the day to the people we love and the homes we live in…and
that includes every police officer who works a shift.
What can change is how we
understand each other; the fears we live with, the worries that keep us up at
night, the indignities that some are forced to suffer, the assumptions we’re
forced to make or not make in the heat of a moment. We’ll come together because
that’s our currency.
Our other currency is that
we are a praying community. I realize that some might scoff or hold it in
contempt; but many have offered prayer on behalf of the Reid family, for
Officer Days and Officer Worley, for the lives impacted and for the peace of
our community. This too is our currency.