I Brought a Gun to a Protest and All I Got Was Tear Gassed
I shook my fist in the dugout on the top field of Foster Memorial Park. The left side dug out, looking at it from home plate, the away dugout, the one a right handed pitcher stares into when there’s a runner on third, something I wouldn’t learn for years.
I was five years old and did not understand shaking your fist was a thing. I did it down, closed and hard, angry that someone had opened the faucet behind my eyes, like my tiny hand was wrapped around the lever that commanded wiper blades to send tears to some other poor bastard’s face.
I was angry because I wanted our summer camp little league team to be the Nationals. They were the newest baseball team to a kid who thought the venn diagram between baseball and culture was a circle, because to him, it was. He was proud to know the Nationals were a team and had convinced his team that would be their team name, until some other kid who loved some other team raised his little bitch voice and the poor likely college aged coach pulled us both into the dugout to figure out what the hell happened.
I cannot say for certain that was the first time I felt powerless, but it stands as an early moment in a long history of feeling incapable.
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I have been to protests and still struggle with why. I don’t struggle with knowing why, I know exactly why I do it, and the reason bothers me. Protesting never felt like my own idea. It does and still does feel hopeless. But I look and see a bunch of people, mostly young people, who have decided to give it a go, and can’t imagine living with myself if I let some 95lb college girl with blue hair take a riot shield to the face. If there is a god, he made me on the same day as F150s and Rhinos, the same day as 95 inch TV screens and 72 oz cowboys steaks. I’m size large, not in shirt, but in analogy.
In 2020, it wasn’t the death of George Floyd that brought me out into the streets. It was the fear of being a coward, of standing on the wrong side of history. I strapped two masks to my face, I made saline solution on my stove, carefully measured, heated, poured into plastic bottles. I bought all the gauze I could find at CVS. I boxed it all up and drove it to capitol hill and was too goddamn afraid to talk to someone to ask if they were accepting medical donations that I drove it back home. For years the box sat with me, an albatross, a memento of my shame.
The second attempt was better: accompanying a friend to the protest, windows down in cold Seattle weather for fear of Covid, to stand in the middle of the day, watching various people try their hand at public speaking, not knowing what to do but knowing we needed to be there, then home again, safe before even the night turned.
Then I saw a video of a college kid taking a dummy round to the leg, a medic running out to apply a tourniquet. I watched someone drive their car into the protest, then shoot a man who tried to grab the wheel, then run off leaving the car behind. I sat with the unusual modern horror of trying to find truth on the internet. And I decided if some bigass white guy with anger problems was going to hit someone else, it might as well be another bigass white guy with anger problems.
So I once again loaded into my 1989 isuzu trooper, late in the night, sober in a way that reminds you your emotions alone can be enough to rule you, this time with a glock 19 strapped to my waistline.
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I’m writing this now because I once again feel powerless.
I waited that night. Stood. Yelled every now and then. I brought hearing protection. Because that’s the kind of thing I think about when going to a protest. Protecting my hearing.
The air gets thick. It keeps escalating. You keep thinking it has to break. The line creeps forward. The same dumbass on the same air horn keeps trying to tell you to all just be peaceful and talk about it. But we don’t want to be peaceful. We want someone to hurt. So do I.
There was a brief moment that stays with me: a point in time when things were still sliding towards getting ugly when the people who deadlifted replaced the people who did not. They were still there too, still ready to huff tear gas, but every corn-fed midwest boy this size of the Mississippi accepted pole position. I left when the first of the tear gas came.
I think: I’m pretty smart and I have no idea where to start with this. I just watched a man get murdered in the streets for what feels like the latest time, like it’s just another season on Netflix, a cultural event like Stranger Things or Floyd V. Mayweather. And I hate it. More than anything, I hate myself for hating feeling powerless more than I hate what has happened.
I want to have something to say. I want to have something to offer. Clever words, a new strategy, a line from a book or a poem or from my brain, something to say. I want to believe I could solve the world’s problems by punching the right person in the face. Instead I sit at home, writing words on a laptop.
I’ve carried a gun at a protest. Tomorrow I’ll carry a gun at a protest again. I’ll carry it knowing if I was in Minnesota that night, I wouldn’t have died, because I’m a coward. I don’t think I would have been courageous enough to do anything. I’m a coward watching younger, braver people take up the call. And I’ll march because they did. I’ll carry it by a tourniquet, by a water bottle, by my cell phone, a flashlight, a hat, the things I know I’ll far more likely need. I’ll be a coward, but once again, I’ll be a coward who shows up.