Reform Should Have Come Before the End of the World
For those of us who have fought and worked for reform, the living, dynamic time of our ancestors has become a dead prison, an eternal waiting room. We are always told to wait for the next Council direction, for another hearing, another ordinance, another committee, and so on, until the last syllable of recorded time. All the while, lives that could be spent pursuing beauty, enjoying family and relationship, building a different world, are given to the noble and exhausting pursuit of every possible scheme by which to procure a few more minutes of life, a few more breaths of air, a few more days, weeks, months, for the next inevitable victim of police violence.
Show me the policy that will explode this continuum of time, so that it can retroactively extract the bullets from Mike Ramos’s body, wind them back into the officer’s gun, and return the weapon to its holster. Show me the policy that can lift an officer’s knee off George Floyd’s neck, raising him up to his feet—up, up, up and back into a life robbed by the State. Where is the policy that, reversing the arrow of dead time, can rewind every step taken into Breona Taylor’s apartment, so that, by walking backwards, and exiting through a front door they should never have opened, they may allow her to resume her peaceful sleep. Show me the special working group that can bring David Joseph back to his mother, snatching from him the sentence delivered by an anxious trigger, and instead providing him with all the care and support he needed. Let’s put that item on the agenda.
Now, as our sunbelt streets fume with teargas, as the cracks of projectiles thunder loud through the air, the promise of reform has grown strange to our ears. To believe it feels like returning to an abusive partner, with a black eye just easing its swell—and convinced that somehow, this time, the promises of change will be sincere. Now, as beanbags launch into our bodies, punching the air out of our guts, and trying to punch the dreams, memories, and the hopes out of our heads, we understand that reform should have come before the end of the world. But it is too late. For Mike Ramos, the apocalypse arrived at the hands of the APD, on the night of the 24th of April, 2020. Austin’s Apocalypse Department has ended the world for another young man of color and his grieving family. We did not prevent the end of the world, not for the Ramos family.
Reform is impossible — from the perspective of Ramos, Floyd, Taylor, Bland, Joseph and so many others. Reform is untenable, to those who will not live to see the results of our next investigation, our next report, and our next working group on systemic racism. The numbers and presentation decks and pie charts meld into a single fuming fallout, an agonizing half-life of anti-racist speeches, declarations of empathy tuned to perfection, all sounding like nothing but a ringing noise in the glowing aftermath of death.
We now live a kind of awful inversion of the One Thousand and One Nights: if Shaharazade’s ploy was to always tell another story in order to delay the coming moment of her death, we, on the other hand, seem to only hasten the next death, with every speech, with every hearing, with every session. With every new report, investigation, and set of recommendations, we seem to make the next death all the more inevitable. Our empty words have quickened death’s pace. And while Sheharazade’s stories at least offered entertainment and beauty, our words have become painful noise in the ringing aftermath of the gunshots, until they are indistinguishable from those same gunshots — until they are more lethal than rubber bullets and tear gas.
And still, we wait, as the planet burns into a lifeless hellscape. We wait. Because we have not yet understood that we are already Mike Ramos, in waiting. Our children are the next Mike Ramos, in waiting. Increasingly, this is the only horizon we have: a death lottery and some speechmaking. We may sometimes enjoy the snacks in the waiting room, or appreciate the view, and we may, sometimes, be so lucky as to forget that we are not already dead. Which may allow us, in turn, to forget that we should not be the ones scrambling for reforms. It is the city that should scramble to reform as fast as it can, in order to save itself. We, who are already dead, and simply waiting for our numbers to be called, should embrace this truth and use the precious few breaths we have to create something wholly different, something dignified and beautiful — something worthy of the immanent unfolding of life.
