I’ve been getting rather sad lately, at least sad by my standards, about the election. I’m pretty confident that Trump is going to win, which effectively, to me, means that half the country kind of wants me dead. At least that’s what it feels like after my long list of experiences with Trump supporters. They want me to suffer and die for who I am.
It’s just hard to accept. Yeah, i know that sounds super hyperbolic but it wouldn’t seem that way if you understood where I was coming from and could see the experiences I’ve had.
I keep seeing the sign: “Trump: safety, Kamala: crime.” Just simple, straightforward, manipulative bold faced lie and every time I think about my cousin when we were kids choking me, slamming my head against the wall, saliva flying from his mouth in a fit of rage as he held a hammer over my head and I stood there, several years younger than him just sobbing in terror and begging for my life. “Please don’t kill me please don’t kill me” and he went on about how criminals were garbage, not even human and they only exist for the rest of society to take pleasure in their suffering.
He was convinced I had hit his bicycle with the hammer. I had been angry at something he did–maybe he welched on a bet but I can’t remember–and I had thrown the hammer across my dad’s shop and he came chasing after me a second later. The hammer landed near his bicycle but he hadn’t actually seen me throw it but he was only a second or two behind me. How he thought I could have gotten all the way to the other side of the very large and cluttered shop, hit his bike then returned to the other side in the second or two that it took him to catch up to me was just mind boggling to me. He just kind of decided that I had done this thing even though it made no sense.
I’m pretty sure this was after the police department had selected him for early police training as a way to divert him from his criminal activity… one could describe this as “the police groomed an adolescent specifically because he had problems with violence.”
Anyway, he screamed in rage and I begged for my life and kept trying to tell him that I had thrown the hammer, I hadn’t specifically targeted his bicycle but he just kept telling me I was a criminal if I don’t admit to it and criminals are all inhuman garbage who deserve to die. So I finally admitted to it and we went over to his bike and he demanded to know where I hit it, so I looked at it for a second and picked a scratch that was already there and admitted to making that scratch with the hammer. So he had an admission of guilt, which many folk’s consider to be proof. But I honestly think he was going to bash my brains in if I didn’t. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Rage like that just had never existed in my life. Not even close.
So then he gave a big speech about how he was going to be a police officer one day and if I ever talked about this incident he would use his resources as a police officer to have me killed and make it look like an accident, or he could frame me for a crime and just shoot me. No one would question a police officer.
So then nothing else ever happened. I avoided him. He was never violent again toward me but I was also real careful never ever to allow myself to be alone with him.
So it’s like, I’ve spent my entire life in fear of my own family member, in fear of the very people who are supposed to protect us from violence. Now he’s a cop and I wonder if any of the people who have said “thank you for your service” or whatever you say to a cop has ever stopped to think that he might have a history, that there might be someone like me who has been forced to live his whole life in fear of this person.
My biggest childhood regret is not talking to my mom about this and telling her what happened. I was just so scared that he really would murder me. For someone like me who had no experience dealing with angry people, I had no idea what to do, so I hid in fear.
I was also a little scared that people would see me as a criminal. I had kind of seen him as a junior police officer and I had rather looked up to him for that.
The other thing that pisses me off about this is that I clearly remember for maybe a year or more before this event my mom repeatedly complained to me about my aunt’s parenting style, saying it was going to drive my cousin toward violence. My mom had minored in child psychology in college and was actually really hurt by my aunt’s refusal to listen to her or take any of her advice seriously. She said it over and over to me, her sister’s conservative parenting style with the focus on punishments, specifically spankings, would drive my cousin toward violence. My mom fully predicted this event and I still didn’t have the courage to tell her about it. That’s how terrifying he was.
I guess much of the reason you don’t talk about these things over the years is you know if you do you will break down into a crying, blubbering mess and everyone will lose respect for you. There’s never an appropriate moment. You don’t want to be a debbie downer. You don’t want to get in an argument with your conservative relatives.
And that’s how violent people keep from getting found out.
I just wonder how many other people my cousin has hurt over the years. How many times has he just decided that someone committed a crime then threatened to murder them until they admitted to it?
So then ten years later I get arrested for marijuana distribution and at one point I try to argue with the officer about the morals of arresting someone for marijuana and he says “Let me explain something to you Kalin, Cops don’t care about right and wrong. How could we? We wouldn’t be able to do our jobs if we did.”
Then that same cop sort of tries to have me killed by telling lies to another weed dealer and saying I was trying to set him up, that I hated him and was out to destroy him. This is actually common for police to deliberately spread rumors in order to drum up violence in our community. They claim they only do it to gangs and it’s the best way to keep them fighting amongst themselves instead of against the police.
Then in an unrelated experience I was at a concert at The Gorge in George Washington and I watched a police officer beat a man to death while he begged for his life maybe ten feat in front of me–at least I think he died. I actually have no idea but he looked dead lying in a pool of his own blood.
But I know how the mind can exaggerate things. I get that.
Another officer choked me and said “Get the fuck out of here or that’s going to be you” and I just knew that he meant that I would be killed if I talked about this, if I tried to pursue any sort of justice for these police.
So then I came out as a marijuana dealer and told my family that I’d been arrested, well my two aunts, one the mom of this cousin, both of them came over to my house separately to scream at me about what I was doing–I was planning on fighting my marijuana charge instead of plea bargaining. But I started talking about police brutality and they just screamed at me that police are the good guys, so I asked my aunts, each of them in two separate conversations, I asked them if I turned up dead in a ditch and it turned out the police had murdered me to keep me silent, would they still see them as heroes, and both my aunts gave an absolutely clear yes. I even re-asked the question to both of them and both times they re-iterated that yes, if the police murdered me, they would see my murderers as heroes.
These two conversations combined (in my memory I kind of think of them as the same conversation because they both went almost exactly the same) are like, the most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me. I was ready to tell them all about my cousin assaulting me, all about my experience watching that guy die at the hands of the police, try to move on from that trauma, but when they told me right to my face that they would see my murderers as heroes I just I just kind of broke down in terror and I shut it down and I bottled it up sort of, like I started writing more and more about police brutality and marijuana legalization but I was too scared to talk about my own experiences. My cousin was absolutely right. If you piss off the police they have all the ability and none of the consequences of having you killed. It’s absolutely terrifying.
So I slipped into a 20 year long PTSD nightmare of being scared to leave my home and having panic attacks every time I see a police officer.
You live in a whole other world when you are terrified every day, every time you leave the house, of the very people who are supposed to protect you, and you know that all those people who seem to see you as a human being, all a cop has to do is point at me and say “criminal” and they will all turn their back and let me die without another thought.
But then Black Lives Matter came along.
It’s not a perfect organization… fuck, it’s a deeply flawed organization. If you want to call BLM a “racist organization”, I don’t actually have a good argument against that–but having said that, Black Lives Matter freaking saved my life.
Black Lives Matter changed everything about what it means to be Kalin.–well that’s an exaggeration, they didn’t change everything about being Kalin but they helped fix one of the biggest negative things about being Kalin which was this overwhelming terror and the keeping of these secrets. During the long COVID lockdown I finally wrote out my stories and got them out.
It’s like I still recognize that I might get murdered for talking about all this. I mean, that’s still a very real possibility, but it’s like, if I’m being reasonable about it, even now after writing this, it’s probably still less likely than me dying in a car accident.
But cars are freaking scary too. Don’t get me started with them.
Anyway, our society is shifting in how we deal with trauma. Thanks to things like the me-too movement–which was painfully non-inclusive of police brutality survivors but still valuable, it’s like people are now talking about these things. Social media too has really given us an outlet for these things.
So all over, people like me are starting to talk about our experiences like this where all the previous generations would have taken it to the grave.
Donald Trump is a massive retaliation against survivors who talk about their trauma and ask the question “why are some acts of violence ignored while others are punished to the extreme?”
A line from the first song of Guns and roses Use Your Illusion 2 keeps running in my mind, “they shot the man Who said, “Peace could last forever” And in my first memories, they shot Kennedy. I went numb when I learned to see”.
It’s retaliation, trying to silence trauma survivors on a massive level.
They put a gang rapist on the supreme court. Blows my mind. Didn’t even consider her story. Even if they actually doubted her, they didn’t even try to get to the truth. Actual innocent people make some kind of effort to get to the truth, to understand where the mistake happened.
We all know he probably did it–I mean maybe no but probably yes, and the people who are continuing to support that gang rapist on the supreme court and Trump who got him there are proudly sending a clear message to rape and sexual harassment survivors: keep your mouths shut or we will destroy you any way we can.
And to police brutality survivors it’s the same thing, but with more of the, you know, threat of straight up murder.
And also to the survivors of war or military brutality or brutality from military veterans. Again, the trump supporters are all telling them that they must keep their mouths shut or they’ll use all those guns they’ve been storing up to deal with people who question the military.
It’s just an absolutely terrifying time for anyone who questions these power structures or who wish to tell a story that makes them look bad.
And I don’t want any suffering or vengeance– I probably should have mentioned this earlier in the entry that I absolutely do not in any way shape or form want vengeance against my cousin or anyone else that may have hurt me. That would be stooping to their level.
Vengeance or “justice” that’s really just vengeance coated in a legal process, would undermine everything that I want to communicate. I want peace. Not continued cycles of anger and bitterness.
One of the things I want more than anything is to sit down with my cousin and talk this out with a therapist who can keep us from screaming at each other.
I want so badly to believe that he’s changed, that he’s one of the good ones now. I do know that’s a very real possibility. I’ve seen other people change.
But if that’s the case, if he really has changed, why hasn’t he come back and apologized?
I wish we didn’t have this rift in my family over violence, trauma and politics.
That whole “thin blue line”, it sort of represents that line the police and my cousin and myself when I was a child believed in between law abiding people and criminals. One side you get protection and respect, the other side you are seen as garbage for society to enjoy spitting on and people are tossed above or below that line arbitrarily regardless of how much actual good or harm they are doing to society.
We need to get back to seeing each other as individual people. There is no line. We are all human beings. We are all in this together.
I know I might get shot for saying all this but it’s worth the risk. I feel a bit cleansed.
Peace.
Saturday, December 7, 2024
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