Airports, first world problems. Police brutality, an actual problem.

I’m sitting in Chicago–yeah, Chicago, I just checked my American Airlines app to make sure where I was. Been here all day, just chillin in this airport. Not my choice of course. My flight was originally supposed to leave around 9AM after just a 40 minute layover, but they changed it on me and gave me no choice in the matter. I shoulda paid for the flight insurance since my job is paying for it but I don’t feel right about charging the company for those kinds of luxuries.
Airports are such weird, unnatural places. Like not particularly bad places. Nothing is particularly awful, I mean really my only complaint is the crowds and the fact that the toilets flush obsessively, like every tiny movement makes them flush again and again so I feel like I have to stay frozen in place when I go to the bathroom to avoid wasting water. But that’s… you know… first world problems as they say. I shouldn’t complain about being in an airport listening to audible, fucking around on my computer, while my company credit card pays for all my food. I’m getting my steps in too, pacing around. Chicago has a real big airport.
Sometimes I start to complain in situations like this and once I start writing it out like this I realize I got nothing really to complain about, all things considered.
But still, airports are weird. No nature, no love, nothing here that genuinely makes us human. It’s like we aren’t really people when we’re here. We’re just travelers in a state of limbo, halfway between one section of our life and another. But at the same time, it’s not that bad. It all still works… I mean except for when it doesn’t.
I’m having this flashback to some sitcom in the 80s– Full House? Where they all got trapped in an airport on Christmas with a bunch of strangers and everyone was so pissed off and ruined Christmas but I think in the end they got all these strangers together and had a makeshift Christmas.
I just shut down my computer and packed everything up so I could race to my gate because I just noticed that the boarding time was still the same. I figured if the flight was delayed then the boarding time would also be delayed but then saw that no the app was saying it’s still the same time so had to race over to this gate to find that no, the app lies. As a web developer I know how easy it would be to fix this type of thing.
But it’s first world problems. Maybe I should have just continued on my career story but I didn’t feel like it because I kept thinking about writing this letter to my aunt who when I watched a police brutality incident where they beat a man to death right in front of me and a separate issue where a police officer tried to trick someone into murdering me, and a third incident where another relative who is a police officer violently assaulted me, made me beg for my life and promised to murder me if I ever talked about it. I tried to open up to her 20 years ago and tell her about these incidents and she just screamed at me that police are the good guys no matter what and “I don’t care how horrifying of a story you have, I will support the police no matter what! No matter what!” And this was like 20 years ago and I was so scared to talk about it. So scared of being murdered by the cops that I kept quiet for so many years until Black Lives Matter came along and rescued me from my chronic depression.
Now I’m in a good place and I can think about these things without getting enraged. Now, after decades of processing, I finally feel confident that I can talk about these things without having a meltdown. But it’s like, if my aunt had shown me some compassion twenty years ago. If she had just been willing to listen to my stories and just understood that police brutality survivors have real trauma that actually matters. I don’t think she’d get it though.
I wonder if all those folks who say “blue lives matter” and “we support our police” have ever actually spoken to a police brutality survivor. I doubt it.
Police brutality for me is one of those things that was just so awful that it couldn’t be spoken about. There are countless other people out there like me who have been through this type of trauma and I’m sure they don’t talk about it until they are in a safe space.
If we talk about it we could be murdered. It’s interesting to think that I have two separate police officers who made it clear me they would murder me if I talked about the things they had done, and then a third set of police officers who did actually try to murder me–granted it was a half-assed murder attempt but that almost makes it more painful, that the police just go around trying to manipulate people into murdering each other, and they can do it all they want without worrying about consequences.
Sometimes that kind of thing is even made public, sometimes they’ll even admit that they deliberately lie and manipulate “gang members” into fighting with each other.
Some people when you open up to them about being a police brutality survivor, they instantly shut down and their whole demeanor changes. They no longer see you as a human being and suddenly they see you as a piece of trash who got what he deserved. Sometimes they won’t even listen to your story. they just scream at you things like “criminals get what they deserve!” “There’s no such thing as police brutality!” or “I’m sure you had it coming,”. It’s like this weird thing where we divide our society into the “good” people and the “bad” people, but those definitions are often arbitrary and have nothing to do with how much you actually support your community or try to do good for others.
But things are different now because of Black Lives Matter. I kind of owe BLM my sanity. They fucking saved me. Granted, I don’t like certain aspects of that group–like, they kind of make me feel real unwelcome in their spaces because I’m white. I don’t understand why the whole police brutality issue is based around race because yes, racism is a real factor and I’m not trying to say it’s not, but white people have this problem too. There was once I was at a table with like four other white people and one black guy and I mentioned my police brutality experience, and one by one all the white people opened up and mentioned their own police brutality experiences–like it was just a crazy coincidence that it was a table full of us. We were meeting for totally unrelated reasons.
But the black guy was like “this feels backward, I’m the only black guy here and the only one without a police brutality story”.
Anyway, I finished this book on Audible today called People Skills by Robert Bolton. This was another really good self-help book. I don’t know if the books are getting better, like maybe the audible algorithm is getting better or there’s more of them available or maybe I’ve gotten better at reading and appreciating them.
But these self help books, it’s like they have sort of given me a whole new way of looking at and communicating about my trauma. Mostly about the communication. Nowadays I can talk about all these police brutality issues without getting all upset. It’s no longer this super emotional thing for me–I mean it’s still very emotional, but not overwhelmingly so. I have much more control now and thanks to all these books I listen to, I feel I have the emotional intellectual and verbal skills, finally, after all these years, to actually articulate this stuff without freaking out and screaming and resorting to hyperbole or isolation.