Boston

Just eight hours after the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, I found myself shopping for dinner at the Berkeley Bowl. It had been a long day at the office and I was not in the mood to cook. Parking in the downstairs garage, I took the elevator up to the store. My only companion was a young Pakistani, probably one of thousands of Pakistani students who attend UC Berkeley.

We both looked at each other, then we simultaneously both looked down. In the minute that it took for the elevator doors to close, the thought raced through my mind. Does he think I am not looking at him because he could be perceived as a ‘suspect’?

Is he anticipating some kind of stupid remark which he would have to either painfully ignore or give a defensive retort? Did he anticipate I would open my mouth and something stupid would fly out?  I looked down at his feet. Endless seconds passed as the elevator moved slowly up one floor.

“Nice shoes,” I said.

We both burst out laughing, going our separate ways to the produce aisles and the deli section. I know what he felt. Felt it myself, only not so pleasantly, in the days after 9-11. I was sitting at my usual spot at the bar at the Buckeye Grill in Mill Valley, waiting for my friends Karen and Jim to meet me for some after-work cocktails and dinner.

A party of four women and a man came in, all the while staring at me while getting seated at a table behind me. Once they sat, I could hear the muffling of their voices as they talked quietly between themselves. They had looks of suspicion and wariness from squinting blue eyes and swollen red faces. I smiled. There was no smile back. Just a hardening of the features. A visceral response waiting on curled lips.

One of the reports at the time immediately after the towers fell was that Muslim extremists from the Philippines were part of the Al-Qaeda conspiracy. What did I have to do with that? Other than being Filipino, absolutely nothing. But the stares coming from behind me were as palpable as shivs.

My evening was saved by an older British man, a Bechtel engineer, who was also waiting for his party to arrive for their dinner. He was observing me and my interaction with the table behind me, and drew me into his orbit. We ended up talking about Bechtel, the state of construction in San Francisco, the complexity of government construction, and what makes a good gin and tonic. The more my British Bechtel friend and I laughed, the more the focused suspicion wandered. The shivs attempting to insert themselves into my emotional body were starting to dissipate.

But these experiences are hard to forget. Especially when you are an ‘other’. It was moments like these for me as well as the unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were the seeds for me becoming a writer about politics. But that same memory also had the memory of someone’s kindness, openness and lack of suspicion and fear. That moment of kindness at the Buckeye Grill was waiting for yet another moment like yesterday in Boston for me to resurrect, share, and pay it forward. Like in the elevator yesterday at Berkeley Bowl.

In Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” he wrote of the beauty of all bodies: black, white, male, female. All equal, all connected under the eyes of nature. It was in this vision that he saw the saving of America. He was long before his time since shortly after its original publishing in 1855, America’s seething racial and economic tensions erupted into Southern secession and the Civil War that claimed over half a million lives.

We’re still trying to find a way to rise to the vision of Mr. Whitman’s poem. We are hindered by the recent wound to the body politic of September 11th, which came with a door opening into the gateway of our darkest side. That darkness flowered into our social body like a terrible, life-threatening inflammatory disease.

That inflammation is now only somewhat subdued, and its after effects remain as social diseases: deep-rooted fear, homophobia, prejudice, distrust, openly hostile ignorance with un-complex conspiracy theories that find dark bugaboos in every corner. Then there’s the disease that compels one’s need to find comfort with as much automatic military-grade weaponry you can buy. None of these types of social illnesses deserve a place in our body politic. Not if we plan to still call ourselves a republic. Not if we want our children to flourish in it.

Yet Boston is an opportunity to heal ourselves of not only yesterday’s terrible crime, but also the ghosts of that terrible national injury that still haunts our perceptions, causing us to react fearfully, raising the specters of our long-violent past. We’ve become like a body too afraid to stretch out and really move and grow after a trauma. We have to think through and re-assure ourselves that we are okay, and then move on.

Yes we live in a dangerous world, but it has been dangerous long before April 15th, 2013, and long before September 11th, 2001. History is there to teach us not to repeat ourselves, as long as we choose to observe its lessons. Each one of us are cells in this movement toward releasing ourselves, our body politic, our country, from ignorance and fear. Each of us has the potential to be a healthy cell in this body politic to interact moment by moment, person-to-person, to help us pick ourselves up and through.

These next few days are the difference in how well we can learn our lesson of releasing ourselves from fear. It’s in these days — like every other day but now more than ever — that we are actively creating the future. We have these moments now to avail ourselves of sharing love, some laughter, and hints for what makes the best gin and tonic.

And to raise our glasses high and proud and with a prayer, to the people of Boston.