An Evening at the Aquarium - Just Progress Newsletter #1
This letter was originally published as the lead in to the June 4th, 2022 Just Progress newsletter. To get content like this right in your inbox, please subscribe.
Dear Reader,
Our bodies aren’t meant to bear this much grief for this long.
Violence on violence, mass shooting after mass shooting weighs on all of us. This ceaseless cycle has left the United States of America, the country I begrudgingly acknowledge as my own, burdened with the grief and pain of tragedy and trauma.
It’s left many surrounded by darkness searching for light.
We were still searching for expression of the anguish and anger of seeing Black elders murdered mid-day, when a monster dressed as a man took the lives of 19 children and 2 adults – 3, if you count the husband who died from a broken heart.
Whether you loved any of the victims or not, all our hearts are broken in this nation in this moment.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve all been reminded that our grandparents, our parents, our lovers, our children, and our grandchildren could have their breath ripped from their chest at any moment in a random act of violence. And our government would be impotent to stop it, all because our so-called leaders refuse to prevent the most preventable of deaths.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In fact, many governments have responded to senseless violence with common sense, courage, and compassion. Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, is a reminder of what is possible when a nation is victim to violence.
After the horrific Christchurch shooting in 2019, Prime Minister Ardern and the New Zealand Parliament did more than offer their thoughts and prayers to the victims.
They offered actions that would prevent anyone else from suffering in the same way. New Zealand acted and rapidly banned assault rifles. To this day they, “buy them back” and “destroy them.”
Whether we go to the same extent or not, we need to explore alternatives to the lawlessness we allow right now.
It was Prime Minister Ardern herself who reminded me of the possibilities available to us.
Last Friday, May 27th, I had the opportunity to attend a reception with the Prime Minister, a delegation of New Zealand business leaders, and a smattering of powerful personages from around the Greater Seattle area. How I ended up at such an exclusive event is beyond me.
I know it was related to my work with the Seattle Green New Deal Oversight Board, but with only two other City officials present – the Director of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability & the Environment, Jessyn Farrell, and the Mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell – I felt out of place. I wasn’t alone.
“You had to be someone to be here,” Mayor Harrell said on stage, “I had to check my own name to make sure I could get in.”
However my name made it on the list, with the reception held in the lobby of the Seattle Aquarium, it made for a surreal night.
Throughout the evening, fish looked down on us from the 15-foot-tall, gallery fish tank as they swam around the New Zealand flag suspended in their seawater.
I wonder what the fish made of that evening’s event?
With blinds drawn and curtains cutting off the reception area from any street view, the event was a world unto itself.
As I wandered around the event space, I found myself dissociating before returning to the full experience of those strange moments which felt suspended outside of society and time.
Often, the dissociation would coincide with the realization that rooms like that are where the powerful gather together to shape the fate of the world. And people like me are not supposed to be there.
Not only was I easily 15-years younger than the average attendee, but as far as I remember, there were only three Black people in that room: a member of the waitstaff, the mayor, and me.
Add in the fact that neither of the other two had earrings or visible tattoos, and your boy here made for a unique addition to that evening’s crowd.
I even earned special attention.
After one circuitous route around the reception space on the lookout for someone to connect with, I found myself tailed by a security officer.
After I finished the loop around the room and found the person I wanted to talk to, I paused and hovered nearby while they finished their conversation. As I stood there, I felt like I was being watched.
I turned to my left and saw a six-foot-three, barrel-chested, white man sporting a crew cut, a loose-fitting suit, and a curl of wire dangling from behind his right ear.
His gruff eyes were locked on me, his body poised to respond to any sudden movement on my part.
No stranger to being followed by security, I stood my ground and sipped my Sauvignon Blanc – confident I was doing nothing wrong and, were I to get tackled by the New Zealand Prime Minister’s security service, at least it’d be a good story.
When I looked away and looked back, the officer was gone.
Despite feeling like a fish out of water flailing around the aquarium lobby, I appreciated the experience of standing in close proximity to power.
I won’t lie.
It’s intoxicating to be in the room where it happens.
But I’d still rather these rooms be replaced with green spaces where communities gather to share our visions and shape our fates as a collective.
Regardless, that event centered in mind two things:
First, the importance of and possibilities for responding to the crisis of gun violence gripping the country.
And second, the reality that mass shootings, in many ways, aren’t our most urgent crisis.
Yes, the Christchurch and Buffalo shooting received repeated mention – the Robbs Elementary shooting hadn’t yet happened. But Prime Minister Ardern made it a point to emphasize and encourage climate action.
She made it clear that the climate crisis demands our immediate, undivided attention.
While mass shootings are an ongoing tragedy that must be addressed, they are nothing next to the violence of climate change and the untold thousands who already die every year due to increasingly extreme and erratic weather.
Whether heat waves, drought, flash floods, forest fires, sea level rise, or any of a myriad of other impacts, the climate crisis is devastating every corner of the world in different ways.
In the face of this crisis, as with that of gun violence, we have a choice to make: we can give empty offerings of thoughts and prayers, or we can take the path of courage and compassion – the path of action.
