Talking to Myself, #2: Maybe. Probably.

“Are you concerned?”

“Not at all. Which is weird maybe.”

I came home to police tape surrounding my block the other day. Most of us that live in Baltimore have had the pleasure of this experience. Equal parts foreign and familiar. So incredibly finite that any attempt you make to wrap your head around it triggers a self destruct sequence that you have to frantically defuse before you can return to any modest breath of sanity. I say that to say I don’t think it’s possible to ever grasp the magnitude of a shooting. Which makes sense I think — a brain that can wrap itself around its own split-second destruction is probably not a good thing.

So, I’m driving up my block, tape just everywhere. And, as I parked, that classic hook of a refrain started to play in my head. That one after the verse about post-manufacturing blue collar port cities that conveniently forgot and never stopped forgetting that being blue collar is something to be proud of and is worthy of every bit the dignity of those precious professional class people this city drowns in pomp and circumstance. Except they never do drown do they? The dogs sure can paddle.

Someone got shot. (Repeat refrain).

I feel like I should’ve been shaken, affected, anything? I wanted to be. And maybe in some low-hum way I was. But if I’m honest with myself, I went inside that building like it was any other night, took the elevator to my floor, walked in my apartment, cooked dinner, and carried on with life like death hadn’t just happened.

I had been in the middle of a conversation with a friend as I was coming up the street. So as soon I got in the apartment, I took out my phone and immediately downloaded the psychological carnage onto her. Like a good friend does. She’s one of those friends that never responds in a way you anticipate, but what she ends up saying is levels above half the shit you had in mind anyway. So I was in good hands.

She asked if I was concerned.

And at that moment it was as if all of my dustiest brain cells looked around at each other like desperately bow-tied homicide detectives still reeling from all that big bold investigative work they didn’t do the day before or the day before that, and then the office phone rings and, well, no volunteers. That six-figure taxpayer-funded salary… as well-spent as it never was.

Was I concerned? Apparently, my brain wasn’t ready for this most basic of questions. A devastatingly obvious question made all the more devastating because not only was I not concerned, it didn’t even occur to me to be concerned. Like, at all.

She had me pinned against myself. I wasn’t at all surprised that a shooting happened. Why wouldn’t it happen? I don’t mean to be glib. I’m saying I live in a city full of people that fight like hell to put food on the table. Decisions get made because they have to get made. And while we celebrate that resiliency, I wonder if it’s something we should even have to celebrate. Don’t we deserve a society where putting food on the table is not just easy, but guaranteed? Instead, we glorify some manufactured struggle — manufactured for the benefit of a few of them, at the expense of all of us. We live in this great big more-interconnected-than-ever society and somehow we’re still out here fighting each other for basic dignity because the constant crippling fear of failing our families is constant and crippling.

And so someone got shot. (Repeat refrain).

Maybe because manufacturing moved overseas generations ago, or because that decline in manufacturing made the drug trade some of the most accessible good-paying work, or because chronic pain is so absolutely painful that drug and alcohol abuse is the only cheap way to make it through a day and someone was a few dollars short, or because untreated mental illness can legitimately be the entire reason someone ever pulls a trigger, or because impulse control is not a hallmark of states of extreme desperation, or because mass incarceration viciously destabilized family units and rendered 90s and 00s babies a new Lost Generation.

Maybe. Probably.

Or maybe some other reason, I don’t know. I’ve never shot anyone. I’ve never even pulled a trigger. I have no idea what it would take to do so. That said, if I believed I had significantly good reason to, I think I would be able to. I imagine the same might be true for most of whoever is still reading this. And so if someone in my neighborhood felt they had good reason to pull the trigger the other day…

Then what?

I don’t have an answer to that question.