We are janitor.

This is gonna be short.

I can’t wait to get everything lined up straight before I start bursting my thoughts out. I’ve thought hard. I’ve listened lots. And I’ve stayed silent too long. Letting myself off the hook in the passive-aggressive self-defense of ‘processing all sides.’

Sort of like responding to ‘black lives matter’ with ‘all lives matter.’

It took me a while to begin to really comprehend why this is insensitive, to say nothing of tone deaf, offensive, hurtful, harmful, and regressive.

There’s a bunch of great analogies. Just like there’s a bunch of people doing great things in trying to make things right. More than I’m doing.

But if I don’t have the best actions to do or the best words to use…do I do nothing and say nothing?

I am Caucasian. There are many voices more important than mine that should be heard and whose pain is a reflection of struggles and challenges I have never faced. I have listened, I am listening. And I am trying to find the balance of listening and learning with that of speaking out and standing up;

recognizing that my voice is not meant to drown out or rise above, but it is, I think, mean to be a harmonious part of a choir demanding better.

Demanding what is right and what is basic.

I have 206 bones. I have some I’m more connected to than others. But from what I understand, they’re all pretty important. If I broke my back, that would be the one I’d want fixed; that I’d want healed.

Are there other important bones? Other ones that are sore, or have issues, or need to be healed? Yeah. But the back’s the one that needs the attention and the immediate fix. My whole body’s not gonna be working right until that’s taken care of.

Not original. Riffing off someone else’s analogy. There’s a bunch of great ones and I just remixed that one from elsewhere. But it finally started clicking, making sense. That’s where literature, film, art, stories make such a difference in helping to frame reality in an understandable context.

Everybody sees the world through a set of lenses. I’m a white guy. Born and raised by two parents and six younger siblings. Married to a woman I love and with four healthy children I wrangle with every day. Challenges, yeah. But not challenges like so many face. I recognize that. I refuse to not acknowledge that. I don’t apologize for who I am or who my family is. It is who we are and we struggle like many; struggles seen and struggles not.

But they are of a different sort. We do not struggle for our lives, for respect, for dignity, for many basic parts of everyday life that we think nothing of…but that many people of color have to think about and decision-make constantly. We don’t. I started out ahead in life. Ahead. Through nothing I did or deserved. I was born into existence, a screaming, naked newborn like all who first enter the world. And then I was immediately grown in an ecosystem that gave me opportunity, advantage, and privilege.

I started off ahead.

You can’t fault a person for the lens, or set of lenses they’ve grown up seeing things through. Thing is though, doesn’t mean you can’t clean off those lenses, or swap them out when they’re cracked, or get some new sets altogether.

The lenses I see the world through are as a dad, a partner and husband, brother, son, uncle; artist and storyteller and documentarian and journalist. The first is as a dad.

That means the choices I make every day are a manifestation of my role as a father. The lens I process virtually everything through first is as that of a father.

I did not want to watch George Floyd die. Knowing that he died seemed enough. Knowing that he died at the hands of police seemed enough. Signing some petitions seemed enough. Liking some social media posts calling for measured thoughtful response seemed enough.

I finally watched George Floyd die.

I watched his murder in front of me.

And then I called our two older kids in. They’re 12 and 9. And I said: we’re going to watch this together.

We’re going to watch a man die. Not someone in a film or a book. Not something that happened a hundred years ago. This man was murdered in a time frame of days ago. While you were reading Hunger Games or riding a bike or eating a popsicle…this man was murdered. By police.

By police, whose mandate is to protect its citizens, its people. Even when detaining someone, their job is still to serve. Public servants. To do the best they can. And many, on an individual basis, do.

But systemic racism is a thing. A real thing. It’s about more than one person and one incident. It’s about the way that evil is normalized; that the perverse becomes acceptable.

We watched him try to move; his neck pinned for almost nine minutes under the knee of a police officer. We watched him beg for breath.

For breath.

The breath given by God, birthed by a woman, and extinguished by a police officer. This was a child of God. Murdered by badge. It’s no longer about one man, one cop, one incident, one murder. Once is an aberration. Over and over, ad nauseam? That’s pattern. That’s systemic. And that’s a problem.

So we watched. Watched him gasp. Watched him call out for his Mama. Watched him go limp. Watched the footage of courageous citizen journalists who dared and cared to keep recording and filming while four uniformed men with guns enabled the murder of a black man, handcuffed, on the ground,

a knee on his legs,
a knee on his back,
a knee on his neck.

We watched as this happened.

Because I could not allow them to not. There may be all kinds of thoughts and ideas and perspectives on how old kids should be before having to deal with heavy stuff. I don’t pay too much attention to it. I’ve talked with our kids from the time they were in the womb, through infancy and toddlerhood and early childhood all the way up to the ages they’re at.

We talk with them. About everything. Good and bad. When they have questions, we answer them to the best of our abilities.

I watched George Floyd die and thought of all the mistakes he made, all the beautiful things he might have done, all the people he may have wronged and all those he may have done right by. I thought of him as somebody’s son. He was 46. Three years older than me.

He was somebody’s son. Whatever good or bad he may have done in life,

he was somebody’s son.

I have never, ever, lived life as a parent where I have ever been concerned for my children on the basis of their skin color. Of all the things I may have been anxious about at different points, that is not one.

There are some voices demanding that this not be made about race. “There’s no proof the officers were racist.”

Of course it’s about race. And a lot more.

We are a Christian family. Tough thing to say these days, as I am resoundingly, firmly in the 19% of those who did not vote Trump into office. To look at his response, his chest-thumping, macho man, “we will annihilate and overpower the organized resistance” shit, and to still believe this man represents, on any level, an example of someone who follows or understands Christ’s teachings or the Gospel on any level is unconscionable. Indefensible.

Strong words. Words that I stand by.

Learn to do good;
seek justice, correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless, and please the widow's cause…”
-Isaiah 1:17

Note: if Trump happens to be reading this post, Isaiah is a book in the Bible. Yes, the same Bible you were brandishing as a weapon after your pathetic faux-Jericho Walk across Lafayette Square where you posed in front of a church.

Our children need to know this shit. And shit doesn’t have to be permanent. It’s organic. It’s disgusting and gross. But it can get clean. It’s gotta have janitors who are willing to get dirty, scrub up, and help make things better for everyone. I don’t know what to do right now. But I’m willing to be a janitor. I want our children to know the humble joy and necessity and power of communing and supporting fellow humans by getting our own hands dirty, washing others’ feet, and getting things cleaned up so everyone can live in a cleaner world.

Shit doesn’t have to stay shit.

Shit spreads when it gets ignored and people walk through it and keep spreading it. When people get involved, on their hands and knees, in tandem with others, in cleaning it…the place is gonna start to get better. Cleaner. Better for everyone. Not just the people sleeping or lying in it. Better for everyone who walks through it, who spreads it, who smells it and absorbs it and…it’s gross. So gross. But if you don’t clean it up, it gets worse and worse. But it doesn’t simply die an ignoble death if it’s all over the ground we walk. It spreads into almost everything eventually. And you start to get used to it, and that shit that gets spread passes along different forms of bacteria and brings other diseases and dog-whistles the flies and it creates an environment and ecosystem that keeps getting worse.

Unless the heroes, the janitors, clean it. Bring the tools, bring the bags, bring a mask, and dig into that shit and get things clean. You don’t take care of shit by plopping a newspaper on top of it. You might have to scrub, and bring the right supplies, and a commitment to cleaning it until it’s cleaned up.

And there’s always those who have made a way to profiteer off shit staying on the ground and getting spread all around. Just like war is good for arms manufacturers, shit is good business if you’re a shit-selling company. If you’re that company, you don’t want the shit cleaned up because you want it to keep spreading, you want people to keep stepping in it and spreading it, and maybe you start another company that also has shit-cleaning services, so you can double-dip (terrible metaphor, sorry), and make money at both ends (sorry, an even worse phrasing).

Racism. It’s shit. Just to pound the nail’s head: racism is shit. You can ignore it, but it’s still there. And everyone gets dirty. But not everyone is wallowing in it, living in it, having their fucking face ground into pavement while they gasp out for their mom with their final breaths.

Some parents worry about the language their children hear. I really don’t fucking care. Why? Because the way people treat each other is far more important to me than the language or words used. Using fuck and shit and any other “bad word” are not practices that are a part of our family dialog or verbiage. But it’s not because they’re “bad” in and of themselves. Out of respect for others, and - okay, here’s some of my privilege coming through - out of a deep love for William Shakespeare and Jane Austen and beautiful witty ways of using vivid language, we don’t typically use these words. But I’m not afraid of them. I’m not afraid of our children knowing or learning or hearing them. I want them to understand the power in their meaning and the context they’re used in, and understand how much more I fucking care about them standing up for what is right, demanding what is right as a society than in them getting hung up on some scrap syllables or two of an evolving language.

You use what works. Are they gonna read this? What I’ve written? Yeah. They are. And they might giggle. They might giggle over the number of time I say shit and fuck in this piece.

I set up the iPad on the table. Yeah, we’ve got an iPad. A big one. I pull up the video. The “warning: brutal and graphic violence” comes on before it starts playing. I tell them I want them to watch. But I will not make them. A man is about to be murdered and we know it’s going to happen.

I care about our children learning to respect those around them and proactively helping those who are vulnerable. I want them to do good, to seek justice, to correct oppression. I cannot in good conscience guide our family, along with Becca, as a spiritual leader who believes in the Gospel’s power and meaning for everyone, if I do not take these words to heart.

“…what does the Lord require of you but to do justice,
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
-Micah 6:8

So we watched a man die. Die? That’s a passive description. The euphemistic description. We watched together as he was murdered.

Then we talked. It’s not a one talk and done. It’s one of many ongoing talks we’ve had and will have. We haven’t figured out a lot. We live on a mountain in a safe place that is far away from many dangers.

We live a life that is privileged.

If we are to be a Christian family and a humane nation, we cannot stand by, we cannot be silent,

we cannot not watch,

and we cannot ignore the role that Donald J. Trump has played in enabling and growing a creeping nationalism whose pillars are buried deep in racism and xenophobia and whose version of Christianity is not only a bastardization of Christ’s teachings,

it is evil.

I do not throw around that word lightly.

But I believe that the man who is now our President, our Chief Public Servant, has enabled, encouraged, and inflamed attitudes and actions that are evil. That have burrowed even deeper into institutions and the way that things are just “normally done.”

What should be outliers are normal.

He has helped in an incredible way to normalize a perverted version of christianity that is not only antithetical to Jesus’s commands…

…but is evil.

What happened to George Floyd was not only wrong.

It was evil.

It was not an accident. It was not simply overzealousness. There were people speaking up, again and again and again: Stop! Check his pulse! He’s not breathing! Get off him!

It was not a single incident.

This is a messy mass of words I’ve thrown together. I’m listening, I’m learning, and I also gotta throw my words in if I think they can benefit in any way. I gotta make sure people know where I stand. Where our family stands. If we are Christians, then we are stewards and janitors.

Stewards of those around us. Janitors to help clean up and fix what is dirty, shitty, broken, and ready to be thrown out.

Yeah, we’re all human. Yeah, we all got challenges. Yeah, we all count.

But at this point in history, right now, right now, right now…

Black lives matter.