RIP Oscar: an experience of tragedy in Baltimore

It is upsetting to see what is going down in Baltimore. I sympathize with the idea that all the rioting is an expression of the otherwise voiceless, but this does not change the fact destruction and violence make me upset. The city is a sad place today; I've heard it described it as a 'war zone' by a friend I trust. Still, in many ways I wish I was there. I wish I was there so I could experience the sadness for myself, and not be informed by a version presented through the media, which tends to filter out all the energies but anger and fear.

For this reason, I do not feel like I am in the right position to assess the incident with Freddie Gray. I am no longer in Baltimore to witness what is happening in response to his death. I choose to reflect on a tragedy I personally experienced while in Baltimore. The reflection is long and full of nonsense, but what I took away is the understanding that grief gets a lot closer to justice than retribution or even rationalization ever can. Moved by the pressure to make this into something didactic and topical, I guess I would emphasize my realization of how important it is to be one with the suffering. The only way the chaos in Baltimore becomes constructive is to understand that this is what the tragedy and the unrest are really about.

It took nearly ten months, but together we escaped the city. Our refuge was Elk Neck State Park. Early in the week, my housemates and I were able to find a cheap camping site, so we liquidated our May stipend and booked it. When the week collided with Friday afternoon, we made the drive north, gliding on the black of Interstate 95 up and over the Susquehanna in our rental Rav4, and finally setting up camp on the damp grounds. Pitching a tent proved the ultimate test of community, and male ego, but we passed it. Each day the sun shined and at night we were reminded that when it gets dark there are little white spots in the sky called stars. We breathed in and out, and appreciated how the air didn’t taste like an amalgam of gasoline and hot plastic. It was quite peaceful to be where we were. I do not know if I should call it nature, but it was an environment that in many ways seemed more natural than the one we had been calling home.

Only by rediscovering this peace did we realize we had been living the year without it. It had been replaced by vigilance—an uncomfortable state necessitated by life in the ghetto. This had become our baseline, and we welcomed the reentry of an old baseline—one where we could walk and talk without a constant tax of awareness. It was liberating, but also oppressing. We felt kind of bad that most people from our neighborhood could never escape and could never come to know this peace. Many were expected to remain vigilant their entire lives. Vigilant and oppressed. We thought about how that couldn’t be healthy, and we thought about how it must at least have something to do with the 20 year difference in life expectancy between West Baltimoreans and residents of other parts of the city.

It was a nice Memorial Day weekend in Elk Neck State Park. We hiked and threw Frisbees and ate canned beans that were heated just enough to prevent gagging. But the weekend eventually came to a close, as they seem to. We deconstructed the tent and got back on the road. West Baltimore welcomed us home in bitter taste.

When we pulled back onto Mount Street, a couple of brawny, long-armed officers of the law were sleuthing around our property, fingering through plants, examining scuffs on the pavement, resting one foot on the elevated curb while the other lay flat on the street, in a way that said they meant some sort of business.

We slowed to a stop across the street. We got out of the car and asked the cops if anything was going on, knowing the answer, but asking anyway. They blew us off, dismissing our concern, likely assuming it was insincere. I can’t blame them for the confusion. I would have thought the same, coming from people like us in a place like that. Our concern had no business crossing over MLK Boulevard.

When they realized it was our home they were investigating, the cops reengaged and asked where we had been all weekend—not in an accusatory way, but an anticipatory one. They told us that there had been a double-shooting the night before. One body had been found in the alley next door. This one was not saved. Another had been discovered in the flower bed in front of our house. I looked over to the spot, and could see where this body had come to rest. While the man survived, the plants beneath where he lay were crushed by the weight of the violence. The flattened grass and broken flowers leave an image I cannot seem to cede. Juxtapositions like this are striking, and memorable. And the juxtaposition of death taking form in these symbols of primaveral vitality is an image that will be forever lodged like a bullet into my mind.

So there had been a murder while we were away—while we were out in the wilderness, fighting the hot sun and irritating plants and copperhead snakes, things which swiftly seemed underwhelming foes after we were reawakened to the unrelenting dangers of the city. A boy of 16 years had been shot and killed in the alley next to our house. Another man was shot in our flowerbed.

Initially, I wasn’t very impressed by the news. I mean that to say it didn’t have much of an impression on me—physically, emotionally, psychologically. I had to force myself to think about why it should impress me, and even then it only impressed me very little.

The first emotion I eventually forced myself into, I guess, was fear. Because there was a man who had his life ended by another man, intentionally, at the foot of our front steps. I was scared because I could have been that man. Or worse, it could have been one of my housemates—Yeti, Nicole, Julie, Pat. It could have been one of them.

Thank God we were not here, I recall saying to myself. I couldn’t imagine the trauma, had we been awoken by the cracking and whistle of metal outside our window, and looked down to see a man dying on the ground below. I would later be ambivalent about this reaction, but it persisted, unquestioned, for quite a while. The next thing I felt was hopelessness.

Pat and I went to return the rental car shortly after returning home. On the ride, we vented. It is not something either of us is inclined to do—this business of venting—but we vented with a vengeance.

“It just sucks, man. We come here, live our ‘ministry’, whatever that means. We hold hands and kiss wounds and whatever. And hopefully—almost certainly—we touch a few lives. I guess it’s hard to deny we do change lives, in some not yet noticeable ways. But at the same time, it feels like we change nothing.” Pat lamented.

“Right? I feel you. I mean, with everything we got, we give love to and receive love from this neighborhood. And its people. We are here for the year, do some decent stuff, but ultimately leave the city in the same messed up condition it was in the day we showed up.”

“In the end, we change nothing.”

It was a hard thing for us to come to terms with. We really didn’t want to. But that’s the way it seemed. We would leave and the city would continue to be what it was before we got there. And then that feeling of distance came back. The one between us and the city. The privileged and the poor. I considered how I came for a year, but would be leaving. I questioned if I would ever really be part of West Baltimore. I questioned whether I really could have been that man who got shot, like I first thought. Or whether my housemates could have been that man. Or whether, in reality, our privilege excused us from the violent oppression that stalks the streets.

These were my thoughts—the gratefulness for not having been there that night, and the hopelessness of not being able to stop a similar thing from happening again. They are vulnerable, and honest, which I think makes them worthy of my emotional energies. But they are also self-centered. They are all directed inward, ending in me and my community. It took me some time to parse out that detail.

Shannon, the director of our program, sent us an email later on in the night. The first line in the email was something like, “Prayers with the victim and his family.” This was a shocking thing to read. It was the first time since I heard about the murder that I was removed from myself, and my community, to realize a boy had died. It literally did not cross my mind to empathize with the family and their loss, and their grieving, until that moment in time, when I read Shannon’s email. I am glad she said what she said, because I may not have ever gotten there on my own. Odd for a Christian and someone who works hard to emulate Jesus Christ, but I had to read an email that told me to be compassionate before I thought to do it myself.

Disconnected from the news all weekend, I didn’t find out until the same Monday about the shooting at UC Santa Barbara. I guess it was another one of those shooting sprees. That I can use the phrasing, “another one of those shooting sprees” as a sufficient descriptor for the event is upsetting. Some troubled young lad took his cerebrally-constructed call for retribution out on six equally young classmates, and then took his own life. But I would bet his life had left him long before his heart stopped beating.

It was huge national news, as it should be. It once again ignited debates about gun control and mental illness, as it should have. It got people praying to God for the serenity to accept those things they cannot change, as it always does. Young adults took to social media. Parents everywhere took to their telephones. Obama took to the podium. It was a tragedy, and what has become the standard post-tragedy procedure ensued. All the sympathies I can muster go to those affected, and in this case, to those who do the effecting. There is nothing right about what happened in Santa Barbara.

What people fail to see, however, is that the murder of Oscar—the boy shot in killed in West Baltimore over Memorial Day Weekend—that too, was a tragedy. Every stabbing, shooting, every senseless death is a tragedy. Yet, unless killed by cops, I don’t see the president share any words of sorrow or impassioned calls to action about a single one of the 300 homicides that can occur in Baltimore throughout the course of a year. Or those of the other urban ghettos lost in our proud country. I don’t want to blame the president alone; I just don’t feel like blaming myself, and he so selflessly volunteered to be the recipient of the nation’s misplaced blame.

There seem to be a few correlations between the certain circumstances of murders and the publicity they engender. One such correlation exists with the number of deaths. A shooting with two victims will get a far dimmer spotlight than a shooting with six victims, and the latter is probably referred to as a “mass shooting” or a “rampage” or a “spree” or, God-forbid, a “massacre”. This kind of makes sense along the lines of relativity, but it also doesn’t at all, because death is death and suffering is suffering. I can’t imagine they follow mathematical principles. You can’t just multiply deaths by pain, and get a total count on the deserved national grief.

I think with every single death, our collective humanity grieves, whether we know it or not. This grieving manifests in all different ways, some subtle and others robust, but it’s always there. Because I think when one grieves, we all do. That claim is dripping with all sorts of hippy drivel, and I’m not even quite sure what it means, but a big part of me believes it. I believe it as the beautiful tragedy we unwittingly subscribe to by choosing to live. But this isn’t even close to how it works in the media. The media has conditioned us to think it’s not how it works for us.

Still, even if this phenomenon is real, it does nothing to explain why the 300 murders that occur in Baltimore get not as much as a shallow breath. Because 300 murders could probably be considered a war. There are war zones, today, in our very own cities, and no one seems to care. Sometimes they don’t even notice. How in the world can this be explained?

Everyone knows how, of course. It has never been complicated. It’s race. It’s poverty. It’s a failure to value life in the ghetto. Too many before me have made the same tirade, and many more will follow. Each one accomplishes little, so I’ll just lay mine to rest undeveloped. But no matter how many people say it, the truth remains outrageous. People forget that those are human lives. Just like mine and just like yours. They live and die, just like you and me.

I get so upset because I was guilty of forgetting all this, too. I think they refer to that as “projection” in the psychology world. I forgot Oscar did not deserve to die, and that those who loved him were now paralyzed by the sadness of the tragedy. I forgot until I saw Shannon’s email.

Our neighbor Willa knocked on our door later that evening while we were eating dinner. Willa came by and told us to come outside the house, because what she called the ‘Spanish Community’ was there. Oscar’s family, neighbors, friends, were gathered around an ad hoc memorial site in the alley next door.

Oscar’s mother and father were inconsolable, as parents tend to be when their child is ripped away from them in a definite way. The pain is spectacular. By this I just mean it is a spectacle. I have no idea what Oscar’s relationship was like with his parents. I know precisely nothing about him or his family. It doesn’t matter, though. None of that matters. If a child dies, the parent is disturbed. They could have been the tightest-knit family in the barrio, or they could have been separated by mundos of emotional distance, and I think the parents’ behavior in response to his death would have been the same. They would have been destroyed. The love is there, but people—even parents—just fail to act on it. It is very hard to get rid of the love. It can only be buried, but never destroyed, and the finality of death has a way of bringing it back to the surface. Death is like the lake turnover that comes each spring, bringing the deepest part of our soul up to a place where it can interact with the living that crave its warmth.

The little memorial ceremony was tough to handle. It really hurt. I was really hurting, and it was clear everyone else was, too. There was this one adorable little fella who was glued to his mother’s leg. He had black hair, dirty shoes, and he was wrapped around his mother. He was about 5 years old, and he was crying. Maybe he knew why he was crying, and maybe he didn’t.

He knew he was upset, so he was crying. He had never experienced something like this before in his flickering lifetime, I can only hope. So he was crying because he didn’t know what would become of him as a result—with Oscar gone—and the mystery of that is scary. He was just a little boy experiencing loss well before he should have to. Well before he had time to understand its counterpart. It was hard to look at, but much easier to look at than to feel.

A couple of Oscar’s friends were also present at the ceremony. The friends were only 16, because Oscar was only 16. They were young and sad and confused—not a whole lot different than me, I suppose. The only difference was the birthyear. I guess the affects of having to stand next to death does not discriminate based on age; you are going to be sad and confused.

It kind of seems like I had been living in a fantasy world in Baltimore up until those days after Oscar’s death. Fantasy might be too extreme, but I somehow felt detached. I saw this world day in and day out—fall and winter, summer and spring—and maybe understood it, but couldn’t really feel it. With this murder on our doorstep, it all became real, and I became attached to the reality. The grieving is real, the pain is real, the loss is real. We were exposed to it all in a pretty intimate way.

Up to this point, my housemates and I had been instructed about the realities of this neighborhood predominantly by fear. Fear was our teacher. Professor Fear—that same guy who kept me from first opening my eyes to the neighborhood had been trying to teach me everything about it once I did.

The shooting became a popular topic of conversation at the hospital: “the shooting at the volunteer house.” When coworkers ran into us in the halls, they would give us hugs and say how worried they were when they heard. In their eyes, we were the innocent college kids who didn’t deserve to be exposed to the horrific realities that our neighbors were raised by. It was comforting to know we were cared about, but we were never sure what to say when people hugged us in the halls of the hospital.

I remember my housemate Nicole mentioning something that must have been hard for her to mention. “It’s weird,” Nicole said, “but I’m almost proud of what happened. I hate that I am, but it’s like I have ‘street cred’ now.” It was funny because Nicole is the last person I would expect to hear using the term. “It’s like I can talk about the shooting to someone and know I am a little better than him or her because I was in some indirect way a part of this, and now have a story to tell in which I got close to death. How messed up is that?”

When Nicole finished, none of us responded, which I think indicated we had been feeling much of the same; we just hadn’t said it to ourselves yet. It was hard to talk about the shooting and not make it seem like we were, in some perverse way, trying to brag about what had happened. Like the chance proximity gave us something to take pride in. We felt weird bringing it up to those outside our community, and uneasy when they brought it up to us.

Together, as a community, we talked more and more about this incident in the following weeks. We did so warily, worried that our talking about it would always make the whole thing about the wrong people. We did not want the death of Oscar Torres to be ammunition to bolster our street cred—something we could tell our friends about and talk to our coworkers about and publish reflections about. Yet, at the same time, we had to talk about it, because it did affect us, and it taught us something important. Fear had been our teacher, but when Oscar died, fear was replaced.

The fear, the diffuse fear that had been transmitted by statistics online and reports in the weekend paper and sirens that put us to sleep at night, is not nearly as true as the immediate pain that is felt when a family loses a child—the pain when you witness that family grieve. That is something our community was experiencing. Some of us have even been caught saying that being part of the tragedy was a blessing. I don’t know how I feel about this. Oscar Torres is dead, and his family is not calling it a blessing. But there are a few compelling arguments: We were getting a chance to stand next to our neighbor. We were given an opportunity to share their suffering. We were coming to know the truth in love, not in the guise of fear.

I wish it wasn’t true, but it was true. The truth was kind of upsetting. I wondered why teenagers kept having to die before people could learn something. Why life has to be preceded by death. Why things need to break before they can rebuild.

#baltimore