My Government Means to Kill Me

by Rasheed Newson

Affection never outlasted need. This was the first lesson the city taught me the hard way. The vast majority of us are merely pawns in someone else’s game. Don’t get defensive over this point. Embrace it. Once you do, you can begin to manipulate the board. Positioned correctly, pawns can checkmate kings.

Don’t reject the space you gravitate toward just because the windows aren’t stained glass and the congregation isn’t saved.

We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe. Yet the limits placed on our appetites, talents, and potential are implanted in us when we are children—too young to recognize the prisons built with words. We could blame it all on our families, but then we’d never find the keys to unlock our cells. The awful genius of our confinement is that we are both the prisoner and the warden. We tell ourselves daily that we aren’t free to do this or that because we are that or this. To escape such limited thinking, we don’t have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.

Why didn’t I trust cops? Why did I have no faith in the justice system? It was obvious now. Until Dorothy removed the scales from my eyes, I’d had one hundred ways of asking one thing: Why did I feel hunted in my homeland? Because my government means to kill me. Amen! Amen and glory hallelujah! At last, I could explain the force shaping my existence.

Yet here I was, and in the morning, I would open my eyes and go on with my life.