Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I grew up in a section of North Philadelphia that was predominantly Black and Latino. It bordered Brewerytown, which was predominantly white, particularly German, Polish, and Irish. As a kid, my friends and I had to walk through Brewerytown in order to get to Fairmount Park. But often we ran; white kids yelled names, threatened harm, threw bottles at us. Our older brothers crossed Girard Avenue to steal bikes from unsuspecting kids, which fueled even more animosity. The racial tension ran high back then; incidents of mass fights broke out. Philadelphia, like the world, was a city of ethnic enclaves where each group suffered its fair share of extreme hate and abuse.

At a conference recently, I listened to an Ethiopian Jewish activist, a Palestinian activist and an Israeli lawyer speak about their attempts to broker peace, to help eradicate hate. I found their passion moving. They spoke of inherited stories and beliefs that seed fear and prevent us from seeing others as humans; they spoke to the complicated idea of victimhood as a virtue rather than a condition; they spoke of the necessity of listening, of hearing each other’s stories. What spoke loudest was that we cannot overcome hatred with hatred.

Today’s poem begins from the idea that we yearn for connection and healing, but that our conflicts feel irreconcilable — to the point that we do not trust a future free of our trauma, grief, and suffering.

Here We Are
by Lauren K. Watel

Here we are at last, meeting face-to-face like two heroes of opposing armies, looking
each other in the eye, poised to shake hands. Do you trust me? Do I trust you? No, trust
died last century, along with truth, so we’ll have to think of something else to shake on.
Not to our health. Our health is bad and only getting worse. Not to our wealth, because 
no amount of riches could heal our poverty. Not to you and yours. Not to me and mine, 
because yours and mine, every last one, perished in the wars, and without yours there is 
no you, and without mine there is no me. Just two bodies standing face-to-face, two 
envelopes of flesh with nothing folded inside. How did we survive? And better yet, how
did we emerge heroic after all that carnage, all that betrayal and heartbreak? Loss for 
every meal, loss before bedtime and on rising. That’s why we’re empty, because 
emptiness made us, made these bodies in which we stand, high on the hilltop, under a 
pallid moon, with the fields of bones surrounding us like a fresh snowfall, except that
the heat here is insufferable. Last winter was years ago, before the battles broke out,
remember? Here, let’s shake on that. To winter. To cold. To snow, real snow.

"Here We Are" by Lauren K. Watel. Used by permission of the poet.