The Mission

I don’t think I even saw the gun. 

The memory of that afternoon has long since blurred and blended with several others. I distinctly recall curiosity at their awkwardly coordinated movements as we walked down the empty train platform toward the stairs. It was late afternoon on a weekday and, as their adjusted pace met mine, one of them reached for his waistband. I vaguely remember the glimmer of something metal arcing toward my face and alarm bells going off in my head. I stepped back, forcing him to reorient around his companion, and ran for the exit. The train station happened to be next to a school where I’d tutored; I made some excuse to get past security and hid in the bathroom. After what felt like an hour, I walked out of the school and saw them headed in another direction. I’d had minor run ins on the train before, particularly with people from that area, and wondered if this was related. I wasn’t even sure what had just happened but the clearest memory of that day was the feeling, expressed out loud as I turned to talk home.

“Not me. Not today.”

Though that day’s experience cemented, in my teenage mind, my orientation toward victimhood, it was just one piece in a tapestry of influences. I’d grown up weird: living in a neighborhood where my parents did gang intervention and going to school with kids who lived so far from the tracks that they didn’t know there was an “other” side. My parents’ combination of ivory tower backgrounds and community outreach programs meant that my mentors were a mix of ex-cons and valedictorians. I spent my formative years on both sides of a fence, trying to reconcile what I saw in the neighborhood with what I learned in the outside world. I began to code switch; my school persona was night and day different from the neighborhood version. Navigating both gave me invaluable perspective but I spent most of my time as a man without a country. Eventually, I concluded that my neighborhood friends mattered much more than my classmates and began to focus on understanding the politics of that environment.

Most of the kids in my age group, civilians or combatants, didn’t consciously understand what we were seeing or experiencing, conceptually. I thought that being scared all the time in a neighborhood where friends and acquaintances were killing and dying meant that I was a coward. I learned to approach small conflicts with irrational apprehension, assigning the weight of "hood politics" to dissimilar contexts. The street guys I grew up with were learning by trial and error, only to realize the foolishness of their youth well past the point when it could have helped. We were all flying blind; led by rumor, conjecture, and others’ brutal examples. I managed to make it through, more or less unscathed, through a combination of divine providence, protective allies, occasional bouts of strategic efficacy, and dumb luck. My father’s pull in the neighborhood played the biggest role in keeping me safe but even he couldn’t fully protect me from an environment where young men proved themselves through violent acts and other forms of creative dysfunction.

As I transitioned into young adulthood, I began working in urban education and saw, routinely, that many young people were learning hard lessons in similar ways to those of my contemporaries. I realized that, even in contexts rife with violence, many children were also flying blind and gained new perspective on how much this reality contributed to unnecessary suffering throughout their communities. A large part of my personal mission crystalized. 

My goal in this field is to do what was done for me. I want to put conflict and violence into perspective, primarily to help others avoid learning the hard way as so many in my orbit did, but also to use the material to build better lives. SD/MA (self defense and martial arts) showed me how much power I could wield in my own life, coming from circumstances where I felt powerless and afraid. I want to help other people find, claim, and use that power and create a better world.

-M