Decades alone slipping through
crowded rooms, filled with
low pockets of air,
spaces between bodies where
in the timestamp of a laugh
the rules of nature’s law
bent at crude angles on his behalf,
exchanges above
predicting outcomes merely a few
feet below; They knew,
they saw, and always, they knew.
What does community mean to you?
How have communities caused you harm?
Which communities make you feel safe?
This week, we’ve seen the powerful result of an extended community joining forces, raising voices, demanding justice. #CyntoiaBrown has been released.
But. Skyrocketing horrors, on repeat, at physical borders, at the borders that separate good and evil in every human, stoked to preserve falsehoods around what community means.
And of course, the darkest revelations, the repulsive collective of corruption that enabled – that created a global machine around enabling – the perverse demands of a monster. That systematically ensured no interruption in his ability to rape on demand.
(The same community many suspect – that would benefit, that might remain safer – in his ultimate silencing.)
I was not trafficked; the abuses were different. But the echoed dynamics of power and privilege among wealthy NY Jewish men (scaled to middle class suburbia, but the attitudes are the same)? The open permission granted an abuser, by men who found their own reassurances in goading him, by women more invested in protecting his ego than the child in the room?
Communities were never safe for me – not emotionally, not physically. Not adults, not my peers. They taught me what to expect from those who operated in the cohesion of others’ encouragement. At best, I’ve stayed at the edges. There’s never been safety in numbers.
And yet. This community. This is (you are, WE ARE) the community that will demand justice – not only in punishments of perpetrators and enablers, but in amplifying and uplifting survivor voices. We will not let their stories go untold.
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