United States of Terror — Soton A Rosanwo

“Emergency! Emergency! All guests must evacuate the building immediately.” Shrill alarms rip me from slumber. My eyes strain to make sense of inky darkness. What time is it? About 2 AM. Where am I? Oh yeah, I just arrived in San Francisco less than 12 hours ago. Part of me wants to ignore the warning. Hope that it’s just a mistake, and will soon shut itself off. That nanosecond of wishful thinking evaporates. On and on, the alarm warns that I can’t stay here. The hotel’s no longer safe. Now the most important question of all: what should I do?

Sliding from bed, I ram my legs into a pair of pants. They say you shouldn’t bring anything with you. Yeah right. There are three things in this room I won’t leave without. I shove them into my bag, take one last deep breath, and crack open the door. Across the hall, other guests peak out too. We all look to each other. “Should we flee? Should we retreat?” No one says a word, yet somehow, we collectively agree. Flee.

All together, we break for the stairwell. All the while, the alarm persists. “Emergency! Emergency! All guests must evacuate the building immediately!” As we steal down the back stairs, I hear two men ahead saying to their wives and children something to the tune of “Don’t worry! If someone starts shooting, I will protect you.”

At the moment the question tore through my consciousness before I could hope to dam it, “Is this how I die?”

We congregate on the sidewalk. Nervous. Anxious. An alarm goes off at the dead of night, and none of us are thinking that maybe there’s a fire or an earthquake or tornado or even just a mistake. No, we’re all thinking someone’s come to gun us down.

Suddenly, they’re telling us that we can return to our rooms. There’s no clear explanation of what the emergency ever was, but a rumor picks up that someone must have been smoking and triggered the alarm or something. Still, the shock clings in the air. The line to take the elevators back to our rooms extends out of the building, so I opt for the stairs. Ahead of me, I hear a guy comforting his wife or girlfriend. She’s crying. He’s saying “It’s ok. I told you. Even if It had been that. Even if there’d been a guy with a gun, I’d protect. Even if it meant I got killed, I’d protect you.” She only cries all the harder. Where’s the comfort in that? One life for another, death is still death. We are living in United States of Terror.

“We are living in United States of Terror.”

Back in my room, I disrobe, climb back into bed, but know it’s going to be a while before the adrenaline truly dissipates, till I can fall back asleep. I can’t stop thinking about how just a few days ago someone gunned down more than 40 people in a Wal-Mart only to have someone else states away shoot even more people that very weekend simply because—like me—they weren’t white. I think about how when Trump started running for president, I actually celebrated it. He dragged into the light the festering underbelly of this country. Finally, I didn’t have to hear one newstainment pundit or the other go on about “race cards”, “political correctness” and “hyper-sensitivity”—all attempts to discredit the pain people of color in America must endure. In the Age of Trump, everything’s in the open. Emboldened, people no longer feel the need to hide their racism. Now I can more easily spot those who hate me simply for being me. What more, I no longer have to explain to people that I’m not just making this stuff up.

None of this is new. It’s always been. Like entropy, we’re spiraling to the collapse. All of the next day, thoughts like these consumed my conscious. I found myself fixating on the negative no matter how hard I tried to see the positive. I guess that’s one of terror’s side effects.

Is this living? No, it’s subsisting.

Once ignited, can terror be stopped? Or does its momentum drag civilization back into chaos? Is there any hope for us? Then it hit me.

Hope extinguishes terror.

For various reasons, I’ve long had a tumultuous relationship with Hope. From childhood, I’d been told that Hope is the confident expectation of good. This led me to believe that Hope is little more than a two-faced siren—daring you to wish, but more often leaving you sorely disappointed. With time, I’ve come to learn that we must fan Hope into being. Without our active participation, Hope cannot exist. Why? Because we are the ember that drives changes. As I walked the streets of San Francisco, fuming at the pervasive state of inequity, I thought of what they tell you to do if you just so happen to catch fire. To prevent yourself from burning to a crisp, you must (say it with me) stop, drop and roll. Interestingly enough, to fan Hope into reality we can follow the same steps. We dispel terror when we…

Stop

I first wrote this back in August 2019, and then sat on it—more so too weary than wary to speak. Eventually, time elapsed. Collectively as a nation we “moved on” from that spat of hate killings. Yet, even then I knew that in short and due course, the thoughts and sentiments articulated here would find cause to rise again. Though we’d grown silent as a country, nothing had changed. Worse still, the hate that fuels the wanton taking of black lives only continued to fester—seldom even concealed below the surface. After all, why bother to feign “polite” sensibilities when the leadership of this country ever fans the flames of discord? In the wake of the most recent in an ever-long string of wrongful black deaths and abuses—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Christian Cooper—Hope couldn’t seem any more inert. To animate Hope, we must Stop pretending like the oppression of black people is a matter of outliers, of rogue agents acting of their own accord. Racism is binary. We are either part of the problem or part of the solution; there is no in between. To say nothing is to be complicit. It’s time we all sang a new song.

Drop

When you’ve got a new tune but no official channel of distribution, sometimes you just have to drop a mixtape: “The act of dropping one's own music on some form of media usually on a CD or cassette in plain sight where some stranger is destined to pick it up and share with friends.” It’s time to Drop a new tune, one that acknowledges the systemic and systematic racism woven throughout every sector of this society—from education and healthcare to the judiciary and corporate world. We have to take this message to the streets with a raucous so loud the very ears that don’t wish to hear it cannot escape it. The protests that currently rock state after state, day after day, are the life blood that will catalyze Hope into delivering effectual change.

Roll

Conjuring Hope requires continuous practice. Indeed, the protest is at once both the sigil and medium of Hope. Together we must shake the fetid foundation, and Roll forward to lay a more level and equal one. The time for ever-patient incremental change has passed. We must press for radical transformation—the only kind that saves lives.