NO SHELTER
NO SHELTER
after Emilie Townes
When you find yourself tucked away in the corner nook of a garage
waiting on a tornado
along with two of your distinguished professors
and their eighty-three year-old aunt
and their little dog, too
certain theo-ethical quandaries are bound to emerge
and start to spin with the deadly force of nature
particularly when one of the professors in question is,
in Brother Cornel West’s words,
THE TOWERING WOMANIST ETHICIST OF OUR TIME
and, in this case, the dilemma at hand was
bike helmets.
the bike helmets were for protection
from projectiles, debris, what have you
and there were four of us human folk, but only three
helmets.
therefore, in the interests of fairness, that is, of justice
nobody got a helmet.
And so we sat together, helplessly wondering what manner of natural nonmoral evil
might be fixin’ to spring upon us
blow the door off that garage
descend on our heads
and fling us ruthlessly out of Kansas
(well, Tennessee)
into outer darkness
into wailing
into gnashing of teeth
…but let’s be honest:
in America, in twenty seventeen
we are halfway there already.
So, huddled together, waiting on a tornado,
we talked about the darkness
–or, rather, the fear of darkness
that has seized whiteness for centuries
and which has reared its ugly head again
and birthed on us a monstrous presidency.
Scanning her phone,
THE TOWERING WOMANIST ETHICIST OF OUR TIME
notices a news headline:
“Betsy DeVos claims HBCUs ‘Pioneers of School Choice’”
my teacher frowns
and wrinkles her face up
“…hmmm,” she wryly reflects.
“That’s not the way I remember it.
I’m not sure much choice was involved there.”
...the forty-fifth president had gathered a bunch of HBCU presidents together because, who knows, he wanted a photo-op with his “black friends”
and he had the nerve to ask them, what the “Harvard of HBCUs” was
Howard, they said.
Howard University
“the Mecca,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it
founded in 1867
in 1867
1867
in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and sixty seven
when countless black wrists were surely still sore
from the grip and grate of rusted iron
when scar tissue on countless black backs had only just begun
to settle
to fold gently over open wounds
to recede, to fade into the darkness
but to remain
a trace
always there,
still, silent
refusing to concede the lie of total erasure
and Betsy DeVos is talking about CHOICE.
well, I never.
hearing the headline, the eighty-three year old aunt
who taught French and Spanish at an HBCU
before integration
sat there, still, silent
and the dog just stayed resting on her lap.
but like I was saying about those bike helmets.
you see, we ethicists love to invent scenarios just like this.
10 passengers stranded in a rowboat
in the middle of the ocean…
…only enough food and water for five days
what do you do?
…whom do you save?
And, it’s a funny thing,
I had always dismissed those made-up mind games
as ridiculous.
There are enough real problems, real death, real destruction and danger out there
there is no need to make a bunch of other stuff up.
And yet, here I am, trapped in this garage, waiting on this tornado, with
THE TOWERING WOMANIST ETHICIST OF OUR TIME
another professor
their eighty-three year-old aunt
and their little dog, too
and we are staring down one of these impossible ethical puzzles
and our solution is,
nobody gets a bike helmet.
and I must say, I very much like this solution
although I am quite sure many ethicists and moral theologians and philosophers
would find it problematic indeed
but look, as my friends in #blacklivesmatter say:
ALL OF US or NONE OF US
and that means
if there ain’t enough bike helmets for everybody
then FUCK bike helmets
nobody gets one
we are in this boat together
and nobody is free until every last one of us is
and, anyway
if God or the devil or some wretched and heartless mindless force of nature elects to send a tornado down on our heads
a bike helmet sure as hell ain’t gonna save us.
there’s
no shelter from this storm
no shelter from this president
no shelter from this dread
no shelter from these gathering mindless furies, there simply is no one here
and never has been
with the power to tell the future,
to gift us a sense of security,
or to assure us that it will all be ok.
right now, there’s just the four of us and this dog
and as my friends in #blacklivesmatter also say
in a lovely black colloquialism that
as a white guy
I can only poorly imitate:
we all we got.