They All Ignorant

"Welcome to Milwaukee."  No one said this to me.  Not a person, not a sign, I didn't even welcome myself.  Sad.  Then I didn't even say "Goodbye."

This is what I know:

Met a woman named Captain Howard.  She is a fiery, petite black woman with a beautiful face and a spunky tough-chick attitude.  She has no tolerance for stupidity and she thinks snow anytime after December 25th is "stupid."  She is the one who blessed the world with the quotation, "He ignorant.  She ignorant.  They all ignorant."

I saw women love their abusers and abusers fail to understand what it means to "change."  I toured a safe house for abused women and their children.  I listened to why women wanted restriction orders.  I saw photos of horribly abused children and the "stories" behind their injuries.

I watched the faces of two boys when they were sentenced to 25 years prison without the possibility of parole.  They had killed a man.  He the partner of one of the boy's mothers.  He was abusing the young sister.  They stabbed him and the mother repeatedly.  The man died.  The mother did not.  She was at the sentencing hearing.  I don't think she cried.

I was struck dumb by a man named Randolph at a support group for batterers.  He had been in prison for eleven years.  Randolph was a man who was not a man.  Something about him was so disconnected from the world that he was... foreign.  His disconnect - his trauma - put up a wall around him.  Palpable.  Tragedy hung on him.  He was orphaned and in a foster home as a child.  He grew up in violence.  His brother was shot and killed  by his side.  He himself was shot in the stomach and in the eye.  Half blind yet he makes his living as a tattoo artist.  He said that every meaningful relationship he's had with people, family, lovers, even friends - have turned to violence.  He was hard.  Someone else might have said he was the mysterious man in the corner - big, physically intimidating, wearing shaded glasses, soft spoken.  But to me he didn't feel alive.  Not dead - just something else.  Not a boy.  Not even human.  Just - something.

Warning:  Public Service Announcement

There is life still.  For abusers.  For victims.  For families.  Everyone deserves peace.