ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 44
We are the people who have caused and allowed harm and demand an approach from a non
judgmental stance. No matter who you are, what you’ve done, these practices and principles will allow
us to be in a community of mutuality.
In 2014, within four months of each other, four unarmed Mexican and Salvadoran men were killed
by police in Salinas, California. Three of the four men were farmworkers. All were emotionally
distressed. One suffered from mental illness. His name was Carlos Mejia, and he was shot by police
in front of several teenagers, one of whom caught the shooting on her phone. His body was left in
the street on the eastside of Salinas, uncovered for four hours. Dozens of school children walking
home from school that afternoon saw his body lying lifeless on the concrete. He had been a familiar
face in the neighborhood. Everyone knew he suffered from mental illness. And now he was dead for
everyone to see, his body cordoned off by police tape.
The teenage girl who caught the killing on video evaded police and returned home to upload the
video to YouTube. It went viral. Especially because it was a controversial police shooting, but also
because we have lost our ways, there was no space for the children and their families to grieve this
unfortunate and very visible death.
The following day, east Salinas youth took to the streets with signs that read, “Fuck the Police.”
Rage stood in for grief. Those of us who worked in community-based organizations did our best to
organize impromptu healing circles for residents. Families showed up by the hundreds to the Alisal
Center for the Fine Arts where we give space for people to express themselves. Many, still wearing
their work clothes, muddied from fieldwork, shed tears and expressed anger. The questions in our
collective hearts were, “How could they do this? Do they think we are savages? How could they just
shoot down an innocent man in plain daylight in front of our kids?”
The pain was palpable. People needed a space to grieve, but we also needed to see that pain
transformed into change. Unfortunately change is slow to come. Not only have we become alienated
from our collective grieving processes, we have become alienated from our local democracies. And
for undocumented workers, democracy feels like an unattaible luxury.
For Salinas, and many cities like it, the question remains, “What collective healing is needed to stop
throwing away people, places, and pain?”
Vulnerable feels like we need to defend
and be defended
Guard and be guarded inside our safe,
hard shells that have become resilient,
impermeable, unaffected
because of fear
because soft things do need defending.
We’re creatures with long childhoods.
Willing at times, to be vulnerable.
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Healing Love: Into Balance | A Brown Paper