What Blackrock can’t buy, a testimony of my experience in jail
Up against the wall in between Green Faith’s founder and a Universalist Pastor, outside the headquarters of Blackrock - masks up, guards down, hearts open, hands cuffed behind back - we laugh at the absurdity of the energy used to power the cameras on the NYPD vests flashing red; so now there’s “proof” of a murder. I ask founder Fletcher, when did Green Faith begin? It always starts with a group of dedicated volunteers. Its great 8 clergy are here risking arrest, but we need 80. I couldn’t agree more. Imagine it. Stoles, Shaws, Kippahs, Collars, Medicine Bags, Mala beads rubbed by his hand, Rosary draped from her fingers. Talisman carried by the committed. A visceral contrast to the metal and plastic guns on their belt made from a company Blackrock finances. Ironic doesn’t begin to explain.
More fossil fuels please, more weaponizing warfare, more AI technology that affords you too distant from I; we don’t have enough. I want drones buzzing instead of birds. And shales of gas abandoned with no life left. Here Blackrock take my non existent pension and pay ExxonMobil for greasing our coral reefs. I beg you to keep investing in the AK-47s sold from American Outdoor Brand to disillusioned teenagers that murder children sitting at school desks. Sarcasm doesn’t begin to capture the sickness. Sometimes I think saying it explicitly instead of a don’t-do chants reminds them of the web of consequence.
Take a second to pause here and admire that name - American Outdoor Brand - sounds like we could shoot hoops together, sip coffee out of our camping mug on the Adirondacks, climb mountains and at the top say we did this all thanks to the American Outdoor Brand and high five in our cameo - like the good guys. Their website is top of the line, they don’t even look like guns, they’re selling adventure and protection. And who doesn’t want that. Some may even mistake it for god.
One cop held an iPhone to take a selfie between the new officer and I before entering the no window paddy wagon. Note reads: Young Officer Pace assigned to 4/13/88, white woman who appears to be some kind of new age hippy, protesting again.
Behind the bars, sitting with legs stretched out on the bench over carved names and doodles recently painted as an attempt to cover up what is humans desire in marking territory, leaving legacy, being remembered. Though we are in a climate change era, some things haven’t changed since caveman. Don’t write on anything, the guard proclaims as if he read my minds fascination with the notes left behind. I’d have to get pretty creative to mark without any tool. He doesn’t laugh. But haven’t we always found a way, as if message was more important than the impending threat.
Among the hidden stories buried in the brick of the cell, I listen to myself in someone else’s present day story. We are two women, both 34 side by side, alumni from the same interfaith seminary two years apart. Crossing paths in the street only ever during protest but never have we actually hung out. No Impact Man, Healing Circles, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, even the 99%, our lives are committed to a different kind of ministry. She calls it Sacred Activism. We make the most of our time; we connect. Next to the metal toilet bowl shared with water fountain, we share experience of underemployment, the splintering that occurs over time when volunteers organizing burn out, and the falling for pseudo spiritual men; I realize this is something I want to do again. We took turns squatting, peeing, while the other stood facing the camera. Do you think they’re watching us? Only one roll of single ply toilet paper that was given upon repeated request by another cellmate; a hand appears with just enough stretch for me to grab it through our metal bars from her metal bars. No face. Just a hand glorified as if it had its own spotlight. Eve and God. Amazing isn’t it, how we collaborate. The light it brings to all of us. When another cells toilet overflowed, we sung, walls between every other one. I found a spiritual community in jail not realizing I was without one.
In the LES police precinct outdated and piss smelled, every detail was mine. Noted. Charted. When everyone was released before me and no officer responded when I called, I hummed an abstracted version of Summertime. Vibrations became an ancient friend stretching vocal cords, pulling lung’s strings, passed down through centuries. I stretched my arms out. Exactly arms width distance from wall to wall. Studied the textures, colors, faded posters on the wall to the right I could barely make out if I squished the left side of my face along the bar. When I took off my shoelaces before entering the cell, there was a faded Smurfs image on the wall. Which I thought was hilarious, considering the 90s are back. Multiple decades this magazine clipping never came down and already we’ve returned nostalgically to what was.
Paint smudged at the intersection of metal bar to metal flat resembling the underbelly of a mushroom cap. Fungi sporulating, imagine that; they wouldn’t even know it. Secrets ours. They can never cage a mind. An imagination that sporulates. A whole world existed in a few centimeters of composition. Rusted paint became streams, waterways carrying nutrients. I was as small as the red flick of rust colors in between two curves. Sound matched shadows on the wall. I knew when my assigned officer came for me. You ready to get out of here. I looked beside me for something that wasn’t there and almost hesitated to respond.
Earlier Officer Pace took me out of the cell to get fingerprinted. He was loose with the cuffs. His hand in the crux of my elbow guiding me in the hall to another piss stained smelling room this bearing the least outdated equipment. I didn’t need the assistance but I appreciated his touch. His hot hand on my hand as I pressed my palm on the glass over the upside down fluorescent light. A little lower, like this. A little to the left. Hand to hand. It’s the little things, I thought. Not institutionalized NYPD trained to hate me, not rebel trained to hate him. Not roles we perform. We made eye contact, his bright blue with circular edge of lens cap, his nose sunburn. I almost suggested 45 SPF.
Do you like being a cop? My curiosity begot any assumption. Believe it or not, we do get to help people. Curiosity wanted more. Tell me of a time. We drive elderly to the hospital for needed appointments and intervene domestic violence. I can’t tell you the details of that though. I can imagine. Curiosity wanted to know when it’s right to call. We usually know before entering. Listen. Knock. Do a wellness check first. Ahh, a wellness check. I never heard of that so innocently shared from a man with a badge. Imagine it. A wellness check.
Are you okay Mother Earth? Are you okay tall trees that catch the smogs wind, air trying to sift through carbon to oxygen, soil searching for mycelium across our manmade Blackrock financed pipeline? Like her hand with the toilet paper stretching for mine. Like the officers palm pressing on my palm to imprint its unique identification some system will hold but no system except nature’s DNA could ever truly know.
Every inch of that police precinct was denatured. It’s as Richard Louv so poignantly claims, a denatured place is a dehumanized place. Inherent in the design. It’s what Blackrock wants, not that they’d ever go there. No one arrests people within corporations for thousands of acres in the Amazon forest replaced with livestock feed or the murdering of innocent lives with sponsored guns. I’m sure their corporate office has free endless supply of Starbucks, massage chairs and back accounts filled with cocaine addictions. Yes, these are assumptions. But the known reality is they are no doubt disconnected from the consequence of their decisions. Some may say they’re just doing their job as asset managers. Invest money to make more money. Interesting isn’t it, to think what we call an asset.
Fresh off the 5 hours of jail time, someone leaned in as if sharing a secret, “Your greatest asset is vulnerability”. A different kind of asset. Can’t buy that next to the Colgate in aisle 9 or intimacy next to CocaCola in aisle 12. Brands backed by ambiguous corporations backed by even more ambiguous investors. Not even Blackrock can capitalize off a ministry with an open heart and fierce wings.
A ministry that sees through the walls, uniforms, even the suits behind the glass of Blackrock’s corporate office where I sprayed washable black dye to symbolize oil. A ministry that resists the dehumanizing trap. Ministry that makes eye contact. No desire for a middle finger. A desire for ritual. New York Communities for Change organizer Alicé Nascimento articulately expressed in the rally that Blackrock’s decision to choose unethical investments has planetary consequence. A handful of mens decision at the top trickles down into a cosmic avalanche. I can hear them now, but we must make money, solar just isn’t there yet, it’s not just up to us, these are economies on the line. As the largest asset manager in the world, investing $10 trillion of shareholders dollars in large part to fossil fuel expansion violates the scientifically agreed upon limit of staying under 1.5 C. Maybe they forgot who’s really on the line. Anything not living, we made up. Maybe they could spend 5 hrs or 50 or 500 in a denatured cell. And fight for sanity to crawl back like a cockroach no one even attempts to kill just so there’s a moving friend.
There was a moment alone locked far away from any kind of window, when the quickest of movement occured, a miniature play between light and shadow, a flickering I almost second guessed and then I knew it had to be, a fly. Somehow made its way down the halls with multiple left turns, to give me a show. I smiled with wet eyes, spores opening. How nature shows up anyways almost as if in protest.
Photo: By Eric McGregor, @ministererik