Rise and shine

When did you know? 

You might have had an inkling ... but when did you know that things weren't as they seemed?

Some describe it as a feeling of being jarred from a comfortable sleep by something you had just accepted without examination.

Context is the alarm clock.

Maybe you were a child, riding in the backseat of the family sedan listening to the car's radio as your parents drove through a rainstorm.

Maybe it was something that went a little beyond your ability to fathom.

The announcer may have been describing the details of a crime. Maybe it was a father killing their family, or a student opening fire in a school. 

Maybe you didn't say anything. Just sat on the leatherette seat in stunned silence, wondering if you could ever find yourself in a similar situation.

You were, after all, a child. How many times had you already been told that your imagination was getting the best of you?

I remember the first time ... and the second time ... I was nudged from the safety of my cocoon and arrived into a world as others might have experienced it. Some of these awakenings were amazing, while others seemed rude and unjust.

Eventually, I lost track, as if nothing could surprise me.

Of course, the lessons don't just stop in childhood. They follow you throughout life.

Maybe you were an adult and you'd somehow gotten through all of your formal education without unearthing buried histories that would have tarnished the general understanding you'd adopted. 

Maybe you experienced something traumatic and it shaped you.

Maybe it was a more glacial awakening. The slow melt of time against the pressure of change. 

For me, it was witnessing the arrest of a coworker who had committed no crime, but "fit a description." How many men like him get taken away from their lives on a whim? Perhaps taken away forever? Written off to mistaken identity, or the high cost of being cautious. 

Why did we just accept this as the norm?

It changed me. 

Something probably changed you, too. 

Whatever it was once you see it, you can't unsee it, no matter how you try. We tend to divide much of our time between pleasure and pain. We mark the hours, days, weeks, months, and years in a kind of blinkered forbearance, biding time until we reach some ultimate destination. It's never quite clear. but you don't need clarity if you have some kind of faith, be it agnostic hope or religious belief.

This happenstance of life might make us feel lucky or it might make us feel unlucky. And the genesis story comes to life. It seems there are so many of us who think innocence is only for those who have no prior knowledge. And that in times of upheaval, we try to expel understanding whether it's thoughts, books, or beings. 

 As I watch people rail against context and understanding, I feel sorry for them, and angry for the rest of us, who wonder what life might have been like if we actually had the justice we believed in so fervently.

Of course, it's not over. There is still time to rise and shine and be the people we thought we were.