In the British musical Matilda, a six year-old prophet sings the opening lyrics to “Quiet.”
It is a moment of epiphany that wonder is perhaps our most reliable rubric.

“Have you ever wondered
Well I have
About how when I say, say red!
For example there's no way of knowing if red
Means the same thing in your head
As red means in my head when someone says red”

I wonder, too, about the word riot.
Perhaps it feels slightly different in every single body. 
I ask which is scarier, broken glass or broken bones? 

I had gone to march with a friend. As I was getting in my car to head home, a cloud of billowy black smoke filled the sky. Kids started to yell, “Fire!” and a sweaty, handsome protestor with a megaphone ran up to me. “You’re going to want to move,” he whispered breathlessly, “We’re about to start a fight.” I was suddenly surrounded by throngs of fellow human beings. For a moment, I thought I was going to have to just leave my car there and get out, to join the action or to avoid the fire, or both. A line of protesters began walking with their fists up, and a line of police approached. Someone had just thrown a molotov cocktail into a police car, after the police had crashed the protest. It had all been been calm for three hours. Then, the mood shifted.

As far as movements go, this is not my first rodeo. I have walked, written, and organized for equality my entire adult life. In 2017, I was a small part of an installation in a Chinatown warehouse, a celebration of the resistance against President Trump’s inauguration. Created by my friend Yosi, the art director of Obama’s HOPE campaign, it was a breaking of habitus, a gathering of spirit. We used our bodies, minds, and souls to build the space. We parked our cars in the middle of Spring Street to block police from getting too close. We played jacks with danger and joy. We made something beautiful. 

The brilliant Leda Maliga re-imagined that message for a Women’s March protest sign (that later became a campaign), “None of us are well until all of us are well,” perhaps more relevant now, in the time of Corona, than ever before. What good is staying home if so many of our global siblings are unsafe, even on the safest, sunniest day? Protests are the dripping wax of public will, the “Please, sir, I want some more.” On Saturday, one person held a sign that read, “Riot is the language of the unheard.” Many are shaken and stirred that the protests turned violent. I can understand the surprise, and I can understand the fear. I myself am easy to frighten. And yet…

Our country, we know, was founded on wreckage.
Stepping over broken bones, mostly brown and black ones, to get land.
To get some very ephemeral notion of nationhood, which we can all acknowledge is imagined.
In this case, if we look at the inception of America, it is not a chicken & egg scenario.
We know what came first. 
Our freedom is born of slavery.
Our elegance is born of savagery.
Take what you desire. Fill your life with stolen goods.
We are pirates at best.

I started to unpack and unthread the assumptions that neoclassical economics was founded upon, and I realized that I found 99% of the assumptions to be false. It was a structure built on faulty foundation. A beach house corroding from rust. One of these pillars, for instance, was that “more is always better.” Another a tool to help us learn, in which happiness was re-named “utility” and could be measured in a made-up unit, “a util.” The more I learned, the more ridiculous it all sounded, like three whiskey-drunk men had created this school of thought on a weekend trip to Sarasota. I wanted to go learn from ancient texts by shamanistic leaders of foreign lands. I changed my major to art history.

My professor of Latinx art was a chic man named James Oles who wore cashmere, even in the heat. He was an expert in Frida Kahlo forgeries. He was passionate about provenance. He taught us that we might not always know the answers, but sometimes it is scholarship, transcendence even, simply to ask the question. Sometimes, the question is the moment. We studied Brazilian artists in the sixties who played with our ideas of sensory process. Helio Oiticica. Lygia Pape. Lygia Clark. They called themselves the Grupo Frente. They believed in surreality over the sensical, feeling over knowledge.

When quarantine began, friends and family checked in. I was heartbroken for those who were suffering from the virus.

When loved ones asked how I was doing, the answer I heard myself repeating was, “Something about this is what the revolution feels like.” 
On April 25, I declared, “I am going to be sober for one month. I am doing a detox.” 

“Why?” friends and glamorous French-Canadian neighbors asked. It seemed odd to them, a harder time than ever to live without any lubrication at all. The answer, again, that I heard myself say and say, was, “When the revolution comes, I want to be on the first bus.” I didn’t want to be tired. I didn’t want to be hungover. I wanted to be light and awake when it came time to fight. One afternoon the year after I graduated college, I volunteered at a teen girls’ prison camp in Santa Clarita. The girls were gorgeous with butterfly tattoos on their necks and golden teeth. Freckly, shipwrecked nymphs. On the way back, I stopped at a Corner Bakery. I was all alone. I missed them. And aren’t we all quarantined, in so many ways?  

Animal. 
Mineral. 
Vegetable.

Stores were broken into this weekend. The circulation of value recalibrated. Minerals destroyed into their most minuscule form. For the sake of humans to be seen, to live. For the sake of blood and bones and hearts to grow to fruition. How much longer can we turn our backs to the abject poverty on the streets we love? How much longer can we let our little brothers suffer?
The time has come to move and breathe as one animal.
To give the land back.
To take care of our planet. 
To celebrate her vegetables and to seed her with spirit.

In the words of “La Vie Boheme,” the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.

Riot & revolution.
Buildings burn & re-birth. 
But to really alter (altar), we go back to before America.
We cannot blame the riots.
Riot is the subtext of our Constitution. 
Riot is the room in which she was born.
Violence is our breast milk.

To imagine a new world, we have to start from scratch. 
A model built on wonder.
What if we look to fairytales, to indigenous cultures, to witch doctors, to hippie communes, to the dark and mysterious woods?
What if we exchange stores for stories?

Stories are my spirit guides.
Mythological heroines guide me.
We cannot look to the past for direction. 
We have to look to art and dreams. 

In plays and books and songs, I see people waving flags that I want to wave, dancing how I want to dance. I model myself after these people. I walk in their footsteps. Those of you who know me well know my fondness for the musical Spring Awakening. In the song “Whispering,” the heroine Wendla sings, “And he touched me, and I let him love me, so let that be my story.”

This broken glass, like at a Jewish wedding, is part of our story.
Ultimately, it is part of our liberation.
Let it touch your skin.
”The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

The song in Matilda goes on.

“I wonder if inside my head
I'm not just a bit different from some of my friends
These answers that come into my mind unbidden
These stories delivered to me fully written
And I'm sorry
I'm not quite explaining it right
But this noise becomes anger and the anger is light…
And suddenly everything, everything is...
Quiet
Like silence, but not really silent
Just that still sort of quiet
Like the sound of a page being turned in a book
Or a pause in a walk in the woods.”

To get to a new kind of quiet, we have to be able to ask questions that don’t have answers.
To honor the unknown. To let things happen that don’t make sense.
To let anger alchemize and give way to light.

I am not willing to fight for my country.
But I am willing to fight for love.
I would rather be surrounded by broken glass
Than surrounded by broken hearts.

Thank you.

Art by Monique Mitchell.
You can give resources to Black Lives Matter, Los Angeles, here.
You can get involved with Get Lit, an arts organization for youth, here.