Air

 
   copyright@2020 will maguire 

Last year one of my tires started going flat. A slow leak. As I began looking for a service station, I couldn't help but remember another time that I needed air.

When I was kid I had a bike, the kind with really fat tires that were so old they were always leaking. Every week I had to stop by the nearby filling station to air them up. The old man that ran the place sat in the shade just outside the screen door. And each time, gravel in his voice, he would ask, “You ever going to buy something, son?”

I’d shrug and say, “No sir. Got no money.” He would look hard at me, then, eyes softening, he’d say -“Well, that's all right, boy...air is still free.”

Like everyone else these past few months I've been watching the slow roll of the COVID death toll. Five thousand, then ten, now an unimaginable 110,000. I’ve listened to doctors plead and wives cry out. I’ve heard strong men in hospital wards gasp for air through masks.

But still this bug continues to find its way in through each other’s coughs and sighs and sneezes. It’s deaf to the pleading, the anguish, the whispered prayers. And like my old tires, air begins to leak away, taking life with it.

All for the want of something around us, and yet now unreachable.

And suddenly it feels like the world has something unseen kneeling on its neck, as we all have become afraid that this thing we take for granted, this thing we need every moment—air—is no longer free.

It bills us with isolation and loneliness. It demands not only our livelihoods but sometimes our very lives. And suddenly we are being asked to pay.

“How much are you willing to sacrifice, for yourself and those around you? How much will you pay?”

Last month there was a video of a young black man jogging in a Georgia suburb. He was chased down, stopped and killed. The very breath taken from him. And later on television I saw his mother crying out. Unable to breathe. Gasping for air.

This past week on the other side of the country another black man was stopped, this time by the police in Minnesota. One cop knelt on his neck as he begged, just like so many others do now from hospital beds, for something unreachable like kindness or mercy . . . or air.

And so we watch from the safety of our living rooms, suddenly afraid for our own breath, in terror for what may be leaking away from all of us as a nation.

This is happening all too often. How it happens is an open debate. Usually it’s one cop with too many street stops and too many arrest fights.

Cruelty, like kindness, accrues. It gets breathed in a little at a time until the heart’s muscle, starved for some cleaner kind of air, attacks itself.

But how is not the issue. Holding any one man for the sins of another because of skin color or even uniform color has always been a common wrong. Because we see each other only from a distance.

But now a plea for air has gone up in cities far from that scene. Millions have cried out for a man they never knew. Because they saw his suffering and his death and understood for a moment what justice is by gazing at the stark shadow of its absence. And so the plea hardens into demand. 
But viruses are deaf. And often, so too is power. The deafness can lead to a kind of sickness.

Yes it's true, some thoughtless few have sought to hijack that plea with contempt. They have taken its torch and used it to set fire to everything around them. They know fire will not burn without air, and so they waste it trying to incinerate justice for being slow and sometimes cold and faulty.

I think of our nation slowly choking in hospital beds with a virus kneeling on its chest or in some side street with a cop kneeling on hope’s throat or a small businessman kneeling at his shattered storefront, holding his breath as he picks through the glass splinters of his life savings.

But all of us . . . every soul . . . one way or another fights for air.

A few years ago some athletes decided to kneel before their games as the national anthem played. It was widely understood as disrespect, but at its core it was a plea for something better. A different kind of air in our country. Too many were unable to breathe free.

Kneeling is an act of humility. Every Sunday in churches all across the country millions kneel and ask for a better kind of life, for a sweeter truer air. Young men fall to their knees and ask girls to save their hearts from loneliness.
To kneel is to say, “I am too small. I am just one soul, but I long for something better . . . for myself . . . for my family . . . for the world. So I am asking . . . begging . . . pleading for something I need and cannot reach alone.

Now most nights I find myself struggling to breathe. My chest, my lungs, my heart have begun to hurt. I can feel something . . . something I cannot see kneeling on me.

Every day I put on a mask and I stare at myself in a mirror like I’m a bandit trying to steal time. Hoping it might help me steal one more breath.

Everything I have ever done, from that first cry to my last gasp, every word I’ve spoken, everything I’ve felt, every dream that has climbed from my heart to my imagination was because of something I need. Air.

So at night, when I cannot breathe, I fall to my knees. And I think of thousands alone in hospital beds and a man on some pavement with a knee in his throat, and I ask for something all around us that I cannot see but need just the same.

I ask for grace and for wisdom.

I ask for air.

Then I close my eyes and dream of my life leaking away like the tires of my boyhood. And once more I hear a voice of an old man: “Air is still free.”

But I know now he was wrong. Maybe once he was right, but no more. Air is not free.

And I fear my country has a slow leak.

Last year when my worn tires were going flat, I finally found a gas station with a hose. I was surprised to see a minute of air costs a buck. I took a deep breath, and then I paid up.

Living is hard. Fighting for every next breath takes a daily kind of courage. It requires strength, the strength to put down the riot in your heart. The strength to humble yourself and ask for something better. It requires we kneel on the throat of our own strangling rage.

We cannot demand justice from a virus or the past. They are merciless and cannot listen.

We can, however, demand justice—and mercy—from ourselves.

So I will pay whatever it takes.

To breathe.