Survival Kit
by Emily Aruna Teitsworth
Today I started carrying a bag labeled “Survival Kit” in my car. It includes an emergency blanket and some band-aids, an electrolyte pouch or two. It got me thinking, as it rolled around the floor of the backseat, about what’s survivable, what’s necessary for survival, what’s an emergency that some gauze and vitamin C are going to fix?
Last week we lost the post office, this week a 17-year-old in Crocs shot two protesters and was waved on by the cops. Vacuous, cocaine-fueled yelling spews from the TV every evening at 6 o’clock. We’ve got band-aids for compound fractures here, semantic games between “the rule of law” and “law and order,” smoke choking us from all directions and a pile of used masks that aren’t rated for viruses, or approved for particulates.
Intellectually, hypothetically, I know there isn’t anything humans won’t do to one another. Now that “anything” is just the reflexive permission of the moment, that day last summer seems less like an attack than a vision of luckier times. Someone covered our car with dust, jumped on the hood, scrawled the n-word and swastikas all over the windows. We stood in the parking lot staring silently at the car, still breathing heavily from a hike, my two hands cupped around my stepson’s slim fingers. I’ve never felt so exposed, so watched, although we were alone, adjacent to an emergency no survival kit could stanch.
There’s gravity at work now, the pull of violence, proof every day that some people are aching to go too far, others are itching to look away. We’re carving out beauty where we can here, walking around the block in the crisp purple twilight, placing our hands reverentially on my mounded, growing belly, slowly slicing vegetables next to the sink, preserving our rituals. Because we know this moment is already an emergency. Because we know, sometime, these will have been the better days.
Emily Aruna Teitsworth is the Executive Director of a non-profit organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a consultant on issues of gender and racial equity and organizational development. She has been writing actively since the age of six, and studied poetry with David Young at Oberlin College. Emily’s writing has been published widely, including by Nostos, West Marin Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the Guardian.