intimate moments in public

this morning while frantically filing my gas tank, late as usual, two cop cars pull into the gas station behind an innocuous looking four door. in the short time that it took my car to suck down a few gallons of gas, the two cops had two young men out of the car, cuffed and were patting them down.

i felt like a peeping tom. here were these young men, probably not more that a handful of years younger than me, being restrained. in a exceptionally basic way, their freedom to move was being denied. and once cuffed, an authority was touching and feeling them. touches that in another context would be considered intimate, but because of uniforms, restraints, hardware and context, are extremely public.

my read on this is scene is colored by too many lenses to name. my own context. i have only been in a car that was pulled over once, and i was not the driver. i am white, and have lived in cities where that seriously drives down the likelihood that cops look twice at you. yet, i am the child of a lawyer who was sure to teach his children their rights at the hands of authority, and how to play the game if pulled over. and in oakland, not a few miles from where a traffic stop took a fatal turn in march, i cannot imagine being a cop in this city and not confronting that reality everyday. nor can i imagine being a young man cuffed in this city, knowing the history, and the fate of the shooter in that incident. these are only the beginnings of the forces at work as that cop rolled up the young man's sleeve and enclosed his wrists in steel.

what feels private is public, and so i turned away, tucked my chin down, replaced the gas pump and drove to holy hill.

huh.