Thread by @mkaiasand

(thread) This is why I write / this is why I fight:
More than an hour ago, I was biking home from @StreetRoots, southward on 3rd Avenue through downtown. I saw a man lying in the middle of the street.

He was sobbing. Blue hair, bright paint smudged on his face, a children’s rainbow-keyed toy piano next to him – he was a man covered in rainbow colors.

I am so extraordinarily fortunate to work at @StreetRoots because I work among many teachers: People impart lessons that I carry in my heart. One vendor told me that when his brain “itches” he needs someone to speak to him in a soothing voice – not with a badge and a gun.

That, he told me, is what he wanted Portland Street Response to be. He is a man who is sometimes in behavioral health crises wandering the streets, but all one has to do when they see him is say his name with love in their voice, and he turns with more calmness.

So tonight I knelt down and spoke to the man lying in the street in that soothing voice. I told him that I didn’t want him to get hit by a car, so I wanted him to get back on the sidewalk. He looked up at me, his eyes bright blue, and he scooted until he was on the sidewalk.

The man was sobbing, speaking a swirl of language, some that made sense to me, other phrases that riffed off into another kind of sense. “How many family members I lost to the end of the gun,” he said at one point. He called to God for “mercy and justice and love.”

“We have to teach each other to speak the language of how-to-be-nice-to-each-other." He said he loved to play the guitar.

Then he began to sing for me – a simple melody that hit a high note, and then cascaded down, repeating “We call this our home. It cuts to the bone. We call this God’s perfect mercy.”

I told him he had the voice of an angel. Once he was calmer, singing softly as he sat on the sidewalk, I began to bike home.

This is why I don’t let up on Portland Street Response. It should not be about narrative battles or political careers. It is about regarding about all the beautiful and suffering people among us ...

... and insisting that we can, in fact, commit in a big way to a society that values their lives at the moments of their greatest suffering. As the man in all the rainbow colors said: “We have to teach each other to speak the language of how-to-be-nice-to-each-other.” Grace.

As the man in all the rainbow colors said: “We have to teach each other to speak the language of how-to-be-nice-to-each-other.” Grace.