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     My problems started about three months ago. The problem has been with us since the beginning of time. But it didn’t start to be my problem until three months ago. That’s when I had begun to take action, modest to be sure, but it was something. I took my white middle-aged self and my white 23-year-old son to a Black Lives Matter rally. That was the first time I thought of the problem as my problem.

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     “Black lives matter!” I heard the shout from my right. I turned my head to see a young black man shouting at me. It sounded like encouragement. After all, we were headed to the rally, signs in hand. I raised my hand to greet him, but I didn’t know what to do or say.

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     To be honest, I’ve always had trouble knowing how to behave around black people. I didn’t want to behave differently, but there was a voice inside me that scolded me for any fear I might feel. The voice told me to show them that I’m not a racist, and then I wouldn’t know how to show that. I had an instinct to hold up a defiant fist and say something ridiculous like, “Right on, brother!” That didn’t feel right, but a friendly wave seemed like the wrong gesture as well. I was glad to have a water bottle in my hand, eliminating the gesture issue. I said, “Yeah, that’s right. Black lives matter.”

 

     “You don’t know anything about black lives,” he said.

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     Fair point, I thought. I had heard of white privilege of course. I even thought I understood what it meant for me. But this was the first time I was really confronting it. “I’m afraid you’re right about that, but we’ll do our best,” I replied. He was sitting on a park bench, and I continued with my son to the protest, so the conversation ended there. But to be honest, he really got to me. Was I a poser? Was I somewhere I didn’t belong?

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     My son wouldn’t let me think that way. I needed to use my privilege to protect others. The cops won’t harm me, he told me, to get to people like him. Would they? I wondered. I wanted to help, but I didn’t really want any trouble. In case you can’t tell, the limits of my bravery and dedication to the cause were very much in question. So, given that, how did I get here?

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     "Here" is the bottom of a grassy hill at the edge of the woods in southern New Hampshire. I’m holding a Winchester XPR bolt action rifle, and I have a man at the top of the hill in the crosshairs of my site. These are probably the last moments of my formerly privileged life, but fuck it, what do I have left to lose?

 

     When I said goodbye to my wife and son, I had no idea it would be the last time I would ever see them. Just the usual perfunctory kiss, and off I went in my Lexus from my suburban home into Cambridge, where I teach American History at Harvard. The topic for the day was how the southern slaveholders became radicalized over the decades between the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Secession. The class was about half full. My students were otherwise occupied with the ongoing protests in Boston. I was proud of them for standing up for what they believed in, and I certainly understood the rage felt by the African American students that compelled them into action.

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     And, by the way, if you’re a middle-aged white history professor and you want to learn some humility, have a debate about the history of American slavery with an African American Harvard student. You’ll learn your biases and blind spots pretty quickly. Of course, your reaction to it might not be as gracious as you would hope. You might tell them that you “have been studying the subject since before they were born,” while you feel an unjustified anger rising in your gut. You might tell them that their “ideas are interesting,” and that they “should keep working on them,” which is, of course, the intellectual equivalent of patting them on the head and sending them off to go play with their little friends.

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     Since my first time, the protests had changed in character. For one thing, they were 24/7 for the past few weeks. The Common was occupied day and night. My wife, son, and I had all been there several times. It was oddly peaceful inside the Common. There were tents, and campfires. People singing protest songs and chanting the names of African American victims of police killings.

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     There was a huge police and military presence. They surrounded and barricaded the park so there was only one entry and exit point, which my students called “Check Point Charlie.”

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     When we went home, we would see on the nightly news that the peace inside the Common was not holding outside. Video—showing fires, looting, tear gas, police in riot gear fighting with protesters—was interspersed with “man on the street” interviews.

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     “We were marching on Beacon Street when the police opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets,” said a woman coughing into a scarf she held over her face as she talked, smoke rising in the background behind her.

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     A nearby man said, “they were coming up the street, yelling obscenities and threats. It looked like they were going to break down the barriers at the State House. The police had no other choice. They had to get control of the situation.”

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     The camera moved past a line of soldiers in camo, holding automatic weapons and standing next to Humvees. It came to rest on a group of men standing near the soldiers, mirroring their look, with camo and weapons in hand, holding signs that read things like, “Blue Lives Matter,” and “Thank God For The Second Amendment.”

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     “If the police can’t get these animals under control, we will,” one of these men said. “These are our streets, and we demand peace. That’s what the second amendment was made for, and we’re not afraid to exercise our rights.” He was shouting directly into the lens of the camera.

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     An off-camera voice asked, “When you say ‘we,’ who do you mean?”

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     “Patriots,” the man said. “We’re the militias enshrined in the second amendment. We’re in every state. When the time comes, we’ll end the mayhem of the radical left and the tyranny of the deep state. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. That’s Thomas Jefferson, look it up.”

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     This drama was duplicated in hundreds of cities across the country. Horrific as it was, it came to seem somehow normal, like everything eventually does. The end of the world doesn’t happen when you’re expecting it. It comes when you stop waiting for it.

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     After my first class, I headed off campus for lunch. I went to my favorite burger joint. They make the greasiest burgers, but damn I love them.

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     I was sitting at the counter, with a fat cheeseburger, and thick cut fries. I was about three bites in when my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I was getting texts and calls and emails all at once. I needed three napkins to be able to get my thumb grease-free enough for the phone to recognize my fingerprint. By that time I had smudged the screen almost to the point of making the texts unreadable. Almost, but not quite.

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     “Warning: Active shooter on Harvard campus. Run if you can. Hide if you can’t run. Fight if you can’t run or hide.” I walked out to the sidewalk and heard rapid gunfire. I chose option one. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could. My car was on campus, so I abandoned it. I headed southwest on foot down Mass Ave away from campus.

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     Ubers were not responding. As I approached Central Square, I headed towards the T station. I hadn’t reached the first step when I saw a terrified mob running up the stairs towards me. They were screaming, and gunshots were ringing out from below.

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     I ran like hell with the crowd. After a while we all realized the shooter was not pursuing us, and we stopped running out of exhaustion and relief, but kept up as brisk a pace as we could. A woman walking next to me was crying. Wailing, really. It was a deep-down, heart-stricken wail. Maybe she lost someone in the subway. I didn’t ask, and she didn’t say. We weren’t beside each other for long anyway.

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     The sound of gunfire followed me everywhere. Or was I following it? I couldn’t tell. It was everywhere. It seemed that the tensions on the street had finally spilled over into open warfare. But warfare usually suggests that both sides were fighting, and in this case, only one side was armed. How about the police? What side were they on? I had no idea.

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     I kept moving, just hoping for dumb luck and persistence to get me home. It was going to be a several hour walk. I called the home number, my wife’s cell, and my son’s cell. No answer on any of them. I tried again and again. No answer, and my phone battery was getting low so I decided to give my phone a rest to preserve the battery in case one of them called me.

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     It was getting dark by the time I reached home. It was quiet and peaceful. The first disturbing thing I noticed was a swastika spray painted on my pride flag. My neighbor, George, told me weeks before that I should take it down. He was trying to protect me, and I appreciated it. He worried that the flag would make my house a target for extremists if tensions in the country were to turn violent.

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     At one point I took down the flag, but the look in my son’s eyes devastated me. He didn’t say a word about it, but I could read the disappointment on his face. So the day after I took the flag down, I put it back up. If he could live his life proudly as a gay man under the rainbow banner of a pride flag, then the least I could do is stand by him under that flag.

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     After the swastika, I discovered that my front door had been broken into. The door frame was smashed, and the door pushed open without resistance. The house had been ransacked. In the hall by the stairs was the lifeless body of a well-armed stranger in blood-soaked camo.

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     Not far from the dead stranger was my dog, lying bullet ridden and in a puddle of blood. I started to dissociate – this wasn’t my house. Those weren’t pictures of my family, splattered in blood, on the wall. That dog looks like my dog, but my dog greets me at the door, wags her tail, and isn’t full of bullets. I could go up those stairs to see if anyone is home, but what family would I find there?

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     Insanity seemed like a reasonable option, but I decided to try to stave it off anyway. I told myself I had to believe what I was seeing, no matter how awful. I surveyed the scene.

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     As best as I could piece together, the dog died protecting the family. I had no idea she had it in her, but she appears to have gotten to the dead guy’s jugular. Blood was everywhere, some hers and some his. There was a good chunk missing from his neck, and without doing too close of a forensic analysis, I concluded that the stuff in her mouth was the missing part of his neck. Good dog. Hopefully, she was successful, and my family got away safe.

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     I closed my eyes to steel myself for what I knew I had to do, but somehow the images of death and destruction were even more vivid with my eyes closed. I opened them again, hoping to find everything back to normal, but the nightmare could not be wished away. As I stepped over the body, my heart raced, bile rose in my throat, and tears welled in my eyes. I could feel convulsions of emotion trying to overtake my actions, but I walked on, tightly grasping the railing as I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Smiling faces of family gazed at me from frames on the stairwell wall. It seemed so incongruous. How could they smile at a time like this?

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      At the top of the stairs, I pushed open the door to my bedroom. The mattress was upturned and off the bed. The quilt hanging off a corner. The dresser drawers were open or removed. The mirror broken. The jewelry box smashed; jewelry removed. But no family. Okay, breathe.

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     Next room was more of the same. Still empty. One more room to go—the bathroom. I pushed on the door, but It stopped short about halfway. I pushed harder, but it resisted. I squeezed in. Do I need to say what I found blocking the door?

 

     A curved red swath of blood was smeared down the white cabinet leading to my wife’s body. A chunk of her head was missing, my son slumped over her, a fireplace poker in his lifeless hand. I looked behind me at the door I just pushed my way through. It was full of bullet holes. How did I not see that as I was forcing my way in? How did I not feel it under my palms?

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     I dropped to my kneed and screamed. I cried. I pounded my impotent fists. How long did I stay there? I can’t say. Was it an hour? Five minutes? All night? Time was broken, along with everything else in my life.

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     Eventually I went back downstairs. I took the gun off the dead stranger and I beat his head with the butt end until his skull cracked. Honestly, you don’t know what you’re capable of until you crack a man’s skull with the butt of a gun.

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     I relieved him of all his weapons and ammo. There was a lot. I had no idea how to use it, but how hard could it be?

 

     My neighbor, George, helped me give my wife and son a burial in the woods behind my house, and dispose of the body of the militiaman. Not long after that, he took his family north. They were trying to get to Canada. They offered to take me, but I decided to stay. Who knows if they made it anyway?

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     All social order had broken down over the course of a few weeks. No electricity, no fuel, no mainstream sources of news. There was some government propaganda if you could find a working cell phone, or you came across the flyers pasted on streetlamps. Some pirate radio could be picked up if you had a portable radio with working batteries. But little else. So it was hard to figure out what was going on.

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     The total blackout didn’t happen all at once though, so there was still electricity and TV news when the president declared martial law “to quell the unrest in cities across the country.”

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     “You have to use overwhelming force,” the president said. “Otherwise they’ll walk all over you. I won’t stand for that.”

 

     At this point the army controlled the cities, while the militia rampaged the suburbs. The election, which was supposed to happen in a little over a month, was obviously not going to happen. The militias didn’t start terrorizing the suburbs until after the blackout. But it seems clear that the president activated them. They had been waiting for the go ahead for almost four years.

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     Looters had emptied the grocery and convenience stores, so food was hard to come by.  Only the army had food, and they were taking care of the militia. I, however, had eaten everything edible in my house, so I was digging through a dumpster when I felt a hand come down on my shoulder. I had the militiaman’s sidearm in my waistband, and I started reaching for it slowly when I heard a man say, “It’s not safe here. Come with me.”

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     That didn’t seem like the militia’s style. They just called you a faggot and shot you if they wanted to. There was no deception.

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     I turned and saw an African American man, which immediately put my mind at ease. The militia was solid white. He was about my own age with kind eyes, a gaunt face, and a scruffy beard. “Come on,” he said softly.

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     That was Pete. He took me to the basement of the local Unitarian Church. There were about a dozen men and women holed up there. The basement entrance was in the back and obscured by some bushes, and the main part of the church had been ransacked and clearly abandoned. The windows were blacked out and covered in wood, so there was basically no sign of them from the outside.

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     Pete was an Iraq war vet, and a wealth of information about guns. He was pretty excited to see my stash, and he was ready to put it to good use. I would have taken him with me if it wasn’t for the fact that his wife and daughter were with us day and night in that basement.

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     Those three were so good to me. His wife, Latanya was beautiful and strong, with a great sense of humor. She kept the family going, and me too. They treated me like family, even though I was a stranger. It’s surprising how kind people can be, even in times like these. I couldn’t bare the idea of anything happening to them because of me, so I snuck out early before anyone was awake.

 

     So here I am now, gun in hand, enemy in sight. My plan is to kill them all if I can.

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     There are six militiamen that sleep on that hill. One will stay sober, or mostly sober. Sober enough that he doesn’t pass out like the rest of them. They rotate who’s stuck with the night watch, and whoever it is seems to resent it. The night watch keeps away from the hard stuff, but still usually pound a few beers. I’ll have to kill him first.

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     I have two guns on me. One is a handgun. A .45 with hollow tipped bullets. It will do a lot of damage at close range, but I don’t want to get that close until the night watch is dead. The other is the Winchester XPR bolt action rifle.

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     So I’m down on my belly, in the mud, obscured by some underbrush in a wooded outcropping. I’ve been lying here for hours, waiting for the militia to get back, get drunk, and pass out. I’ve had to be very still and quiet so that they didn’t notice me, and my time has come. I’ve got that son of a bitch in my sights, and he has no idea I’m here. He’s just pounding away on his beers.

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     I want to take the shot, but my hands are trembling. The gun is shaking, and the sight is unstable. I’m starting to sweat; I can feel my heart pounding. I’m starting to think I can’t do this.

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     I bring to mind the meditation techniques my wife made me learn. She gave me a lot of crap about not believing in meditation because it was outside the experience of my middle class, American upbringing. But that wasn’t really the case. I believed meditation was a useful tool, but I was too lazy to bother to try, and I didn’t feel like I really needed it. Eventually, she broke down my defenses, and taught me, using this app she had on her phone. I’m glad she did, because I need it now. 

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     So I’m concentrating on my breathing, letting the fear and tension run out of my body with each breath. I feel my heart slow down. I listen to the leaves rustling around me; feel the perspiration on my forehead and the cold metal of the trigger. I look into the sight, crosshairs steady upon the target. I’m now in the right state of mind to take a human life.

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