I have things to do that are more important than SRK, so much more important that my brain doesn’t even have space for him. It’s not that he has become less important to me, it’s that for the first time in 20 years there is something going on that is so much more important I honestly forgot.

My city is in crisis, my community is in crisis, but most of all the children need me. It’s amazing, as soon as the invaders came into Chicago, the first instinct was to go to the schools. Every school in my area, that’s more than 20, has a volunteer patrol stationed on each corner for an hour at drop off and pick up. And the same is true through out the city. We have to protect the children, we have to stand there as a physical barrier in front of them, and nothing else matters.

I’ve been thinking about tribal instinct. You know how the sound of a baby crying is the strongest sound any human can hear? It cuts through logic and intellect and everything else and screams at you “FIX THIS!!!”. That’s how the race survived, that’s how most animals survive, by learning that the most important thing is protecting their young. And it can’t be JUST the sound of crying, can it? That’s only one sense out of many. It must also be the look on a child’s face when they are frightened or sad or hungry or need something from you, that calls deep deep down and says “stop what you are doing, change your whole being, become a single purpose creature who has to protect the children.” And when there is actual danger, instinct takes over and you don’t even remember doing things, right? If, say, you smell smoke and think the house might be on fire, you don’t even remember what you do next and suddenly you are standing outside holding your children. The body moves of its own accord, finds the kids, gets them safe, and then lets your brain take over again.

So if all of this is true, and we know it is, then what happens when a whole city is filled with thousands of scared sad children? Do you even have to hear them, or see them, or is there something they send out that calls to you deep inside and wakens up that instinct through the vibrations of the air or the smell on the wind? Yes, we have photos, and we have stories, of kids who will never feel safe again, but I think it’s more than that. The kind of sense that would have taken a hunter gatherer a mile out of their way because they could feel that there were children trapped by a lion, something that’s deeper than instinct and is just there way way way down.

Right now, thousands of people in Chicago are trying to go about their days, to go to work, to eat food, to do things like pack whistle packets or fold instructional zines or make signs for the next protest, and the whole time they are struggling not to give in to the insanity of knowing there are children in trouble, all around you, and you have to DO SOMETHING.

It’s not just me, truly it isn’t. The city is going a little bit insane with this. Volunteers are being turned away from every opportunity because there just isn’t enough for them to do. For Halloween, I went out to find a corner to stand on and guard with a whistle, and I had to walk 6 blocks because all the other corners were already taken. The young artists and hipsters down in Logan Square are coming out on their bikes, by the dozens, dropping everything to chase people out of their neighborhood. ON BIKES! Can you imagine the kind urge it must take to go out there on your bike and chase a truck full of armed men? Multimillionaires down in Lincoln Park ran out into the street in front of their houses and confronted tear gas. In my neighborhood, a woman ran out barefoot in her bathrobe and stood in front of a car full of armed men.

The crazy thing is, it’s not hard at all to do something. The hard thing is to NOT do something. To try to distract yourself and live your life when you know there isn’t anything for you to do right now. Imagine being in a room with a crying baby and an armed man standing between you and the child. What would you do to get to it and sooth it? How long before you either risked your life or went insane? Surely the hardest thing of all would be to sit there and think “well, there’s someone better qualified out there, I need to focus on my work, this will all blow over eventually if I just let it play out”.

So I forgot Shahrukh’s birthday. Because the image of frightened kids who don’t know where their parents are or if they will ever see them again, who go to school every day not knowing if their family will be there when they get home, who see armed men and teargas and know they are there for them, who are hungry because it’s not safe for their parents to go out and work, all of those children are constantly there, around us. Instead of Shahrukh’s birthday, I’ve been doing school patrols, food deliveries, checking my rapid response text chains, and reading about how my whole city is standing up together and screaming our lungs out saying “STOP THIS”.

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