Dredge

1. I like order and loose guidelines, but I hate rules.
2. My kitten likes to scoop all the food out of her feeder and bat pieces of it around the floor. This drives me crazy, but there is something in the impulse I admire. 
3. I would probably admire this less if she did it everyday, or if she were a person and not an animal.
4. I am tired.
5. Trayvon Martin was shot by a neighborhood watchman 3 weeks ago. Trayvon was black. They keep specifying in the news that George Zimmerman was Mexican, not white, as if that keeps it from being racially motivated.
6. 10 days ago, my 15-year-old cousin beat his 20-year-old brother over the head with a baseball bat while he was asleep. He split his ear and had to get 11 stitches. He has a concussion.
7. When he was eight, my cousin told me that he wished he was dead. Then he told me that his mother had said she wished she’d never had him.
8. When he was 11, my cousin took a picture of himself arms crossed and bare-chested in front of a Confederate flag.
9. My cousin beat his brother because he couldn’t find his pot.
10.  
11. I am tired, and I want to find other people who care as much as I do.
12. When I saw American History X, I thought “I know these people.”
13. I know these people.
14. Today the daughter I don’t have, my friend’s daughter, gave me a flower. It was tiny, smaller than her almost five-year-old hand, and white, with six petals. It surrounded a pale green center.
15. This not-daughter of mine has many not-parents. So many people who love her and would grieve her if she were gone. She also has two parents who love her.
16. My parents offered to send my cousin to military school but military school won’t take him, because they want kids with “leadership potential.”
17. When I watched American History X in 1999, I couldn’t watch the sidewalk scene. I still haven’t seen it. But I feel like I have.
18. If my cousin would beat his own brother in the head with a baseball bat, and would rather be dead, I can only imagine what he would do to someone who’s black on a bad day.
19. Last month, a guy hit my car. When we’d pulled over, after asking if I was ok, he got mad and offered me this explanation—that he realized he was in "The Projects" and had to get out of there as soon as possible.
20. My blonde hair and blue eyes were presumably supposed to put me on his side of this logic.
21. A year or two after seeing American History X, I considered doing a documentary on the National Alliance, because I figured my appearance would allow me entry. They'd started papering my neighborhood with flyers to recruit people for their white supremacist agenda. I was too afraid to follow through.
22. I live two blocks away from where the car accident occurred. I am more afraid of people like the guy who hit my car, or of police pursuing the black people in my neighborhood than I am of the people who actually live in "The Projects."
23. What kind of rules, what can possibly undo what’s been done? Can make my cousin—if not a leader—at least not a danger, not a bully?
24. It's late. It's too late. 
25. Is it too late?