A letter to cops

To whomever this may concern,

My name is Ken Leng, and I am a citizen of the United States of America, who was raised in rural Massachusetts and Chicago. I am writing with regards to circumstances that have primed your experience of life within the past few years, and circumstances that are surrounding your experience of life in this moment.

I understand that there has been and is something heavy in the air. It may be smog–it probably is; and it may be something that cannot be measured in units such as miles/hour or molecules. Most importantly, it is something that has made it hard for you to breath.

I know the feeling of having trouble breathing quite well. I’m not thinking about times where I ran too hard on the soccer field and found myself suddenly gasping for breath, or times where I’ve smoked too many cigarettes. I’m thinking about times where I experienced cognitive dissonance as a result of having to pay respects to tension between my identities.

These days, identities associated with a job are amongst the ones that people invest time and energy in most. I’ve found that such identities can lie in tension with one another. In your case, being a police officer–someone who is meant to protect “people” (i.e. all persons)–now lies in tension with being a “police officer” [whose responsibility is to do what has been outlined in training]. You have my deepest sympathies in this regard. One is apt to question if they are carrying themselves throughout life in the best way possible when their identities, and/or when differing conceptualizations of one identity, are clashing.

I’ve been apt to give attention to an identity that is easy to neglect. It is an identity that is often attributed to certain people, while not attributed to others. Perhaps you don’t consider this identity as your own–that is, being a pioneer of potential futures.

As a pioneer of potential futures, you can create pathways in which you, your family, your friends, and/or everyone in the world can succeed and find happiness. However, with so many people as part of living society now, it is easy to neglect the idea that we are all pioneers of potential futures, and pay respects to the idea that one voice out of 7 million can be only so loud–to operate under the belief that there is a limit to how much of a difference we can make. Additionally, with knowledge developing on the relationship between humanity and the environment, it has become reasonable to believe that no single person can impose control over their own life; the power that forests, icebergs, mountains, other parts of the Earth, animals, plants, bacteria, and other forms of life have over us is much greater than the power that we have over them. Thinking about yourself as a pioneer of potential futures may be hard, but my friends and I can provide support to any of your efforts involving the creation of pathways to success and happiness.

With awareness for what may be influencing us, every now and then, we have to remind ourselves that we are pioneers of potential futures who have voices that can work to bring about a certain kind of future. If we let fate take its course without making sure that our voices are heard, the future may hold even more undesirable outcomes than the present holds. But if we take steps to make sure our voices are heard – in the future, there may be an amount of love in the air that is beyond what you and I can imagine in this current moment.