At the end of this past summer, I remarked to my little brother that I hadn’t seen him doing much else except for physical fitness. He casually responded, “I would never want to have your body.”
That stopped me in my tracks. Okay, he’s 15—15-year-old boys can be shamelessly critical—and his all-boys school mentality and obsession with sports and girls has seeped into his mind. Right? No, it’s not right.
On July 27th 2004, a young black civil rights attorney hailing from the classrooms of University of Chicago Law School and the chambers of the Illinois Senate dusted the chalk off his jacket and took the podium.
He addressed the audience as the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention under the Fleet Center dome in Boston, Mass.
“Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.”
Brown smoke curdled and ran up our front windshield. Outside, the ink-black shadows of night swallowed the Mexican desert scape, and only the stars and the moon bared themselves with some familiar likeness. And beneath all this, a 2006 Toyota Sienna, our “Golden Bullet,” smoked and suffered on an unknown highway. The van stunk of feet and booze.
We swung a left off the CO-94 E and onto Curtis Road, and the white signs began to surface: “Personal Protection,” “Home Defense Weapons” and “Be Prepared” leapt out of the hill banking the left shoulder of the road. In 70-foot long letters spelled out by black rubber tires in the hillside: “Dragon Man’s.”
