Ode to Skateboard-Guy Who Took Munitions from ICE
in LA, Walked Away and Flipped Them Off
You look like half my friends from 1994.
Baggy pants, bulked sweatshirt,
beanie, or backward cap (can’t tell
through the haze) and double shoulder-strapped
Jensen backpack. Board in hand,
walking down the street like the street
is an old friend who kissed your girl
and you want to rough him up but not enough
to lose a friend cause she’ll likely leave one day.
You strut straight up to the lCE-line, Guard-line, LAPD—
who can tell at this point, uniforms beget
uniforms, masked faces moving in the name
of hauling day laborers out of Home Depot
men, fathers, hoping for a few work hours,
a day’s wage, trying to build something.
The cops don’t hesitate firing gas, pepper, rubber
bullets, at you, one baggy man lugging
his board, and you stand as if dared, holding
ground, then parade away through powder and smoke.
In the name of humans living out the abstractions
tossed like tickertape—hope, opportunity, freedom—
actually living, a body buying buckets of nails
and 2x4s in that orange warehouse, filling
a flat cart, swiping a debit card, wearing
Carhart jeans, a sweatshirt, a backwards cap,
wrist grabbed while sticking a wallet back
in his back pocket, the whip of image fliting
across his thoughts of his daughter walking
through the door, home from school,
his wife unpacking from a day of processing
numbers or food then he’s gone, swallowed
by cement: that body is body and ideal.
That body is any body. Making a life is to foster
enchantment in nails, cut lumber, the belief
that working hard will actually pay off. How many
who love freedom have the courage to stand firm
on another country’s ground? To find hope in hammers,
in a single finger and a slightly slouched shoulder?
by Jeremy Voigt
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In matters of style
The annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future, the competition will serve as a complement to the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, which recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world.
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Dear Reader,
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