784: Serving in Uniform on September 11, 2024
If you haven’t listened to episode 781: My New Major Life Volunteering Community Project, four years in the making, listen to it first for context.
That episode describes my journey to start volunteering as an auxiliary police officer and the background to it. Depending on how well you know me or not, you may find the activity as surprising as I do, though I seem to be a minority in that regard. Everyone else congratulates me. I remark on how different this part of my identity seems compared to the younger me who protested America’s involvement in Central America, disrupted graduation to protest Apartheid, and knew friends who chose to be arrested at such protests.
This episode recounts one of my first activities as an auxiliary. One month ago today I participated in uniform in the Sixth Precinct’s September 11 memorial service. I didn’t expect the experience to affect me as much as it did. It did, so I’m sharing it, along with how the activity emerged from living more sustainably, related to how living in unsustainable modernity inhibits introspection and reflection with constant distraction.