Chasing Circuses Through The Killing Fields of America

 

 

How guilty should I feel for passing up two  circuses that recently played in my area?

There was a time before the streets were so randomly dangerous. A time when, at the age of 15 and alone, I walked a mile or two down a Richmond, California street before day break,  to reach Ringling Bros circus rising.  Don’t blame a mass shooting being the cause of the tents having already  been pitched  –  they’d snuck into town the day before.

Back then, after getting off a bus somewhere, I’d  walk the rest of the way for Carson Barnes or Beatty-Cole. With each passing step, my heart jumped higher.   (No wonder I love to walk!)

Today, the same landscape is riddled with the bullets of an America going mad. Bullets from drive-bys and shoot outs between passing cars. Bullets into school yards and churches and malls.  Bullets of anger and greed, defiance and retaliation.  Bullets from, if you ask me, suicide protesters. This year, there have been over two hundred mass shootings. So, how do we rank up against other countries?   This I got serious about.     

And here’s the top ten from one of the reports I found. Not sure what the numbers mean, but the contrast should suffice.

 1. United States – 101

2. Russia – 21
3. France – 8
4. Germany – 5
5. Canada – 4
6. Finland – 3
7. Belgium – 2
8. Czech Republic – 2
9. Italy – 2
10. Netherlands – 2
 

Stunning? Yes, gawk and behold.  

How does that make you feel about, as many claim it to be,  the world’s oldest democracy? 

UniverSoul Circus was inexplicably ignored by a local media that treats Black History Month more like Black History Year. The show played the iffy Hilltop Mall in Richmond.   All but one TV station appears to have ignored  “America black owned circus,” as it bills itself. I had half way toyed with the idea of risking it.  The lack of coverage, of a single poster, did nothing to push me on.  In fact, I forgot all about it.
           
Caballero  is now playing, on a wretchedly ugly patch of weeds crammed between a freeway on one side and a parking lot for the Coliseum on the other.  I went there once, to take in  UniverSoul, and have since preferred  avoiding it.

But now, I have better options.  After going for decades without a car, I found the perfect one for me: The make is Lyft, the model, whatever the car driven by the driver answering my call. Heck, I can get from my apartment in Oakland to the front door of my boyhood home in Santa Rosa (owned by my niece, Lisa, who now rents it for short terms) for as little as $70. And the ride takes one third the time it would take were I sharing public transit seating with bums and junkies and sex crazed wackos.

I might have lyfted myself to the Caballero tent, but, after the show, how to tell Lyft where to find me?  By three low-life misfits in hoodies squatted near a scrappy blob of a tent that does not sing CIRCUS?

Perhaps there is only one thing worse than too little freedom: too much.  

Here in the State of Insanity, I don’t walk to the circus anymore.