The Void: Everywhere and Nowhere

A terrible incident occurred in Gainesville a few weeks ago. A Ghanan doctoral student enrolled at the University of Florida, alone in his apartment, one evening began to create a great commotion, causing much anguished noise that concerned his neighbors. One of them called the University Police (the same department of Andrew Meyer “don’t Tase me bro” infamy), who then proceeded in careful, methodical fashion to break down his door, Taser him, attack him in stepped up fashion and finally, when the visibly very upset man wouldn’t lie down and say “uncle”, instead waving around a crude metal stick at them in self-defense, carefully aimed and shot him in the head. In his own apartment. A man hurting no one, but in great emotional distress. The brutes.

The student, it turns out, was panic-stricken over fears that his visa would not be renewed and he would soon be forced to leave the country. But to me, it mattered not what his reasons were for causing the disturbance; the police were completely unjustified in using deadly force on him. Which brings me to a feeling I sometimes get when out in the lonesome public environment too long: the Void.

The Void is an inner state of mind, one of alienation, hopelessness, and stress. It envelops me sometimes when I am out in public too long and I begin to feel that everyone around me regards me as a suspicious stranger. I tend to think that the police are all eyeballing me to see whether or not I fit their criteria for becoming a potential victim of theirs, i.e. a potential arrest. I don’t always feel this way, but when a wave of the Void sweeps over me, I imagine it is something like how the hideous dementor monsters in the Harry Potter series would make people feel if they really existed. The best remedy for this feeling, I have discovered, is simply to go home and revel in my seclusion and rightful, “safe” privacy.

But now apparently the cops can bust down anyone’s door and, if they employ the “correct” procedure, can bully, arrest, Taser, or even shoot a private resident just on the merits of that individual’s expressed response to their uninvited, unwelcome, and often quite frightening intrusion.

So now I wonder: is the Void everywhere? Can I really get away from it from sealing myself within my home, drawing the curtains, and locking the doors? And if I can never safely get away from it, perhaps I need to reconsider the legitimacy of my panic in public places.

Gainesville, as far as I know, has no curfew. I can walk or run down any publicly owned street I want anytime I want. And I owe nobody any explanation for my presence. As long as I am civil to others in public, they have no cause to act in any way against me. I am no longer a stranger; I belong here and anywhere I decide to go. Those who I earlier feared may have cast me in such a category have diminished themselves through their fears, if it turns out that they really regarded me this way. For the most part, though, I believe that most people around me actually regard me with the utmost indifference, completely immersed in their own vanity and personal narratives.

So if the Void is everywhere, then it is really nowhere, either. I belong here, and so do you. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. By the way, the student in question survived the shooting, but his life hung in the balance for several days. And he is now being subject to criminal prosecution for his entire horrible ordeal!