In Formation

Our town’s Friday night lights were at the end of the street where I lived as a child. Maybe this isn’t true, but the way I remember it, those lights lit up the whole town.

For two years, I was the drum major for our small high school’s marching band. This is around the time of year we’d gather in the parking lot or a practice field in the early mornings to learn the marching drills for our football team’s halftime shows. I carried a binder full of instructions that described how everyone was to create the formations on the field and move from position to position, all while blowing a steady stream of air through an instrument. The steam rose up from the grass on the practice field between the baseball and football fields- you could feel the energy through your shoe soles from the asphalt lots that never had a chance to cool off overnight. Heat in every form: frustration, motivation and tedium rising out of everything. My whistle would burn my arm as it’d swing while I tried my best to march backwards and forwards at the same time with a straight, confident face. And the cicadas- oh, the cicadas. The air was thick of everything.

Tedium and heat can make you feel a certain way- like you’ve said something a million times (get it together, trumpets), gone over something a million times (an ending, a solo). Everything feels like it takes longer. “A million times” is in our language. What does ‘one million times’ really look like? What actually gets done one million times? When you set out to do something one million times, you learn something along the way.

I think about the number of steps that a small South Texas marching band might take during an entire football season’s worth of halftime shows. Ten games in a football season-a thousand steps each for one hundred kids- one million steps. (Some steps were bigger than others; it always seemed the charts had the sousaphones lunging from place to place with their massive instruments- and some smaller, barely even moving at all but picking up your knees- just enough of a tug on your insufferable itchy polyster band pants to remind you of your tragically hip situation.)

Even in those million movements, there was stillness and surety. There was chaos in the scramble drills, and yet you always knew where you were going- you always had the same two people on your left and right. Sometimes you’d forget where you were supposed to land, and you’d feel like you were off completely- and you’d see the video later and see that your uncertainty was completely undetectable.

There’s division on the field for 4 quarters- the helmets cracking, the yelling- the Gatorade bottles thrown about. Halftime was a show. Disciplined and measured - cooperative and inspiring and beautiful. Maybe I’m biased- maybe I’m just bitter to have been on the obvious losing end of a Texas school budget showdown between the arts and football- but halftime was the best part about football season.

What do you learn when something happens a million times? As I sit here at the apex, near-end of this post - one million small cooperative elements coming together in the formation, culmination of something beautiful!:

I’d like to knock it all down with an inconvenient truth: one million is nothing.

I wanted to try and illustrate what one million feels and looks like. Now that it’s here in front of us- the heat, the determination, the long season- the weary, loyal, sweaty sousaphones, each step a stretch- I want you to feel how much it is, but also how little it accomplishes when it comes to injustice. One million of anything won’t bring us to justice.

Say we serve 20 partners- that’s 50,000 diapers each. 8,000 diapers per child from birth to potty training: that's only 6 babies per partner. This doesn’t help anyone with anything. I’ve known this all along. The halftime programs will have been executed, sure- but you’ll still always be left with the cocky trumpet section in the bleachers, mindlessly running away with your tempo in the 4th quarter.

We need you to start speaking up about this very fact.

One million diapers doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of anything useful. Tell them. Stand with us. The Brooklyn Diaper Project is working hard to distribute one million diapers, and it’s all for nothing if we don’t insist on executing our more sustained goals of setting up systemic and public diaper availability. This can’t just be a project that ends when we blow the whistle to file off the field. If we don’t commit to dismantling systemic inequality while we distribute diapers, it’s all for naught.