How Long Will I Cry? by Miles Harvey

she begged me not to do it.
But there was one last staff member I hadn’t told about it—and he’s
not a “yes” guy. When I mentioned it in the staff meeting the next
day, he said without hesitation: “Pastor, I think that’s the best
idea in the world.”
    So that very moment, I stopped the meeting
and said: “I’m going to get a tent.”
    The first night it was raining. The second
night the wind was just blowing so hard, and the third night I
think it was raining again. So the first three nights were kinda
like: “Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?” And for the
first three weeks I was upset, because I felt like: Man, people
ought to get this, you know? Young kids are dying and no one is
doing nothing.
    But then I came to recognize that you can’t
get mad at everyone because they don’t see what you see. I take
inspiration from the Book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. The
prophet goes up on the watchtower to hear from God. And God speaks
to him and gives him a vision and tells him to write it, to make it
plain, so the people can run and see it. So I just kind of feel
like that’s my job. For whatever reason, I’m the watchman.
    Being on this roof has brought me isolation,
but it’s also given me perception. The number-one thing I hear are
the sirens. Until I came up here, I never realized how many sirens
actually go off on a consistent basis and you pay no attention to
them. But now I can even distinguish the different types of sirens.
Is that an ambulance? A fire truck siren? A police siren? Because
if it’s the ambulance and the fire truck siren you know: “Wow,
somebody probably got shot.”
    I hear gunshots all the time. Even the
gunshots that happen ten blocks away sound like they’re next door.
I don’t know why, but it’s like sounds are magnified. And
unfortunately, I have learned to tell the different types of guns
apart from each other. A .25, that sounds more like a large
firecracker. A .45 has a ferocious volume to it. Semi-automatics
are repetitive: pow-pow-pow-pow-pow.
    New Year’s Eve—that was frightening. In this
community, it’s a ritual to shoot off guns on that holiday. So what
happened was around 11 p.m., I began to hear sporadic gunfire, gun
here, gun there. But at 12 o’clock, there was nothing but
guns—small guns, large guns, automatic guns, shotguns. And it can
be horrific if you’re in a close proximity of where these guns are
being shot. Because at any time a stray bullet could come from
anywhere and take you out.
    So what I did was, I pulled the futon over
me, ‘cause I figured if a bullet came through it wouldn’t hit me
because the futon is so padded. I just stayed underneath the futon
and slept as best I could. And it really, really sounded like a war
zone. There’s no way that a person could have heard all this
gunfire and not start to think differently about guns.
    In January of 2012, I came down to do two
funerals. One was the young man that was killed in Church’s
Chicken21 and another was a young man that was killed at Marquette
Park.22
    It was bittersweet to be back on the ground.
I was glad to be down off the roof and to be able to walk around
and socialize with people. But the bitter part was to come down for
funerals and to see so many young people who looked so hopeless. I
think that a lot of kids in this neighborhood feel like they don’t
have anything to live for. They don’t have any education, they
don’t have any jobs, they don’t have any family, so what’s the
point? They’re just like: “whatever.” Whatever happens today, it
happens. Whatever . And when you start having that approach
toward your own life, you begin to have it toward other people’s
lives, as well. And I think that’s where a lot of kids are. Life
means nothing. Life has been devalued.
    Being up on this roof has made me more
compassionate, because it’s made me more keenly aware of things
that are going on around me. Every day I ask God to forgive me