The first thing she noticed, says my mother, is that the conference room table lifted up off the floor, and everything went quiet.

She and eight colleagues were in a meeting at their Rysick Street office on the third floor.

This is Johannesburg, 1986, and she worked at that time for a non-profit called Child Welfare,

a social work NGO who tried to protect the rights and well-being of children,

caught in the crossfire of apartheid's brutal political and economic oppression,

while still giving the appearance to the authorities of working within their racially segregated structure.

First came that odd moment of the table lifting up several inches,

accompanied, she says, by an immense feeling of pressure in the room,

and then the huge sound of an explosion blooming from a restaurant across the street.

Now, such impressions are inevitably filtered through shock, so who knows what else lifted or how high.

It was probably less than a second between that sound wave vibration and then the sound itself

hitting. But she described it as time slowing down and that

uncanny sense of the table hovering for an in-breath of total silence before the chaos. I recognize this

kind of altered time perception myself. Perhaps you do too. For me, it's a memory of a bad car accident. The windows

in the office block did not shatter. It was something of an anomaly for such a warm climate,

but they were double glazed. Probably, she speculates, because they faced a street

usually busy with traffic noise. They were, for that reason, also never open.

I'm Julian Walker, and today I'll be reflecting on where we are in America right now and what

happens in societies where citizens form paramilitary groups in order to further their political goals.

That topic exists, of course, in the context of what happens in societies where state

violence via policing reinforces oppression and can at times take the form of militias

created to be loyal only to an authoritarian despot.

...