I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown. The Slowdown. I'll never forget the day at St Elizabeth's Elementary School when my teacher Dave

Hagen stopped our math lesson to speak passionately about what it meant to be a

peaceful, caring citizen of the world. He was our sixth grade

algebra teacher who broke that day into an emotional speech about the value of all life.

His spontaneous lecture was prompted by my friend Gerald,

who had interrupted his lesson on quadratics

to ask about the image on the front of the desk.

It was a sticker that featured arms of varying skin colors graphs together in a circle with the word humanitarian in multi-colored letters.

In his youth, Dave protested the Vietnam War. He often spoke about peace. The other sticker on his

desk was of a dove with an olive branch in his beak. He was an early model for me of someone who envisioned a better earth and just an equitable

communities.

He also worked alongside members of the Plowshares Movement to help remedy our addiction to war.

He brought these issues into my life and later my art as ongoing political concerns, a way of being and existing, for

which I am grateful.

Over the past year I have thought frequently about the pitch and fervor of Dave's talks to us,

which were equally rageful and mournful.

We were a group of young black kids whose families faced structural, systemic, and gang violence

in our neighborhoods, who knew what it meant to live in fear.

I can only imagine the collective anxiety of people in the Middle East,

Africa, and Eastern Europe, for whom the reality of dying is ever present.

Lately, I hear Dave's voice whenever I talk with friends about the unnaturalness of human aggression

...