The Bullet Time and The Ballot: How ‘The Matrix’ Affirmed My Politics

The year 1999 was a year of awakening, as much for me as for the world at large. The millennium was unavoidably on its way. ‘Y2K’ was still a buzzword that filled so many of my elders with the fear of a global shutdown. Every popular musician had incorporated the idea into their album titles and aesthetics. It felt like the most important time of my life, the most important time in human history. I had always been aware of the hypocrisy of the modern world, but something about 1999 opened my mind and broke my heart. It was the year I learned who I was meant to be. The Fight for the Future Begins February of that year, my tenth-grade Humanities teacher (shoutout to Ms. Riley) brought a stack of newspapers to class. The papers read very clearly, “Cops Fired 41 Shots”. Amadou Diallo’s name was the first of a long list of names I would come to memorize after their murder by police officers. He was killed not far from where I lived in The Bronx and I never after felt safe in the presence of cops again. The more I learned about what happened to Diallo and how far the fear and racism went up the hierarchy of local politics, the more hurt and reclusive I would become. There was a very real feeling in me that the world was against me and anyone like me.

Mural on on Wheeler Ave; (Michael Schwartz/for New York Daily News)

In March of 1999, a month after that shooting, not only would my anxieties about the world be affirmed but so to the allegory needed to fortify my desire to stand a…