We Consider These Kids Our Kids

I've spent some time in Baltimore, so I feel like I'm in position to offer some first-hard insight into the situation on the ground there. For instance I know it's in easy driving distance from Washington D.C. and that it's possible to find a reasonably priced family hotel in the downtown area on relatively short notice. Not really sure about all this riot stuff, though. Seems bad.

What is really bumming me out though is not just what I've seen in Baltimore, but what it's making me reconsider about some of the seminal events of my adolescence. I was 17 when the Rodney King riots happened in LA in 1992. For context, I live in a half-desert exurb about 50 miles south and east of the city, so when it was happening, it happened on television, yes, but none of us were 100% sure it wasn't also happening right here, right now. Loads of rumors about local incidences of violence or destruction, specifically (as I remember it) that the Tyler Mall was under siege, which was fucked up because goddamn it if we didn't just get us a Nordstrom. Those reports all turned out to be fantasies genied up by a reasonable paranoia and, if we're being really honest with ourselves, the pessimistic expectation of a constantly trodden-on regional younger sibling. All we typically get from our association with LA are smog and traffic on nationally competitive worst-of levels. So if the city is swallowing itself in fire and an avalanche of thrown shards of concrete, we'd have to half-expect a wayward blow to land somewhere on our civic person.

We escaped unscathed and honestly unthreatened, but the images from the day were indelible and my already-wobbly public-school-civics sense of American fairness and justice were shaken in a way that has never really settled. This happened about six months before my first opportunity to vote in any election. It remained the defining event of my political and social consciousness right up until probably Bush v. Gore in 2000, barring of course the six-month period in '99 when I was a committed technophobe kung-fu anarchist after seeing The Matrix seven times. It sounds embarrassing, but I feel like the work I put in as an anti-machine-intelligence activist is still paying dividends every day I'm not enslaved by any of my appliances.

After Ferguson and the Eric Garner demonstrations last year, now Baltimore, and the dozens of other incidence between '92 and '15, all this has conspired to chastise 17-year-old me for the shallow novelty of my reaction, bred by what is a fair excuse of inexperience, sure, and instead accept the recontextualization that this is what President Obama called "a slow-rolling crisis."* None of the individual events make any sense without reference to the rest of it, all of it. Such an atmosphere of fear and distrust exists between police and these communities, I feel safe assuming that the most prolonged and direct interaction they ever have is during a riot.

Here it is, though: here's the opening that we're looking for, where people are forced by the awesome horror of the circumstance to confront these stubbornly festering wounds of race and injustice we inflicted on ourselves 500 years ago, and look, we have all these ways to interact now, to locate and address the issue with a stinging but antiseptic catharsis.

But first, let's retreat to our news-predigester of choice and get our talking points straight. Yes, it's going out of our way to pick a fight, in much the same way a cheating spouse might decide it's suddenly super important to start in with a lecture about proper dishwasher-loading procedure or whether the grass was magically going to cut itself.

Also, who has time for the problems of one small ethnic minority in just one city when we have to make sure the federal government doesn't execute a military coup to take over Texas. That's right, Texas. A whole state. We're very busy.

If we ever do get around to talking about how race works in America, I know a pretty good starting point: for everyone who wants to say there isn't an imbalance of opportunity in favor of white Christian males, the counter-argument is always going to be Tim Tebow.

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*you should really listen to the whole thing, in the link provided. I've excerpted a bunch of what he said below:

"We can't just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. This is not new. It's been going on for decades...

"In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there's no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks -- in those environments, if we think that we're just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we're not going to solve this problem. And we'll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual...

"But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It's just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant -- and that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don't just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We're paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they're important... But that kind of political mobilization I think we haven't seen in quite some time... I think we all understand that the politics of that are tough because it's easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law and order issue, as opposed to a broader social issue."