Am I Under Arrest or Should I Guess Some More?

OK, so a lot has changed since the last time we spoke. Looking back now, the world a week ago where I thought it was a good use of my time to atomically inspect my own musical taste in the form of a single LA-based pop-trio family band seems like a thousand miles away, if something can be a thousand miles away and lost up your own ass at the same time.

Time dilation as a phenomenon is real, usually expressed in physics whereby two points of reference are warped, each from the perception of the other, by either relative velocity or proximity to a massive body with a profound gravity of its own. As a result, time, a constant only in perception, stalls or speeds up, depending on where you're standing or how fast you're going. Today, standing next to this massive thing that wasn't here a week ago*, the me that existed in relative space last Thursday seems to have sped off an unfathomable distance at a preposterous speed, flickered and vanished, out of sight and into the past or future, doesn't much matter which.

Of course the whole last four months we've been stretched and compressed, stretched and compressed, stretched and compressed, hurtling blobs of wibbly protoplasm hooning around both infinite space (absent the boundaries of routine) and the physical confines of our homes at the exact same time. I'm going to go ahead and speak for you when I say we'd lost hold of the tether that tied us to our compatriots, a disconcerting state of disconnection to tolerate for so social a thing as a human person even if it was for the best of human reasons: to save one another from our plague spittle.

Maybe it's the pent-up demand for connection and commonality that has driven so many to the streets and to the perpetual battlespace of twitter or, if you're a Baby Boomer or a Nazi, Facebook. The fact that anyone showed up for something in tightly packed groups after months of such care, even when the numbers continue to climb and the federal coordinated response (such as it ever was) has been so unceremoniously abandoned it didn't even merit a public shrug, means the motivation is primal and raw and powerful. With the protests, there was risk--and therefore real courage--just in the doing. And that's before police show up en masse, facing down groups of angry and hurt people, creating situations of danger and then deciding to preemptively overreact to them (to protect themselves!) with more police violence against unarmed people. The cycle of control perpetuates itself, and so on and so fucking forth.

As a middle-aged white man of unremarkable means, I ask myself what I can do really. I haven't been out to a protest, mostly because I'm a giant chicken. My hometown has shown out and acquitted itself admirably, sometimes even spectacularly, which has been a source of heart-exploding pride considering our own history with exactly this kind of shame and infamy (I'll say the name Tyisha Miller here). I guess I could make my social media profile pictures into black boxes or whatever. Mainly what I've settled on is to be a pain in the ass with my kids, three young white adult men. It's actually harder than I thought it would be, not because they are resistant, but really for the opposite reason. It's almost impossible to bother somebody about a topic if they're willing and eager to listen, to talk and to ask about it. All we really need out of white people right now is empathy, compassion, the ability to recognize the inequities that don't/won't/can't affect your daily life. Have the capacity to believe someone when they are telling you their story, and then have the presence of mind to ask--not proclaim, not decide, ask--what you can do to help.

I've cheated with my kids because they were raised in minority-majority communities their whole lives and have continued that same demographic balance into post-living-with-dad college life. But even that could go either way. When I was living in roughly the same area in the late 1980s-early 1990s, the majority-minority setup fractured the kids (all new to the same booming population area) into little mutually exclusive bubbles. The quad at lunch was way less melting-pot than armed camps of mutually suspicious city-states, with the white boys striking fear into exactly nobody's hearts as it's impossible to intimidate when you're wearing Birkenstocks with socks.

Like anything worth doing, the lesson has to be vigilance, and we're capable of that more now than we ever have been. Even the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd was recorded and shouted out to us because of the ubiquity of the cell phone camera. It's best we take advantage of the electronic eyes everywhere now before one corporation or another figures out how to turn them into instruments of the state only.

The main things I hope my kids learn is that nobody by default deserves your respect. Anyone can earn it, but nobody gets it automatically, not even cops. People in positions of authority, armed and let loose on the public, should be asked to work harder to earn and maintain the public trust. Automatic respect for the uniform isn't respect, it's deference and deference is the death of vigilance. Even this mild, conceptual position can/will be/has been seen as "anti-police," which is asinine, but this is America. There's a Manichean split down the middle of our social soul between order and justice, where a frightening number of us are happy to obliterate the latter just for the ephemeral liar's-promise of the former.

Deference doesn't buy you anything except the tragic ability to be entertained by the theater of fascism, the cult of order's favorite government. Sometimes I envy the MAGAs their clarity and what must be some pretty comforting fervor. But they'll also be denied the potential release of almost devastating relief when we swap out their overlord on election night in November. You know, probably. That's five months from now, which these days is either eight seconds from now or never.

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*Well, it was here, but then it was Neptune and now it's four Jupiters stapled together