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.
---
*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."
Showing posts with label #blacklivesmatter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #blacklivesmatter. Show all posts
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Take Up Our Quarrel With The Foe
When tragedy strikes, what's the first thing you absolutely have to know? First, obviously, is exactly how much money and energy a cable news outfit has devoted to a kick-ass graphics department and timpani drums.
Second, where all the victims fit in the hierarchy of international who-gives-a-shit.
-Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappears. Three Americans lost, including two Baby-Americans, plus probably other people.
-Tsunami in 2004 kills around 230,000 people, and especially 33 Americans.
-Malaysia Airlines (seriously, again) Flight MH17, some number of Americans killed between 1 and 23, depending (for a few hours at least) on your party affiliation. Obama's perceived level of outrage only applicable to this number, whatever it happened to be. Not that interesting in the context of the larger human tragedy involving 280+ foreigners, possibly shifty-eyed ones (again, depending on your party affiliation).
-Japan suffers tsunami/earthquake/nuclear-meltdown triple whammy. Americans killed: PROBABLY ALL EVENTUALLY.
-9/11/01, 2,977 killed, all automatically American. Not killed? Our freedom.
-9/11/12, 4 Americans died in Benghazi which, if you're the president, is enough to get people whispering about impeachment. Crazy people, so more of a muttered self-directed monologue, but still, the word was used. "If our government knows who perpetrated the attack that killed four Americans, it is critical that they be questioned and placed in custody of US officials without delay," scary bigface U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa said. "Delays in apprehending the suspected Benghazi killers will only put American lives at further and needless risk."
So what's the point? The point is that like any good citizen, I learn what I need to know about what's important between short films about the implied virility-making powers of light beer and, not ironically, old couples painting a fence to mid-tempo soft jazz under a softly voiced recitation of the possible side-effects of ED medication. Even before and after the ascent and decline of cable news, from all other sources, I know that when death happens, anywhere in the world, the first thing I'm going to know is how many Americans it killed. And if the number is large enough or if the context can be bent into something politically opportune, the point will be reinforced as it is forged into either policy or (100% more likely) some high-production-value political theater.
The lives of Americans are precious. They're the most important thing. If you're reading USA Today the day after the tsunami killed literally hundreds of thousands of people, the lede is going to include the number of Americans. Because why else would you bother to care? Those aren't the important ones. The Americans... they have names we recognize and hometowns that look like our hometowns and middle class aspirations and shared values.
Unless... the American dies in America? At the hands of another American? And is male? And is black? Now we have controversy?
Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner.
If they'd gone down in a plane or were blown up by a bomb in a nightclub in Bali we'd get some non-partisan candlelight vigils for them and soft-focus retrospective TV news features starring slow-zooming close-ups of smiling photographs accompanied by tinkly piano music. They'd be the most important thing: dead Americans. The only thing worth taking notice of in a world full of news.
Instead, nah, hang on. These ones we have to talk about.
When I see the protests, though, even though nobody is saying it directly that I've seen, this is the central point the protesters are trying to remind us of: these are Americans. And American lives matter. Before I give in to despair over the polarization, I remember: as long as there have been Americans, there have been those of us willing to risk all, to arrive, to fight and to die to win the dignity and safety of their countrymen that those protesting may already comfortably and presumptively enjoy, without regard to the idiot visual shibboleth of racial commonality. As horrible as it all is, has been and will continue to be, there's palpable evidence that we--the sane and unafraid--are winning. But as fast as it's coming, it will never be here fast enough.
Second, where all the victims fit in the hierarchy of international who-gives-a-shit.
-Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappears. Three Americans lost, including two Baby-Americans, plus probably other people.
-Tsunami in 2004 kills around 230,000 people, and especially 33 Americans.
-Malaysia Airlines (seriously, again) Flight MH17, some number of Americans killed between 1 and 23, depending (for a few hours at least) on your party affiliation. Obama's perceived level of outrage only applicable to this number, whatever it happened to be. Not that interesting in the context of the larger human tragedy involving 280+ foreigners, possibly shifty-eyed ones (again, depending on your party affiliation).
-Japan suffers tsunami/earthquake/nuclear-meltdown triple whammy. Americans killed: PROBABLY ALL EVENTUALLY.
-9/11/01, 2,977 killed, all automatically American. Not killed? Our freedom.
-9/11/12, 4 Americans died in Benghazi which, if you're the president, is enough to get people whispering about impeachment. Crazy people, so more of a muttered self-directed monologue, but still, the word was used. "If our government knows who perpetrated the attack that killed four Americans, it is critical that they be questioned and placed in custody of US officials without delay," scary bigface U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa said. "Delays in apprehending the suspected Benghazi killers will only put American lives at further and needless risk."
So what's the point? The point is that like any good citizen, I learn what I need to know about what's important between short films about the implied virility-making powers of light beer and, not ironically, old couples painting a fence to mid-tempo soft jazz under a softly voiced recitation of the possible side-effects of ED medication. Even before and after the ascent and decline of cable news, from all other sources, I know that when death happens, anywhere in the world, the first thing I'm going to know is how many Americans it killed. And if the number is large enough or if the context can be bent into something politically opportune, the point will be reinforced as it is forged into either policy or (100% more likely) some high-production-value political theater.
The lives of Americans are precious. They're the most important thing. If you're reading USA Today the day after the tsunami killed literally hundreds of thousands of people, the lede is going to include the number of Americans. Because why else would you bother to care? Those aren't the important ones. The Americans... they have names we recognize and hometowns that look like our hometowns and middle class aspirations and shared values.
Unless... the American dies in America? At the hands of another American? And is male? And is black? Now we have controversy?
Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner.
If they'd gone down in a plane or were blown up by a bomb in a nightclub in Bali we'd get some non-partisan candlelight vigils for them and soft-focus retrospective TV news features starring slow-zooming close-ups of smiling photographs accompanied by tinkly piano music. They'd be the most important thing: dead Americans. The only thing worth taking notice of in a world full of news.
Instead, nah, hang on. These ones we have to talk about.
When I see the protests, though, even though nobody is saying it directly that I've seen, this is the central point the protesters are trying to remind us of: these are Americans. And American lives matter. Before I give in to despair over the polarization, I remember: as long as there have been Americans, there have been those of us willing to risk all, to arrive, to fight and to die to win the dignity and safety of their countrymen that those protesting may already comfortably and presumptively enjoy, without regard to the idiot visual shibboleth of racial commonality. As horrible as it all is, has been and will continue to be, there's palpable evidence that we--the sane and unafraid--are winning. But as fast as it's coming, it will never be here fast enough.
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