Black Lives Matter

There are protests in thirteen states. When night falls, a few cease to be peaceful. It is difficult to trust that the rioting isn't goosed by agent provocateurs in hopes of providing an excuse for more police brutality or to discredit the message of the protesters. Much seems to be transparent propaganda, but somewhere there must be truth. I do not think that the truth will exist in a fashion where I will ever have it.

Truth is a precious commodity and too many on all sides amplify the salacious over mundane truth. The media fixates on the rioting over peaceful protests, then complain that the public fixates on the riots. They create a narrative that will increase ad revenue. If they covered the protests honestly, people would better know more than that a Target was looted. (Few mention that the Target was bending over backward for the police and refusing to sell protesters supplies to neutralize tear gas. They deserved what they got and even Target headquarters agreed.)

Trump has ordered that he will send the military in to quell the protests. He has threatened those outside the White House with "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons." He had peaceful protesters, including the clergy, teargassed and shot with rubber bullets so that he could walk to a church that did not want to be his photo op and hold a Bible as though not only was he uncomfortable holding a religious book, but he didn't understand what a book was. It is hard to call that action other than cartoonishly, on-the-nose evil. Lex Luther wouldn't do that, at least not so clumsily. He predictably has his defenders licking his boots so hard that the sole is hitting their uvulas. Trump has been hidden in a bunker under the White House because he is afraid of the citizens protesting his policies. He has built a wall around the White House because he fears the citizens. The protesters have responded by turning the wall into a Black Lives Matter art memorial, which I suspect galls Trump further.

There is a video making the rounds of an armored truck rolling up a suburban street in Minneapolis, followed by a contingent of men dressed for battle. They shout for people to get in their houses, as it was curfew despite the abundance of daylight. The woman filming is doing so from her home. One of the men spots her and screams, "Light 'em up!" A half dozen of them stop an open fire at a woman on her porch. To say that this shouldn't happen in America is as trite as it is naive. Yes, this is despotic fascism, but it is not original. The only difference is how easily we can see this, how hard it is to combat a truth we record from a thousand lenses.

America dropped a bomb on its citizens once, in Tulsa, then denied it for decades despite the evidence. Few people pushed for this is be officially known because, hey, it was a war against Black people.

(In 1961, America accidentally dropped two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, 260 times more powerful than the one that obliterated Hiroshima, on North Carolina. One low-voltage switch failed to make the bomb explode.)

The hawks who salivated over going to Vietnam blamed television for our losing the war. For once, Americans could see images of what war is rather than glossy propaganda. News cameras on the ground played unedited for the viewers at home, those who would never have known that war was not righteous and brave. It was disgusting, body parts blown off, genocide, starvation, ordered by men who had evaded the draft or had their parents buy their way out. (I am not averse to the chief executive of the nation not being a veteran. I am opposed to someone fetishizing militarism from a place of hypocrisy.) In war, there are no winners, only survivors. (It is not as though the government treats veterans well. Programs meant to support them are cut, their trauma an institutional inconvenience for whatever administration is in control.)

Maybe we will see this effect now. This renewed era began with Rodney King. Police brutality occurred before--it is an implicit aspect of policing--but some demographics found it easier to be blind to it. The American police as we understand them did start as slave catchers. Some departments and officers seem never to have grown past that, especially as they are incentivized for filling private prisons or stealing assets via civil forfeiture. (And, to a lesser extent of corruption, create impossible speed traps.) The police punish those who record their violence, sometimes even killing them for the audacity of their free speech. Good cops who whistleblow are harassed, stalked, and arrested by their coworkers, something that the Blue Lives Matter crowd manages to overlook.

The dominant paradigm cannot have us turn against our country's war against its citizens, as the populous did with Vietnam. George Floyd's death may be the latest tipping point, but these sorts of protests haven't been in the past. More eyes still, more and instant publication. The propaganda is more obvious and weaker from those shooting protesters for opposing the brutality of a militarized police force sucking clean the public coffers. It doesn't feel hyperbolic to assume that some would rather see us dead than let us unmask their corruption.

In any other country, we would call police shooting at a woman in her house what it was. Eager fascists blame a woman in her house for recording as the jackboots march up her street. (The police also busted into Breonna Taylor's house, shot her dead, and arrested her boyfriend for trying to protect her from aimed intruders. As of this writing, the officers have not been arrested. The person they were looking for was already in custody.) Police have shot rubber bullets at reporters covering the protests. These have not been accidents, people caught in the crossfire. The police have intentionally fired on reporters on camera, blinding them for the crime of letting the world observe brutality. These cops know what they are doing and know too how unlikely it is that they will suffer any consequences for what would be literal war crimes if perpetrated by a foreign army. That, after all, is why people are protesting. Still, to be safe, the police cover their badges while acting like storm troopers.

(As a crucial side note, rubber bullets are not meant to be fired at human beings ever. These bullets are fired at the ground so that most of their force is dispersed and they bounce up to be painful, but not close to as damaging. Are we to expect that I know this but that trained police don't? Should we then assume that the police know exactly what they are doing and want to hurt citizens who are doing nothing wrong, nothing warranting an attempted murder?)

White moderates, to borrow Dr. Martin Luther King's phrase from "Letter from Birmingham Jail," are droning on how the protesters should sit down and shut up. They insist that MLK would have wanted their silence, knowing nothing else about the good reverend but the words "I have a dream," that he was Black, and that he was assassinated. They have felt entitled to lecture Dr. King's children about what they are certain their father would have felt about all this. They confuse non-violent resistance for peaceful compliance with unjustified authorities. They ignore that it is moral to disobey unjust laws and immoral to obey them. A law is just if it upholds human rights. It is easy to name a dozen unjust laws we see every week.

When I run into town for daily exercise, I pass masked teenagers chalking the sidewalks with Black Lives Matter messages. No chanting. Certainly no threat of rioting in Red Hook when the sun goes down. Just a Benetton ad preaching to the choir. (Red Hook is not the liberal enclave I like to assume, but the yokels with Confederate flags on their rusted trucks lack the courage even to slow down when hurling abuse. They overflow with angst at knowing they are, yet again, on the losing side.)

As a white, straight, cis man, the part of the conversation that my voice should occupy is small. I should help to amplify the voices of people who are more directly and constantly threatened by the increased militarization of the police. In Red Hook, all I am amplifying is self-congratulations that we are 91.4% white and thus able to throw minorities a bone that they deserve to live. (The percent of Black people here? 2.4. This town of over eleven thousand people has nearly--but not quite--twenty-six Black residents.)

I do not know that I will attend a formal protest. The trigger-happiness of police and the inclination of agent provocateurs--whatever their affiliation--is enough to give me pause. I support the protesters, having given donations to the cause, but do not know that putting my body on the line contributes much more than making me a tourist to their struggle.

I had about incorporated COVID into my normal and have lived through at least five racially charged explosions of protesting. If we were only dealing with the protests right now and not a pandemic, it would be easier. Critics of the protests, their bias clear, bring up that this is going to lead to a sharp uptick in cases of COVID. It may. The protesters know this and go anyway, though wearing masks and taking precautions. Protesting despite the possibility of a fatal illness should be seen as a conscious sacrifice, far different than the maskless people wielding guns at the police weeks ago because they missed tequila shooters at Senor Frog's.

My friends have attended protests and have seen police taking a knee only until the picture is snapped, then rising with gas masks on to begin assaulting protesters. (I want to underscore that this is not a figure of speech. In exactly those words, unrelated friends in different cities have independently reported the police doing exactly that.) I have seen their pictures of stores boarded up for fear of rioters. I watched a police department's social media as they lied about what the protesters were doing, each outrageous claim ("THEY ARE JUMPING ON POLICE CARS!") shot down by citizens with photographic proof ("One leaned on a police car").

I am safe. It is rare in my life that I have been anything else. In encounters with police, I have had abusive experiences, but I did not fear for my life. I don't expect that to change. To the police, I was not born into an enemy uniform.

Like so many people with privilege, I am uncertain what will happen as a result of this. I recall Occupy Wall Street, which fizzled come winter, though the police committed countless illegal acts with few, if any, repercussions to try to speed the process. Occupy became fuzzy around the edges on what they wanted, which was further used to turn them into toothless hippies in the public consciousness. Black Lives Matter has a clear and consistent goal: stop the police from killing Black people.

I don't know what it would take for us to feel that this goal had been met. The movement is nationwide--international, even--so December isn't going to stop it. Defunding the police--which is not abolition--would be a fine start. Many services are better performed by institutions that don't see a gun as an essential tool. Weapons of war should not be used against one's citizens. It is impossible now to say it is otherwise. (Or, I suppose, imprudent, because a vocal minority would give the police predator drones if they could.) Our police have more severe equipment than actual soldiers in warzones while politicians think little of defunding every educational and social program they can find to balance the budget. (Whenever a politician conflates defunding the police with eliminating them, please know that they are lying and expect you to be too stupid to realize. They've defunded your kid's music classes without a care. They've defunded programs meant to help mentally ill people stay in society.)

My first exposure to rioting was after the OJ Simpson verdict. Judge Ito ruled him not guilty--at least criminally that day--but still it was a riotous occasion. My high school, which had a larger proportion of minority students than some surrounding districts, announced the verdict over the PA. I also recall there being an assembly where some students watched it on TV, but I can't swear that this happened. I don't know what the school was thinking by doing this, but the reaction was massive violence. I was in my social studies class when it happened. Students ran out of the room to the teacher's caution. He wasn't paid enough to stop them.

In the hallway, kids threw garbage cans, screaming, hitting lockers. Our teacher congratulated us on staying inside the room, but he made no further effort to continue the lesson. What would be the point? He said that he would keep us safe and asked us to stay put. A few other students, realizing that the chaos outside the door beat the reassurances inside, bolted.

The initial spurt of rioting in the school lasted half an hour. Then someone pulled the fire alarm--garbage cans had been lit on fire--and we evacuated. Outside, there was much less chaos. The kids, having gotten what they wanted, relaxed, smoked, and talked. The principal came out and used a bullhorn to admonish us, but it didn't affect us. I did not mind being outside, because it seems safer than being locked in a room with my teacher as my classmates tore the school apart.

I didn't understand the purpose of this rioting. It seemed that this was the verdict that people wanted to hear. There were rumblings that it was unjust that OJ Simpson was even arrested for this crime. At the time and now, I do think that OJ Simpson killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend Ron Goldman. That is the widely accepted story and a civil trial ruled him culpable. Had it not been for a cop, Mark Furman, planting evidence at the scene, they could have secured a conviction.

I wish that the BLM protests were no longer necessary, but a new video confirms daily that they must continue. More people will suffer at the hands of the police. The police will kill us for not wanting people killed by the police. The police are not meant to be executioners. They are not meant to punish (that would be a matter for the courts), a notion that shocks people. Many services that the police arguably provide would be better given to people not trained to shoot first because they are scared. Someone with their finger on a trigger should not be performing wellness checks on the mentally ill or homeless.

Racism does not make me feel safe, which is selfish. It is a healthy reaction, like nausea around corpses or wincing when one sees a stranger fall. Where there is prejudice toward anyone, there is a threat to everyone. Working with dysregulated boys, I know that healthy reactions cannot be assumed. I am self-interested, but it is akin to wanting to expel toxic gas so that no one breathes it (including me). We are still far from a place where that is feasible, in no small way because the president encourages the use of actual toxic gas. They will poison us a while longer, though maybe more are realizing that they were never in the presence of fresh air.

I don't have it in me to make the sacrifices some have. I can deescalate adjudicated youth, but there is no soothing police with riot shields in need of breaking in. I can make ten other excuses and regret them all, but I am still making them. I was never going to be a revolutionary in the front of the crowd. I don't have the courage for it, the constitution. I am a slacktivist, for the most part. I am not looking to be pitied or consoled for this weakness. I spread awareness. I donate. I paint small rocks with equality and Black Lives Matter slogans and scatter them around my suburb. I support BLM, but so do many. I don't know that my bumper sticker agreement does much or surprises anyone who knows me. What is this but saying near aphorisms so dilute that they are barely controversial? It borders on the masturbatory, as though I deserve praise for saying the right things. Of course, Black lives matter, and police receive an obscene portion of public funds. It seems ludicrous to maintain otherwise. These should not be partisan issues, except that people want to claim them (or their strange opposites) as political banners. Why would small-government Republicans want to give all the taxes to an intrusive government arm going after personal freedoms to the benefit of the private prison system?

Violent revolution, though it may be necessary, makes me anxious. Knowing this is the background of my life in 2020 is traumatizing, though far less than those losing eyes and lives to police bullets. I continue my privileged middle class, DINK existence. My local police are going to troll for speeding tickets, but they will leave the infrequent protesters alone. This upheaval is personal because there are Black people in my life whom I love, my elder two nieces in particular, and for whom want a better world, but it won't be a necessity of my daily struggle. Few feel the value of my life is under debate.

I am not in the group that will decide that the protests have achieved their goals or when. I cannot predict when it will end, but I know we are still in the first contractions of birth, full of agony and hope.

Soon in Xenology: Probably more about COVID-19, since, you know, the world is ending and everything. Black lives mattering.

last watched: Travelers
reading: Last Book on the Left