How I remember it
“You Can’t blame them if they’re a little jumpy.” The you was a man speaking for himself, after telling the radio audience that he had been held up three times; twice by African American men. The them, police officers that shoot and kill…I want to say without thinking, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
I grew up in the 1970’s. It was different back then than it is today. I grew up in a nation that perhaps superficially, but seemingly, was one people. We weren’t divided along the many lines we are today. The Ku Klux Klan was mostly a thing of the past, almost forgotten. And they were the white supremacist group, but largely didn’t even claim that characteristic, publicly, anyway, at the time. This is how I remember it.
The movements had come and been largely a success. That’s the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement and the environmental movement and others. There had also been the anti-war movement and the Vietnam War had come to an end.
But there was a movement stirring underneath. A mysterious mix of perhaps confusion, but certainly fear and anger was moving somewhere in the depths of our society. It seemed that some people had gotten a little uppity. There was too much freedom now and it could be known by the success of those movements. The middle class had exercised their new found power (time and energy afforded by well paying jobs) and influenced the way things worked.
Freedom is a frightening thing for many. Those that wield their power unjustly, in particular, dislike freedom. Such people look big on the outside, but they’re really small on the inside — full of unacknowledged fear.
They put a stop to the economic good times the middle class was basking in. Division was a big tool used to trip us up. Confusion was another. Fear was probably the greatest.
Government was characterized as being against the people, even though it was the people (not quite so bought as it is today). Some people were labeled sluts and others thugs, and many were to be afraid of, suddenly.
It was a sort of reverse revolution, turning freedom upside down. Some even called the “new” economic ideas that sucked the middle class wealth into a higher and mightier storm of wealth concentration to the top, “neo-liberalism.” It was more freedom to rape and plunder. A few got a great kick out of it, but many weren’t happy.
Not happy at all. In fact many began feeling angry because the once ease with which their lives had been lived was being stripped out from under them.
But that was all for the good of the few with the power to wield. The anger could be directed away from where it laid to those fewer in number — for instance, the women that cherished, for good reason, their reproductive rights. They would be called sluts. The black men without jobs and wages would be called thugs. In fact, they would go to prison by the deluge. One in four would go to prison. Somehow the money would be gathered to house millions in institutions that further sucked the life out of people, instead of investing in education, skills training, healthcare and jobs that could have enticed them off the streets and into stable living conditions. Women pitted against each other, meanwhile, loose the tremendous potential they have to be a big part of creating peace and prosperity. Those are only two examples of how the decay billowed forth.
Now I find that I live in this place where we are no longer one; where the kkk is one of thousands of such groups and is alive and well posturing every chance they get. Such hate groups are well infiltrated into our police departments whose purpose is to serve and protect the public; not just part of the public, but all of it. But how can people that hate a portion of the public, serve all the public? They can’t, and they don’t.
For a while, I had comfortably forgotten about police killings that seem so absurd it makes my psyche search in vain for understanding. They make national news and immediately we take sides and divide up on the issue. Both sides feeling deeply — on one side, compassion for the dead and his family and community and horror at the brutal injustice; on the other side, feeling threat and grateful for the promise of a justice system that will keep them safe along with confusion as to why the other side would blame police action.
The divide is so deep that I don’t think we can claim the Grand Canyon as the deepest and biggest in our nation anymore. That divide continues to play into those hands that fear real freedom.
That’s my story as I know it and I’m hoping that it doesn’t further the divide (in any direction), but I’m not sure that it can’t at this point. I have hesitated to have a response since the two recent killings just a day apart because I see what I have said here and I don’t want to further that divide, yet I can’t stay silent when, as the reader sees, I see the situation as horrific (and horrifying) and profoundly unjust. The answer continues to be a mystery for me. But, I know we can do better. We can do even better than what we have before.
C��w
