I’ve been below the radar and nearly off the grid for the last week. For what it’s worth, I’m trying to find a way to budget my time in such a way that I can still include the nearly two hours required each day to write this blog, and I’m not quite there yet. It would help if there could somehow be twenty-six hours each day, but even at that, I’d probably just fall asleep in my recliner an hour earlier and sleep an hour later. But enough about me. Site statistics show a total of two page views today, and if I’m successful, I can at least double that within the next five or six hundred words.
My youngest son, Zach, just arrived home from New York yesterday. He lives in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn and he told me that the site of the murders of two NYPD cops was just a short half mile bike ride from his brownstone. He and a friend rode by and saw an ocean of police vehicles with strobe lights flashing and yellow tape strung far and wide even a day after the incident. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers and hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Zach was part of the peaceful protests against the most recent wave of police brutality (Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, etc.) According to Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and a host of FOX News talking heads, the blame for the murders of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos can be laid squarely at the feet of President Obama, Mayor Bill deBlasio, and pretty much anyone else who spoke out against the sanctioned murders of so many unarmed black men and boys. At the head of this chorus of finger-pointers was Patrick Lynch, the president of the NYC Policeman’s Benevolent Association. To translate and paraphrase the sentiments of Lynch regarding the police, “You’re either with us or you’re against us”.
That has been the stance of police across the country since these protests began. A cop in Mishawaka, Indiana, who printed and distributed hundreds of “Breathe Easy, Don’t Break The Law” t-shirts, is emblematic of the police (and conservative) mindset. They feel the police are blameless, that there is no racism or profiling involved, and that if every citizen obeyed every law and demonstrated instant obedience to every police command, no one would ever need to be hurt. For instance, if Eric Garner simply hadn’t committed the heinous offense of selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, and if he had meekly offered his wrists to be cuffed the moment officer Daniel Pantaleo told him to do so, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this today. And if Tamir Rice, a twelve year-old boy, had only raised his hands and laid prone on the grass…within the less than two seconds of the Cleveland cop diving out of his police cruiser and firing the fatal shots, no one would have anything about which to protest.
Look, the murder of those two NYPD officers whose only crime was wearing the uniform and doing their job is appalling, but it is no more or less appalling than the murders of Brown, Rice, Garner, and hundreds of others whose deaths never made the news. But while these murders are shocking, they are in no way surprising. I’ve said this before: There is a huge well of frustration and anger in this country, and the basis is largely income disparity paired with racism. What is surprising to me is that the frustration and anger haven’t yet boiled into something even more toxic. The protests of the last few weeks have, in fact, been very restrained, very well-informed, and very peaceful…but there is no reason to believe they will forever remain acts of passive resistance.
There is a perception among a segment of the population, mostly young black men, that their every action, from simply walking down the street wearing a certain kind of clothing to petty crimes like shoplifting, can be treated as a capital offense by the police without any repercussions whatsoever for the cop who carries out the summary execution. And there is another segment of the population, mainly the police, who see the world in very sharply defined camps of “us” and “them”. Right now, these two segments are basically at war. The murders of the two NYPD street cops is only going to add fuel to the fire. There will undoubtedly be more of the same in other cities, and the police response, rather than restraint, will be justifiable paranoia, with even more black men being gunned down on the slimmest of pretexts.
I don’t have an answer for any of this. In a perfect world, we’d simply get rid of the means of all these murders, the guns. But that has the same chance of happening as the Bears winning the Superbowl, the Cubs the World Series, and me being named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. So we’ll have to deal with the world as it is. As Bad Santa might say, “Merry freaking Christmas.”
BW
Kibbitz Corner 