What the Hell?!
It was bound to happen.
Ever since Ruby Ridge, and maybe even before that, this country has this semimythical sense of balancing "the scales" and the events of last evening (Thursday night) prove this to me.
Let me take you back (if you are old enough) or fill you in (if you are young enough) to the time when this country was largely and blissfully unaware that problems with law enforcement were limited to sparse media coverage and the old age of civil rights (which most of us who grew up in the seventies missed....unless you were black).
Let me stop here and make an apology. I am a white man who grew up as a white child in a "mostly white" world. I was blissfully unaware, that there was even a problem with race until I was 6 and refused to hold a black girls hand in gym class and someone said some word that made no sense and everybody just nodded as if you could expect no less from me. It didn't matter to anyone that the girl had been mean to me or stolen my pencil in class.
But I digress.
I am going to stop myself here. Let me just add that there was a lot of bad things that happened in the lull between the press coverage of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's and the rude awakening of the early 90's. I do not mean to imply that nothing happened, lots of things happened. What I mean to say was there was a subtle shift for someone growing up in the white man's world.
The shift showed up slowly, mostly because it was treated as this faraway problem of unrest and uncertainty as human went about doing inhuman things to other humans and calling it one thing or another. For some of us, it was an ignorant sense of bliss as we were able to grow up without a constant fear dogging our lives.
What is this shift, you might ask (while the rest will jump to conclusions and declare anything I write to be wrong)?
The shift was perception. The perception of law enforcement.
(someone, somewhere just jumped up and yelled "Finally! He gets to the point!")
The point is this. We, as Americans, grew up with preconceived ideas of who and what Policemen were and what they did. What unified this for many of us was television.
I grew up with small amounts of exposure to this phenomena unlike I suspect many of my peers. I did not have a tv in our house so all my exposure to tv came through seeing it in other places. Places like the after school sitters' houses and during a visit to one of my mother's relatives.
I saw law enforcement through the gilded shows of Andy Griffith, All My Sons, and Barney Miller.
The pattern was set and I believe in the idea that the police were well meaning individuals who seldom ever used their guns, spoke plainly and seldom ever resorted to violence. In fact, I did not refer to them a police or law enforcement, I referred to them a peacekeepers or keepers of the peace.
The Peacekeepers
It was a wonderful concept that was largely attached to the old west of yore and legend. Men who dedicated their lives to being fair, honor bound and preserving the peace for the public trust.
It never occurred to me that there was a complete or nearly complete lack of race in these shows. It was never mentioned or brought up, in fact, until Archie Bunker reared his ugly head and reminded America that it wasn't all "Father knows Best" and you couldn't leave it to the Beaver.
In short, I was first exposed to TV in the south where 1950's TV was still king.
I really believed that the policeman was to be respected and honored for keeping the peace. It never occurred to me to doubt it until I went home to South Africa in 1980 to a very different world, a world much more like the civil rights world of 1960's America. The illusion was shattered but not the ideal.
I still hold to that ideal. I have been on the other side of that shield (albeit in a much lesser capacity as a security guard for a campus police force). It was eye opening and I needed to see that the police were not as bad as they had come to be, in my mind growing up in the 90's. (I will come back to this at the end, I promise).
What happened to change my perception of law enforcement?
One Word.
Waco.
I don't have time or energy to go over how everything went wrong in Waco but let me say that it was as some of my peers call it- a cluster fuck (sorry but there is just no other word that occurs to me at this point)
I know what some of you are going to say:
Mike, this wasn't the police.
It wasn't the police but it was law enforcement agency (in particular the ATF and the FBI).
Mike, this wasn't about race.
It wasn't race, it wasn't even religion. No, it was about a group of law enforcement agencies overstepping their authority and mishandling a volatile situation that went horribly and tragically wrong. It was about a group of men and women believing they were doing the right thing and just how badly their decisions turned out.
Ironically, it didn't actually happen in Waco.
But all I have to say is Waco and every white person (at least) will immediately remember that FUBAR.
Everyone has analyzed Waco to death. Well not everyone, but the media certainly did.
The problem with Waco was it was actually the middle, although it was the beginning for me.
By the time I learned aboutRuby Ridge- I had discovered that what I perceived as the causes of Waco had been going on for a long time (mostly without media coverage).
Bear with me.
Ruby Ridge happened before Waco but I had missed it or not realized how much trouble we were in.
It was bad and it made a lot of people very angry.
It made one man extremely angry.
I suspect he had lost his appreciation and respect for law enforcement a long time before me.
On the morning of April 19th, 1995. Timothy McVeigh let the US and 848 people directly how he felt about what was going on. Right or wrong, justified or not. Timothy McVeigh found it necessary to kill 168 people and injured/damaged 680 others in what appears to have been a terrifying act of retribution, this country has ever witnessed from one of its citizens.
I am not going to say anything more about this except to point at this as the basis of my point.
One man (with help) decided to do this - he did not apparently feel as he had any other recourse.
Again, right or wrong or somewhere in between, he committed this action because his perception of law enforcement had changed to something very ugly.
So why go on and on about this awful stuff?
Because Dallas.
Because of what just happened in Dallas.
5 policemen are dead, 12 more are injured in what is the deadliest direct attack on law enforcement in a long time. Retributive attacks are not new things and the police have suffered losses like this before but not at this scope, that I know of.
Right or wrong, there are some very angry Americans right now.
This is in a wake of 2 recent, execution style murders of African American men. Not criminals, just ordinary men trying to live in this racially charged state of the USA.
What is more, is these kinds of deaths of African American men has almost but not quite become a "normal" thing (which is utterly horrific in and of itself).
What makes this so much worse is what has happened after each of these killings. The outcry from the victims and many Americans and almost no penalty to the perpetrators (police/law enforcement) of the killings.
The disparity between this and all these "white privileged" criminals getting unbelievably light sentences for the often unspeakable crimes they commit shows that we have not gotten very far along from all that was wrong in the 1960's.
It's going to get worse, possibly a lot worse before it gets better.
It hurts.
As long as Law Enforcement- as a whole is perceived as the purveyors of this kind of racism and violence, it won't get better.
I know policemen, personally.
I don't know any racist policemen. Pretty much all of the ones I know right now, I would describe as good men and women trying to make their towns and communities safer for everyone, not just the "privileged white folks."
I don't have any solutions that anyone will even consider.
Guns are not a solution and yet everyone will be using them as such
(if you don't understand this, refer to my earlier blog).
Killing someone should not be the solution either. We, as a country, really- really need to stop referring to killing someone as the solution to any problem.
It doesn't work in any case other than the extremely short term.
If you disagree, then I am surprised you have read this blog this far.
To the Police, I would ask for perseverance and calm. We need you. We need you to be leveled headed and use good judgment before you use your guns. We need you to find a new or old definition of what you are and what you are trying to do that doesn't become a slur for overreach or synonymous with brutality and racial violence.
To Law Enforcement (whoever sets the terms in this country) get a name changed to Upholding the Laws we all voted for or something else that conveys that we should trust you to do what is best for everyone.
To the victims. especially, my brothers, I leave you with wiser words than any I could come up with.
"The second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these." and "Forgive your enemies." and "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
A man who came from Galilee (or "the wrong side of the tracks") said these things and changed the world. Not just any man, of course, but he would not have been one of the privileged men of his time.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
Another man said this, he was also from the wrong side of the tracks.
If you don't know about those two men, I am referring to, I am sorry but I can't help you.
Otherwise, that is all I have today.
Pray for peace, forgiveness, and compassion for all men and women (and everyone else)
Be kind, if you can; love everyone as much as you can; hate no one, if you can; and think carefully before you speak and/or act, if you can.
I can and I will.
And that is life according to Mike.
addendums to the fact.
See? I am not the only one who feels this way.
Okay, I hear those three conservatives who finally made it to the bottom of this blog grinding their collective teeth and sharpening their knives.
It was bound to happen.
Ever since Ruby Ridge, and maybe even before that, this country has this semimythical sense of balancing "the scales" and the events of last evening (Thursday night) prove this to me.
Let me take you back (if you are old enough) or fill you in (if you are young enough) to the time when this country was largely and blissfully unaware that problems with law enforcement were limited to sparse media coverage and the old age of civil rights (which most of us who grew up in the seventies missed....unless you were black).
Let me stop here and make an apology. I am a white man who grew up as a white child in a "mostly white" world. I was blissfully unaware, that there was even a problem with race until I was 6 and refused to hold a black girls hand in gym class and someone said some word that made no sense and everybody just nodded as if you could expect no less from me. It didn't matter to anyone that the girl had been mean to me or stolen my pencil in class.
But I digress.
I am going to stop myself here. Let me just add that there was a lot of bad things that happened in the lull between the press coverage of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's and the rude awakening of the early 90's. I do not mean to imply that nothing happened, lots of things happened. What I mean to say was there was a subtle shift for someone growing up in the white man's world.
The shift showed up slowly, mostly because it was treated as this faraway problem of unrest and uncertainty as human went about doing inhuman things to other humans and calling it one thing or another. For some of us, it was an ignorant sense of bliss as we were able to grow up without a constant fear dogging our lives.
What is this shift, you might ask (while the rest will jump to conclusions and declare anything I write to be wrong)?
The shift was perception. The perception of law enforcement.
(someone, somewhere just jumped up and yelled "Finally! He gets to the point!")
The point is this. We, as Americans, grew up with preconceived ideas of who and what Policemen were and what they did. What unified this for many of us was television.
I grew up with small amounts of exposure to this phenomena unlike I suspect many of my peers. I did not have a tv in our house so all my exposure to tv came through seeing it in other places. Places like the after school sitters' houses and during a visit to one of my mother's relatives.
I saw law enforcement through the gilded shows of Andy Griffith, All My Sons, and Barney Miller.
The pattern was set and I believe in the idea that the police were well meaning individuals who seldom ever used their guns, spoke plainly and seldom ever resorted to violence. In fact, I did not refer to them a police or law enforcement, I referred to them a peacekeepers or keepers of the peace.
The Peacekeepers
It was a wonderful concept that was largely attached to the old west of yore and legend. Men who dedicated their lives to being fair, honor bound and preserving the peace for the public trust.
It never occurred to me that there was a complete or nearly complete lack of race in these shows. It was never mentioned or brought up, in fact, until Archie Bunker reared his ugly head and reminded America that it wasn't all "Father knows Best" and you couldn't leave it to the Beaver.
In short, I was first exposed to TV in the south where 1950's TV was still king.
I really believed that the policeman was to be respected and honored for keeping the peace. It never occurred to me to doubt it until I went home to South Africa in 1980 to a very different world, a world much more like the civil rights world of 1960's America. The illusion was shattered but not the ideal.
I still hold to that ideal. I have been on the other side of that shield (albeit in a much lesser capacity as a security guard for a campus police force). It was eye opening and I needed to see that the police were not as bad as they had come to be, in my mind growing up in the 90's. (I will come back to this at the end, I promise).
What happened to change my perception of law enforcement?
One Word.
Waco.
I don't have time or energy to go over how everything went wrong in Waco but let me say that it was as some of my peers call it- a cluster fuck (sorry but there is just no other word that occurs to me at this point)
I know what some of you are going to say:
Mike, this wasn't the police.
It wasn't the police but it was law enforcement agency (in particular the ATF and the FBI).
Mike, this wasn't about race.
It wasn't race, it wasn't even religion. No, it was about a group of law enforcement agencies overstepping their authority and mishandling a volatile situation that went horribly and tragically wrong. It was about a group of men and women believing they were doing the right thing and just how badly their decisions turned out.
Ironically, it didn't actually happen in Waco.
But all I have to say is Waco and every white person (at least) will immediately remember that FUBAR.
Everyone has analyzed Waco to death. Well not everyone, but the media certainly did.
The problem with Waco was it was actually the middle, although it was the beginning for me.
By the time I learned aboutRuby Ridge- I had discovered that what I perceived as the causes of Waco had been going on for a long time (mostly without media coverage).
Bear with me.
Ruby Ridge happened before Waco but I had missed it or not realized how much trouble we were in.
It was bad and it made a lot of people very angry.
It made one man extremely angry.
I suspect he had lost his appreciation and respect for law enforcement a long time before me.
On the morning of April 19th, 1995. Timothy McVeigh let the US and 848 people directly how he felt about what was going on. Right or wrong, justified or not. Timothy McVeigh found it necessary to kill 168 people and injured/damaged 680 others in what appears to have been a terrifying act of retribution, this country has ever witnessed from one of its citizens.
I am not going to say anything more about this except to point at this as the basis of my point.
One man (with help) decided to do this - he did not apparently feel as he had any other recourse.
Again, right or wrong or somewhere in between, he committed this action because his perception of law enforcement had changed to something very ugly.
So why go on and on about this awful stuff?
Because Dallas.
Because of what just happened in Dallas.
5 policemen are dead, 12 more are injured in what is the deadliest direct attack on law enforcement in a long time. Retributive attacks are not new things and the police have suffered losses like this before but not at this scope, that I know of.
Right or wrong, there are some very angry Americans right now.
This is in a wake of 2 recent, execution style murders of African American men. Not criminals, just ordinary men trying to live in this racially charged state of the USA.
What is more, is these kinds of deaths of African American men has almost but not quite become a "normal" thing (which is utterly horrific in and of itself).
What makes this so much worse is what has happened after each of these killings. The outcry from the victims and many Americans and almost no penalty to the perpetrators (police/law enforcement) of the killings.
The disparity between this and all these "white privileged" criminals getting unbelievably light sentences for the often unspeakable crimes they commit shows that we have not gotten very far along from all that was wrong in the 1960's.
It's going to get worse, possibly a lot worse before it gets better.
It hurts.
As long as Law Enforcement- as a whole is perceived as the purveyors of this kind of racism and violence, it won't get better.
I know policemen, personally.
I don't know any racist policemen. Pretty much all of the ones I know right now, I would describe as good men and women trying to make their towns and communities safer for everyone, not just the "privileged white folks."
I don't have any solutions that anyone will even consider.
Guns are not a solution and yet everyone will be using them as such
(if you don't understand this, refer to my earlier blog).
Killing someone should not be the solution either. We, as a country, really- really need to stop referring to killing someone as the solution to any problem.
It doesn't work in any case other than the extremely short term.
If you disagree, then I am surprised you have read this blog this far.
To the Police, I would ask for perseverance and calm. We need you. We need you to be leveled headed and use good judgment before you use your guns. We need you to find a new or old definition of what you are and what you are trying to do that doesn't become a slur for overreach or synonymous with brutality and racial violence.
To Law Enforcement (whoever sets the terms in this country) get a name changed to Upholding the Laws we all voted for or something else that conveys that we should trust you to do what is best for everyone.
To the victims. especially, my brothers, I leave you with wiser words than any I could come up with.
"The second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these." and "Forgive your enemies." and "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
A man who came from Galilee (or "the wrong side of the tracks") said these things and changed the world. Not just any man, of course, but he would not have been one of the privileged men of his time.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
Another man said this, he was also from the wrong side of the tracks.
If you don't know about those two men, I am referring to, I am sorry but I can't help you.
Otherwise, that is all I have today.
Pray for peace, forgiveness, and compassion for all men and women (and everyone else)
Be kind, if you can; love everyone as much as you can; hate no one, if you can; and think carefully before you speak and/or act, if you can.
I can and I will.
And that is life according to Mike.
addendums to the fact.
See? I am not the only one who feels this way.
Okay, I hear those three conservatives who finally made it to the bottom of this blog grinding their collective teeth and sharpening their knives.
and then there is this:
At least two cops killed, many wounded in Baton Rouge
and it continues.
I dread what happens next.
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