ramblings

Recently I had workshopped a draft of an essay about being a radical, an essay in which I attempted, at one point, to describe something of the world my friends and I live in:

In this world. . . black men get shot on the streets every day, and other black men are put in prison for crimes they did not commit, and the white police officers who fired the bullets are sent out again with a slap on the wrist and a bigger gun.

(It is probably worth noting that I wrote these words several weeks before the acquittal of a white police officer in Cincinnati, who shot a young, unarmed black man to death. The workshop took place a few days after the decision.) The overwhelming reaction of the workshop members to this particular passage was that this was not a radical position and that, in fact, “most Americans believed this” and “prominent people spoke about it.” I was rather stunned. Of course, I remembered, it was true that a hundred or so upper middle class white students at my high school walked out of school on the day of the Rodney King verdict (I did not, nor, interestingly, did any of the other people in Ruth Greenwald’s Geometry Honors class which met that afternoon. We asked Miss Greenwald to tell us about student protests from back when; but I think we all felt, oddly, that protest on that day was futile, and knew, somehow, that Miss Greenwald had something left to teach us–and I think that she did). And it is true that hundreds of people marched in New York after the shooting of Amadou Diallou, and Susan Sarandon and some other “prominent people” got arrested. All this is true, and would seem to indicate that my colleagues were right, that the majority of people share this view of the world that I’d presented. And I think that it is true; I think that a lot of people out there feel that racial profiling exists, that police brutality exists, that the legal systems set up to deal with this are inadequate. But I maintain that there is a difference–not a difference, necessarily, in commitment, or even in effectiveness (for who knows what is truly effective?), but a difference in view.

When I fed the poor they called me a saint. When I asked why they were poor, they called me a communist. –Archbishop Hedler Chamoa Hèlder Câmara I saw that in someone’s signature recently; I don’t know who Archbishop Chamoa Câmara is or when this was said, but it represents, albeit somewhat blatantly, at least part of the difference I’m trying to get at. [There's no way to talk about this without creating an us/them dichotomy. I apologize--the limits of our language are the limits of our world (I think Wittgenstein said something along those lines, but never actually having read him, I'm a little out of line in attributing--or using--the exact quotation. But the idea is one I've had myself.)]

The world I live in is one in which these things happen every day and no one notices. We all know that the majority of rapes go unreported and that many crimes go uncaught. Yet many seem to believe that these undetected, unpunished crimes are only those of the vandals–the petty thieves, the minor arsonists. The idea that undetected, unpunished crimes could be carried out by those in uniforms–whether they be military, police, judicial, Wall Street, G-8, what have you–is one that, for many, is harder to accept. And when they do accept it, it is seen as an aberration, one which will be rectified by witness, by spontaneous demonstration, perhaps by a few celebrity arrests. That these crimes are committed daily, routinely, and that they must be questioned and stopped from their roots, and that that questioning and stopping may well have to take the form of “radical” action, is something this supposed majority seems unable or unwilling to admit.

There was something hopeful in the fact that, after all, four of the twelve members of the silent majority believed us. But four of twelve in the Gallup polls believed in unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam as well. They are willing enough to register their opinions but too defeated to live them. Fascism will come to America by compromise: not through the strength of reaction but through the weakness of the good people.
–Tom Hayden, Trial, 1970

A week or so ago I heard a politician–probably Rudy Giuliani, but it might
have been someone else–giving a speech at some sort of memorial service for victims of S11. (We activist types write all dates that way since A16, the
first major protests against the IMF/World Bank in DC on 16 April 2000).

“When were kids,” the speaker said, “and people asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, what did we say? ‘A policeman.’ ‘A fireman.’ Well, we
grew up and we didn’t do that. But today I tell you, when we are asked what
we want to be, we say again, ‘A policeman! A fireman!’”

It was a damn good speech, one you could tell was bringing tears and shivers to the eyes and spines of everyone in the audience. Geo. Bush ought to hire that speech writer, though he might have to work a little on his delivery. But it got me thinking again of something that occurred to me some time ago.

Think back, if you can, to a Fischer-Price village. I had one (actually,
two, I think) as a kid, and they sometimes had them at preschools and
doctor’s offices, at least in my white upper middle class existence.
Fischer-Price villages are little miniature cities, complete with houses and
stores and hospitals and police stations and fire stations, and little
people who work and live and shop in all these places. And the amazing
thing about all these little people (aside from the fact that they all smile
all the time) is that they are all absolutely equal in stature–equally
clean, equally well-equipped, equally important in the functioning of this
little city. And when you’re a kid, especially a kid young enough to be
playing with these things still, that’s the way you think the world is.
Being a policeman or a garbage collector or a window washer is no different
from being a doctor or a lawyer or a banker in the world of Fischer-Price,
in the world we are taught to believe in as children.

And not only is everyone’s job equally important, but everyone’s job is also
equally real. There are no systems analysts or customer (guest, if you work
at Target) service assistants or departmental executive officers. The
worldview of children may be the closest thing to Marxism ever to have
existed–no one is alienated from the product or meaning of her work,
everyone works according to his abilities and receives according to his
needs. (For those of you who may have difficulties with Marx, you could
also think of this as Christianity in its purest form–there a number of
passages in the Bible Marx could well have been cribbing from.)

But of course that’s not the world we grow up and live in, and it’s not the
world most of us think of every day. After the age of twelve or so, nobody
I knew was saying they wanted to be a policeman or a fireman or even a
pilot, at least not in front of grownups. We were going to become
journalists, mathematicians, scientists, diplomats, doctors, lawyers,
bankers, architects, professors. A few people said they were going to
become musicians (classical) or artists (but they would teach, too). The
world, it seemed, could function with just those professions filled. That
there were people who mopped the floors, drove the buses, built the
buildings, we knew, but somehow these people were not us. We were not
responsible for their livelihood or well-being. Obviously, if they really
wanted to, they could become doctors and lawyers and bankers, too. Wasn’t
that the story of every biography we read?

The world is disturbing to me these days, as it is to many people. But the
world has been disturbing to me for a long, long time, and I suspect it will
continue to be so long after we’ve forgotten that we want to be volunteers,
that we want to help out, that we want to be heroes, long after we’ve
returned the illusion of peace, which, as another famous Marxist noted, is
“nothing but a period of truce between wars.”

Martin Luther King defined true peace as not merely the absence of tension
but also the presence of justice. I used to believe that, too–but that was
back before the acquittal of a police officer in Cincinnati, before the
deletion of the names of “possible felons” from the voting rolls in Florida,
before Madeleine Albright ever said the price was worth it, before I stopped
wanting to play with my Fischer-Price village, even–back when I believed in
that piece of graffiti some ruffian carved above the Supreme Court: Equal
Justice Under Law.

Shalom,
Laura

Gentle Readers,

The pieces I’m sending out now were written in the last couple of days, based on thoughts I’d been having now for weeks, or months, or years. As I write this preface now, I’m listening to NPR tell me that military strikes have begun against Afghanistan. I’m listening to a White House correspondent report that George Bush has noted, again, that these attacks are only one aspect of a multifaceted military strategy, and that some aspects of this strategy will, by necessity, be covert, and we will never know about them. I would like you, for a moment–particularly those of you who are older than I am, who have memories more direct than the accounts I have received from books–about the covert, secret military actions you know about. (Sometimes, I believe, these were called “police actions.”) I would like you to think about wars in the past, in which, theoretically, strikes were made only against military targets, and I would like you to think about collateral damage. I would like you to think about how you wage a war against an enemy you cannot see, whose whereabouts you do not know, and whom you have represented consistently not as a person or even a group of people but as a concept, an -ism. I would like you, if you can, to think of the number of American casualties in any recent war, and then I would like you to think if you can remember, or even find, the number of casualties on the other side. I have noted to many of you on many occasions that I do not really believe in moral progress. It seems to me that the aggregate level of human suffering has remained the same across the centuries. I still believe that. But I also believe that we are obliged to try, and I believe, more now than ever, that peace can never be achieved or kept through strength. Einstein, whom I believe said that first, concluded by noting that this peace “can only be achieved through understanding.” I think grass roots organizing promotes understanding, that reading promotes understanding, that singing promotes understanding, that loving–family and friend and neighbor and stranger alike–promotes understanding. I encourage you to continue with it all, and to preserve, for yourselves and those around you, those things which are good about civilization.

Shalom,
Laura