Rage

Ferguson, Missouri, 2014

I’m not going to pretend to understand racism. It’s a disease. An affliction of the mind. Self-curable. Nor will I accept that anyone with any appreciable training in peace keeping—and let’s call it that instead of “law enforcement,” a terminology which includes the very brutish word “force”—needs to shoot someone whose arms are in the surrender position six times in order to subdue them. 

I will not accept that a stranglehold is necessary for one officer as several other officers pile on top of a man, choking him to death. New York, New York, 2014.

The George Zimmerman Training Academy of Enforcement and Anger Management seems to be gaining favor among our cities’ local police. We can’t go a day without video, whether it’s old or new, of police violence slapping us in the face. The “heat of the moment” is too often the background noise of these acts. I disagree. The heat of the moment is cursing at the driver that recklessly cut you off; the heat of the moment is throwing “You don’t love me!” in a lover’s face; heat dissipates very quickly. The heat of the moment for a police officer being  a thousand degrees hotter than mundane interactions, they should be given the proper training to deal with that. They shouldn’t be the assholes that flip you the bird while running a red light; shouldn’t be the guy that slaps his kid to stop the child’s crying.

But they too often are. Because they’re us.

An officer of the law shouldn’t be the one telling a reporter, “We’re dealing with 4,000 animals.” That tells us what the heat’s done to him. His mind is everywhere but on what’s in front of him, and the most dangerous thing for a police officer is blind spots.

A state trooper, along the side of a busy freeway, while atop a woman, punched the hell out of her.  Los Angeles, CA, 2014.

Blind spots. Rage. Blind rage.

A worldwide epidemic of rage.

That officer didn't shoot and kill the young man in Ferguson, Missouri simply because the young man was black. He did it because he was (potentially) a small officer in a small town with a failed marriage and friends who were only friends when drinking was involved, in a country that can’t get its shit together to save its life and so forces him to be a small officer in a small town, a white man against the black man no matter how many black friends he can point at, and giving him nowhere to escape but out the barrel of a gun. Death by projection.

Gaza, Palestine, 2014.

Ukraine, 2014.

Honduras, 2014.

Australia, 2014.

England, 2014.

Canada, 2014.

Racism is a social construct predicated on economic disparity. The color of skin means squat. We’re all from Africa. There are no bogus genetics to justify brutish thoughts. There is not one person on this planet that made it here without being human. There is no white race. Ask most Irish if they were “white” when they made it to America’s shores in the early 19^th century, then ask them now. The difference is capital. Money.

We are enraged the world over because no one thinks they have enough.

Money. Whatever form capital takes. Financial capital, emotional capital, religious capital. In order for one group to have enough of one thing, another group has to have too little of everything. Money kicks in our anger receptors like few other things can.

Schools underfunded while billionaire fights for control of shipping lanes. Takes an angry man to accumulate so much. Thousands without water, summertime. Gangs forming at an increasing rate. Detroit, MI, 2014. Takes a ton of rage to wall that out and keep it in.

Rage blinds us to what’s right in front of our faces time and again. Rage. We rage against everything.

Except the palsied monkey grinding the organ for the machine for which we dance.

One Gaze

I’ve never understood the need so many have for violence. Not that I don’t have violent impulses. I do. Frequently.  Like everyone else I unleash wrath in my mind upon the day’s disturbances. I haven’t, nor will I, act on that, as imagining harm and inflicting it are highly different things. Even the thought of clenching my hand into a fist, launching it at speed at someone’s head, and feeling the dreadful impact of my flesh and bone to theirs—the true memory of pain as I know and feel it—knowing how many pain receptors are suddenly exploding to life inside the other person, disgusts me. The first fight I had as a child occurred as older relatives watched while, simultaneously, I wondered why they didn’t put a stop to it. Even at eight I knew fighting was primitive and I wanted no part of it. It was ludicrous. There I was, playing with my cousins, when the neighborhood jackass decided he wanted attention. I called the adults out and told them he was bothering us. They came on the porch and told me I had to deal with him. I was the kid who needed libraries and books and time to think; I needed sunlight to lie in under tables; I needed the world to make sense, and in order to make sense adults were to keep harm from others, especially children. That seemed so foundational as to be unshakeable.

So when I told the bully to go away and he didn’t, I was at a loss. I looked to the adults, and it took two seconds for the ugliest realization I’ve had to become clear: they wanted me to fight. “Deal with him” had nothing to do with appealing to his sense of reason or compassion. I was not to allow him the dignity of human consideration. I had to hit him. Hit him hard. While the family watched.

He threw the first punch. Didn’t connect. Eight year-olds push and punch with their eyes closed, even the bullies. After a few seconds of this I thought we were done. I certainly was. I dropped my defenses, turned away…and he punched me in the back, very hard, then ran away. I wanted very much to kill him for imposing his idiocy on my world.

I don’t remember the names of any of my friends from eight years old, but I remember his: Vincent. Violence solidifies things no one wants or needs.

State-level violence? That creates fossils. Bones, hearts and minds of stone that believe killing people going against their day is justified because of certain policy words: retaliation; defense; sovereignty. Policy is as foolish as a group of adults encouraging a child toward a pointless fight. I’m sure they thought they were toughening me up, just as those who send others to kill create excuses for behaving as though damnation is always for others.

I don’t know what I can possibly write that will change a single mind in the Israeli government. Benjamin Netanyahu has dug into the role of embattled righteousness, a hole which governing bodies tend to peer out of only at night, and only at what they want to see. We won’t pretend Israel hasn’t planned to hem Palestine into the tightest, most volatile circumstance they possibly can, because they have. Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Hamas – there are no accidents here, only short-sighted, entrenched hatreds. You cannot be an occupying force demanding and expecting quiescence even as further encroachments are made. You cannot create unyielding barriers and expect the ghetto to garden. Israel has created an untenable situation. We also won’t pretend that, being a superpower compared to Palestine, Israel has not and does not have the capability to end what might as well be known as the world’s Forever War. Israel has the resources to capitulate. Unfortunately for those in Gaza, its refusals to do so are specious. Because the world has become so cartoonish there are never enough self-reflexive moments after any act of terrorism. Even the word “terrorist” is a cartoon, all dread removed from the word, drowned out, instead, by patriotic fervor on the part of the wounded. When I was growing up we heard all about the PLO. This generation gets “Hamas.” Groups that see violence as a means. What would they do if, at some point, someone on both sides of Gaza decided to be the adults who saw no value in fighting, someone on both sides who stepped out of the industry of war—and make no mistake, no large country that has been at war for generations is doing so without a large profit component—and realized there is actually no reason their children need to found buried under tables, under rubble, during the bright light of day when television cameras are at their most active and anguish, pure and vibrant in high definition suffering, races across social media to fuel our days’ ire; right now Israel’s anger is pounding Palestine bloody. The blows are hard, fast, brutal. Netanyahu bathes in what he sees as righteous blood. Violence is never given life without it demanding life in return. The death of the body for one, the death of the spirit for the other.

We don’t need violence. We don’t need to kill to be heard. We don’t need to kill to live. It is my hope that a thousand voices will speak better than I have. It is my hope that nations will tell Israel “Enough!” and that Hamas will realize that death as its only option is an option for utter fools. When I was younger I wrote a poem for my neighborhood. From the title alone you can tell what type of neighborhood it was.

Genocide: A Primer

I

Picture drug houses

Youth no soul

Filthy violent blight

I would pack up my people

And leave them

To prey on themselves

Until only one left standing

I see him

Alone, in the middle of the street

No wind, no sound, but

Still birds waiting in the trees

Only one left standing

I would return to the old frame

And shoot him.

This is what hatred does, whether hatred with good reason or not. It kills from the inside out. A genocide of one. Pain isn’t drowned in the wine of violence. It’s exacerbated. My hope is that aid to Israel will cease, because they don’t need it. But, again, there’s profit in conflict, and the United States has a ton of bullets to sell. My hope, no matter what kind of temporary cease-fire is issued and promptly broken by Hamas, is that the Netanyahu government be properly condemned for atrocities committed out of frustration and anger. Small chance of that, I know. My own country still has its share of ex-presidents (and a current one) with more than enough blood on their hands and nary a sight of justice. My hope is that people who say, “But what about Hamas? What of their killings?” dig a little deeper beneath their emotions to help Israel create a solution rather than martyrs.  A country governed in theory by laws and integrity is different from a cadre of idiotic, angry, desperately illogical men playing the game of hate with a losing hand. Let’s be clear: There is no possible way Hamas can militarily defeat Israel. Hamas’ only endgame will be inciting Israel to obliterate Palestine’s bakers, accountants, students, teething children, construction workers, firefighters, laymen, and anyone else unfortunate enough to walk their days under skies of retribution. Neither side can have fought this long without having become addicted to the wine of violence.

These days people speak blithely of radical this and that. Is it impossible for us to imagine radical peace? Are we going to be so forever addicted to violence that mortar shells serve as our speech? An untenable situation. Very confusing to all of us who think lying under a table in the sun is a beautiful thing.