The Politics of Emotion

We’re scared, we’re confused, we’re enraged — and that’s the way they want it

AFP photo

This last week has been a doozy. An entire thesaurus of emotions bombard us every day, every night, and we’re at the point now where those of us who think, who care, who take the burdens of the world personally, are on sensory overload, dangerously close to imploding. Exploding. Doing ourselves no favors by feeling emotions so raw, so painful they render us, in the end, helpless.

The catalyst this time? Another Black man’s senseless death at the hands of the police — say his name: George Floyd— and it’s almost more than we can bear. The Minneapolis cop who killed him did it in front of us, in broad daylight, gloating, smiling for the cameras, his knee pressing harder against George’s neck as George pleaded for his life, called for his mother, said I CAN’T BREATHE.

Three other cops stood watch over the killing. According to witnesses, at least one of them helped to hold George down. The crowd around them pleaded for the cop to stop but he didn’t move, didn’t ease the pressure, didn’t consider the minutes it took for the life to seep out of George Floyd’s bones. There were nine of them. Nine minutes. Two of them were probably a waste of time. At seven minutes George was already beyond help.

As reports of George’s death began to surface, sorrow turned to rage. And rage turned to helplessness. It happened again. We couldn’t stop it. That portion of our nation who feels these things sat back and cried. Some of us did it in public, in front of the cameras, as we tried to grapple with emotions so out of control we couldn’t put words to them.

We watched as people who built their reputations on giving us the words that eased us, motivated us, energized us, fell apart before our eyes, reduced to weeping out of sheer frustration.

And Donald Trump, seeing us as pitiful, as vulnerable, as easy marks, grabbed at the chance to twist the knife and make it worse. The president-in-name-only didn’t rise to help a nation get through this, didn’t give the speech that would comfort or settle us or make us believe justice would be served. No, he took to Twitter and instigated. He teased, he taunted, he threatened. (“When looting starts, the shooting starts.”)

Inevitably, the outrage took over and the protests devolved to riots in the streets across the country. Stores looted and burned. Some would say emotions blew it all up; others saw it as rank opportunism. Whatever it was, fire lit the skies, entire buildings were reduced to rubble, and we were left to feel. What the hell is happening?

After a few days we were back to protesting for the right reasons — because George Floyd was dead and because black lives have to matter. Thousands of us marched peacefully, without incident, and the rest of us, watching from home, rejoiced at the numbers, at our unity, our solidarity, our humanity.

But Donald Trump wasn’t done with us. He spent the riot days hiding in a bunker beneath the White House. We got wind of it and we let off some steam by making fun of him. So he put on his “I’ll show them” face and upstaged us by marching a few hundred yards, in broad daylight, looking for all the world like a tinpot dictator, a coterie of sycophants marching a few steps behind him, along a route lined with armed guards, to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where rioters had done some damage, and where he then stood, unannounced (and unwelcome, it turns out), muttered a few unintelligible words, held a bible over his head, and walked back to the White House.

AFP/Brendan Smialowski

                                       

It took maybe 20 minutes, but in order for Trump to make that walk, the crowds lining that street had to first be dispersed. Nobody knew it was coming. Suddenly the police came from out of nowhere and began forcing the crowds away, pushing, shoving, spraying them with tear gas, spattering them with rubber bullets.

Those of us watching in real time at home were horrified. It made no sense. They were more than a half hour from curfew. They were protesting peaceably. They had the right to be there. And uniformed men in riot gear came at them as if they were mad, snarling dogs.

Our hearts were in our throats. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. Was this it then? Was this the battle we’d long been afraid of? Would we now be fighting for our very lives?

No. It was just that Donald Trump wanted to make a show of walking those few yards because we made fun of him hiding in a bunker and because a damaged church made the perfect backdrop for his phony piety in these times of crisis.

Or something.

And we come away from this scared, confused, exhausted, wondering how many times we can go through this without just coming apart or just giving up. Knowing that’s what they want. They want us to come apart. They want us to give up.

And we can’t. When our emotions get the best of us we have to stop a moment and rewind. We owe it to ourselves. But quit? Can we? You know we can’t. Because this is who we are. And that’s who they are. And it’s either us or them.

(Cross-posted at Medium)

I Have No Power

And I'm powerless to change that.

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

The pain I feel these days is existential. It’s not about the crunching in my knees or the flatiron pressed against my chest as I breathe, it’s harsher than that. It’s the pain behind knowing the world around me is a dangerous place and, as hard as I might try, I can do nothing to make it better.

This is new for me. I am the resident Pollyanna, the believer in great things coming from ordinary people, the pusher of positivity when everyone else sees darkness ahead.

People come to me looking for answers, and if I don’t have the answers I think I can at least comfort them with my positivity. As if all it takes are a few sunny words accompanied by a knowing smile. As if those few moments of respite will solve anything.

What bullshit.

I was a picky eater and when my mom told me about starving kids in China who would give anything for even a bite of what I was refusing, I would cry just thinking about them, their poor, wasted bodies — skin and bones. But I still wouldn’t eat it. And when lunch was over I skipped away, on to something else.

Later, when I had my own kids, I did the same thing, only it was poor starving kids in Africa. It was a lousy way to teach about awareness — as if filling their bellies was all it would take to remove the awful images of wholesale, planned starvation and death.

I came into this world thinking I could save it with sympathy and empathy. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t feeling sorry about something I had no control over. But feeling sorry can’t take the place of actually doing something. It’s why we’re so sick of “thoughts and prayers”. It’s too easy. It’s a brush-off. It’s “Oh, poor you! Here — let me hand you a posy. Feel better now? I know I do.”

I wanted to do more. I threatened to do more. I promised to do more. I did what I did and it wasn’t nearly enough.

I’ve been a liberal activist for more than 60 years, calling, marching, protesting, singing, writing — all without once feeling violated or threatened. Throughout my long years of what I called ‘activism’ I was never in any danger. I’m not saying this out of guilt. I’m saying it because now I’m aware. I chose activism over complacency, but if I had been active enough I would have, at some point, felt the sting of fear. I never did.

No matter how incensed or enraged I become when I find out about terrible actions against individual or groups, I can’t begin to understand how it must feel to be in the middle of those danger zones. How it is to have to live with it throughout my entire life. I’m not there. I’ve never been there. I never will be there.

I’ve been a writer for more than 30 years, much of it dwelling on rights issues, but I’ve been safe there, too. For the last 10 years I’ve focused on writing to change minds, but that hasn’t happened. All the while I’m writing to make a difference, I’m marveling at the writers who get it. Those writers who spoke to us so vividly, so masterfully they made us gasp at the majesty of their words. Surely this would do it. This, this amazing piece of writing would change the world, or at least our country, or at least… But it didn’t. It doesn’t. They couldn’t do it, either.

I’m writing this now because yesterday I saw Bakari Sellers break down and cry on CNN. This man who sought to change us, to make us aware, to use his often brilliant prose to bring us to attention and DO SOMETHING, broke down out of a feeling of frustration and pure, agonizing helplessness.

The catalyst was yet another murder of an innocent black man, in broad daylight, with cameras rolling. The killer was a member of the Minneapolis Police Department. He put a knee to George Floyd’s neck and kept it there for nine minutes, as George pleaded for his life, called for his mother, said he was in pain, said “I CAN’T BREATHE”.

Other police officers stood there for those nine minutes and did nothing. They could have saved George Floyd, who wasn’t resisting, was crying out, was barely breathing after a few minutes of that pressure on his neck, but they didn’t.

Once again, the police officer wasn’t put in handcuffs immediately, wasn’t taken into custody for murdering a black man. We were assured that he would be fired. The authorities would look into it. They would ‘look into’ an incident that was witnessed by dozens of people, was filmed and sent out to the airwaves, was clearly, without a doubt, without provocation, a deliberate killing of an innocent man.

And Bakari Sellers wants to know how he’s going to explain this to his son. How does he keep his boy from being afraid when this same horrible scene happens over and over and over?

“There’s just so much pain,” Sellers said, sobbing, “I get so tired.”

Add Bakari Sellers to the long, long list of activists who work so hard, who try so hard, and who, when another tragedy happens, end up having to acknowledge how little they can actually do.

Then there are the rest of us. We have no power. The reality of our powerlessness is hard to take. All we can do is howl.

(Cross-posted at Medium)

No Excuses: Angry Thugs and Looters are Still Thugs and Looters

I know you might hate this, but I'm going to do it anyway.  I'm going to write this as a mother, as a grandmother, as a card-carrying citizen of the United States, as a goddamned human being.

I'm white, but if you dare hold that against me you're no better than those who hold color against anyone.  We're going to talk about those stupid vandals who rampaged through their own Baltimore neighborhood the night before last, looting, burning, destroying nearly everything in sight.  They were black kids and they used the funeral of a young black man as an excuse to raise so much hell we'll be adding Baltimore once again to the list of the worst riots in the U.S.

So far, as of this writing, there have been no reported deaths--thank the light above for small favors.  But vicious, creepy thugs willfully savaged an entire neighborhood, and I submit the only thing poor Freddie Gray's funeral had to do with it was opportunity.  It was their big chance to blaze their way in, using righteous protest as a flimsy excuse to riot.

Rumor has it that they were mainly teenagers, that they used social media to get the word out, that a movie fueled their fervor for vengeance.  There are reports that the police themselves showed up at the school campus in riot gear and wouldn't let the kids get to their buses to go home.  They went to the neighborhood instead.

Some of the people who have lived through the cop-on-black violence in West Baltimore abhorred the rioting but tried to find ways to explain it beyond simple vandalism.  TaNehisi Coates knows the area and the police activities well.  He writes:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

 But it wasn't just the police and the politicians pleading for nonviolence.  Freddie Gray's family begged for it.  The preachers in the community prayed for it.  Neighborhood families hoped against hope for it.

If the thugs had stuck with setting police cars afire, with throwing bricks at police officers, I might have understood, but still not condoned, that kind of disrespect.  They see the police as the enemy. But they didn't stop there.  They didn't even start there.  Their intent was to riot.  To disrespect the community.

 For 48 hours, since the riot began, we've heard non-stop talk about the reasons why.  I won't go into all of them, except to say that the Baltimore police are known pigs who seem to thrive on punishing black people, and Freddie Gray, the young man who didn't deserve to die at their hands, did die at their hands.  Horribly.  They broke his spine, curled him up into a ball and stuffed him into their paddy wagon.  They ignored his need for immediate medical care. He died in their care and nobody but him has so far paid the price.

If I lived in that neighborhood and knew what I knew about the police and about this case and about the hundreds of other cases where justice was as cruelly denied, I would want someone's hide.  Not literally, of course, but I would want retribution.  I would want somebody to pay.  I would protest.  Loudly.  I would not shut up.  I would be just like the thousands of people in that neighborhood who finally have had enough and want something done now. But I, along with those thousands of others, would have respected Freddie Gray's grieving family enough to grant their wish for peaceful protest.

Freddie Gray's funeral sparked the riots, even though his parents and his twin sister begged for peace.  Begged for it.  Said it out loud many times:  "Please.  No violence.  Please."

But within hours of Freddie's funeral the mourners' remembrances of the slain young man took a back seat to the nightmarish witnessing of a full-blown incendiary riot.

The rioters (do not call them protesters) busted out windows and doors of small businesses, made off with the goods inside, and looted and vandalized a CVS drug store.  They commandeered a police car, severely injured the occupants, and set the car on fire. They rampaged through a liquor store and a check-cashing store. The CVS went up in flames. More cars burned. Then more buildings. Through the night, fires roared.

And--get this--when the fire truck arrived to put out the fires in this neighborhood where families live, one of the punks pulled out a knife and spiked the hose. Twice. The water meant to put out the fire spewed like a swell fountain into the air, far from its directed target.  I'm guessing the punks around him thought it was pretty cool, too.  Nobody--I mean nobody--said, "Uh, not the fire hoses, idiot."

Yesterday the community came together to clean up their streets.  Mothers, fathers, small children.  The elders.  They're trying to put their lives back together again. They're heartbroken.  They're ashamed.  They're angry.  They know how this will look.  NBC news correspondent Rehema Elllis reported that she saw women standing in front of the burned-out CVS store weeping--weeping--because they spent years trying to get a pharmacy to put down roots in their neighborhood. What are the odds that CVS--or any pharmacy--will build there again?

This is the harm that riots do.  Riots aren't protests. There is no good outcome from riots.  They're remembered into eternity as the crazed response to a bad situation, and when it happens in a black community it's the black community that has to answer for it.  The thugs, the vandals, the looters need to get that message.  Making excuses for their criminal behavior doesn't just let them off the hook, it gives them license to keep their destructive anger alive.

Toya Graham, the mother who whupped her son in front of the cameras yesterday to keep him from joining the looters showed us the way well-placed anger wins the day. Her raw desperation, hard as it is to watch, is about as heroic as it gets.

"'That's my only son and at the end of the day I don't want him to be a Freddie Gray'. . .

 'Graham says after she got her son home they both watched news coverage of the demonstrations and riots on television. As images of her reaction started to go viral, Graham says comments started appearing on her son's Facebook page, many in support of her.

'Friends and everybody making comments and saying you know, you shouldn't be mad at your mother, you should give her a hug,' said Graham.  [She] hopes the incident will serve as a teachable moment for her son."

Thugs will be thugs and to hell with them.  They almost destroyed this community.  Almost.  But the beauty of it, if there is such a thing, is that the people who live there aren't about to let them.  If something positive finally gets done in the community of West Baltimore, don't thank the rioters, thank the people in the neighborhoods who, in spite of the destruction, choose to rise from the ashes and work to build anew.

Addendum 4/30/15.  Since I published this yesterday I'm getting all kinds of flak about the use of the word "thug".  Yes, I must be living in a cave because I had no idea that word was now seen as some sort of code word for "black".  "Thug" is a word that has been around for over a century and is used appropriately to describe troublemakers.  There has never been a hint of color attached to it that I know of, and it's not my intent--or the President's, I'm sure--to offend anybody but the looters.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Liberaland.  Featured on Crooks and Liars MBRU))

Protecting Wolves by Throwing Them to the Wolves?

Yesterday I wrote about Opening Day for Michigan’s deer hunting season.  But yesterday was also opening day for a hunting season not seen in Michigan for almost 50 years.  Despite pushback from many different organizations, and petitions set up on a whole lot of petition sites, our grand Poobahs in Pure Michigan caved once again to special interests and instituted a hunting season for wolves.

Yes, wolves.

There was a time not so long ago (pre-1965) that our wolf population was zero, and we didn’t like that.  Other states had wolves; why didn’t we?  So in 1965 we gave wolves legal protection in our state. How we got the word out to the wolves, I don’t know, but over the years a few of them began to straggle in.

In 1974, after only six confirmed sightings in nearly a decade, we decided something had to be done.  Four wolves were captured in wolf-heavy Minnesota and plunked down in the Huron Mountains in the Upper Peninsula. Within eight months they had all been killed.  (Nobody ‘fessed up.  Surprise.)  None of them reproduced. (See Gray Wolf timeline here.)

Sadness at the DNR.  They wanted a wolf population in the U.P.  With the help of the Michigan Wildlife Fund (See below) and other protections, including habitat enhancements, wolves finally began to appear in greater numbers.

The population expanded (Woo Hoo!), but with the expansion came more and more incidences of predation.  The wolves were killing livestock and pets and were spotted too close for comfort near human population centers.  Once their numbers grew to more than 400 the DNR began to see them as a liability and not an asset.

Could there have been any other outcome?  The Upper Peninsula isn’t a zoo or a preserve.  Wolves will be wolves.  But this was excellent news for the hunting interests out there salivating, hoping against hope that wolf numbers would continue to explode and that Canis lupus would keep that wolfish behavior going.

They have long been making plans for the inevitable wolf hunt.

And yesterday it happened.

In the Detroit Free Press:

Engadine Feed & Supply store owner Dick Pershinske said he looks forward to entering the woods Friday for Michigan’s historic, first-ever wolf hunt.

“I’m an avid hunter, so this is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often,” he said today. “It may be the last hunt, too, if the environmentalists get their way.”

As hunters excitedly prepared for the hunt this afternoon, the mood was far more somber about 300 miles to the south in Mt. Pleasant, where the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe planned a candlelight vigil for the animal so iconic in their tribal heritage.

“The gray wolf is significant to our culture,” said tribal spokesman Frank Cloutier. “It’s a part of our creation story, very significant to who we are and what we believe.”

The hunt calls for a maximum of 43 wolves to be harvested in three designated zones of the Upper Peninsula. It is slated to run from dawn Friday through Dec. 31 or whenever the target number is reached. Michigan has sold 1,200 licenses for the hunt.

Ah, there it is:  Twelve hundred licenses sold when a mere 43 wolves can be killed.  ($100 for residents; $500 for non-residents)

It’s not about culling predators (which wolves most certainly are, but they knew that in the 1970s when they were encouraging the population.)  Farmers and homeowners already have the right to shoot predators, including wolves, on their property.

It’s not about feeding families (nobody eats wolf).

For the state, it’s all about giving hunters a new sport.  It’s all about the money.  Not only the uptick in license fees, but in years ahead the kill limit will increase and Michigan will benefit as one of only a handful of Midwestern states allowing wolf hunting.  The economic run-off could be big.

In Michigan we can pay extra for license plates that will aid our favorite organizations.  We have one with a picture of a loon, for example, that aids the Michigan Non-game Wildlife Fund.  We can also check off a box for the same fund on our Michigan Income Tax forms.
From the MWF page:

Since 1983, over $10 million has been raised for these important management efforts through voluntary check-off contributions on the state income tax form, sales of specialty license plates, and by direct donations. Six million of that $10 [million] dollars has been placed in a permanent trust, and interest from that trust will continue to support threatened and endangered species well into the future.

The Nongame Fish and Wildlife Fund is responsible for:

• restoring Trumpeter swans to their historic wetland areas;
• reintroducing the Peregrine falcon;
• implementing the Michigan Frog and Toad Survey;
• helping the wolf population through monitoring and education;
• establishing over 120 watchable wildlife viewing sites;
• relocating osprey to expand their range in Michigan;
• surveying abandoned mines to protect bat wintering sites;
• identifying rare plant sites; and

So now that they’ve decided our once threatened and endangered wolves are out of the woods, where will the wolf money go?  Will the DNR keep “helping” the wolf population they so purposefully worked to expand, now that the crew in Lansing has caved to the hunting special interests and reclassified the wolf as fair game?

Note, too, that not a single dollar of the money going toward wolf protection came from hunters’ license fees, even though they’re the ones who’ll now benefit from all that TLC.  The general population donated all of it, thinking it would actually go toward protection and education.  Nobody ever mentioned wolf-hunting.

John Barnes at MLive quotes Bob Graves, one of the Upper Peninsula hunters yesterday (My emphasis below, because, yes, they really say this crap out loud.  I’ve heard it, or something like it, more times than I care to count):

“Yes, I’ll take the pelt, but that’s not why. It’s not (being) here to put a trophy on the wall, it’s to experience the outdoors, and to hunt a majestic animal, a beautiful animal.”
There is another reason too, adds [Mark] Bird, 62[, of Kent City]. “This might be Michigan’s only wolf hunt. It might be just once in a lifetime opportunity.”

So that’s it.  There’s talk of putting the issue on the ballot in 2014, but, even with enough signatures, and even with an iron-clad “no” vote, there’s no guarantee our current Koch-based administration won’t just ignore the will of the people.  They’ve done it before.

( Iggy Pop’s letter to Governor Snyder.  Go, Iggy!)

As of this writing, three wolves have been taken.  The DNR keeps track and so can we.

________________

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.  In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep hill shot is always confusing. when our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes-- something known only to her and the mountain.  I was young then, full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

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NOTE:  A big Thank You to Chris Savage at Eclectablog for choosing this post as a Guest Post for his website today.  Check it out!

Hatred in a Lovely Church

As I watched that hideous video showing Pastor Charles Worley's recent headline-grabbing rants about penning gays and lesbians inside miles-long electrified corrals until they die, I couldn't help but notice his surroundings. (Okay, go and watch it if you haven't seen it.  But then come back and we'll talk.)

He preaches his particular style of self-righteous, good ol' boy hate from the pulpit of the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, NC.  This is not a store-front or a rustic, backwoods building, it's a beautiful traditional church, obviously designed and built with the prospect of honoring the Christian God.

If you could turn off the sound and watch this man Worley as he clutches his bible and moves around his pulpit, you might be lulled into thinking you were watching a man of God preaching in God's house.  No such thing exists in that building posing as a church.

Picture a wedding in that space (a wedding between straight white adults, of course--proof of intelligence apparently not required), a baptism (poor baby), a funeral (I'm not going there).  Many loving hands keep that interior pristine and lovely.  Deep pockets provide the heavy-duty funding necessary to keep the building maintained.  All so that their chosen pastor can step to the front on a Sunday morning and propose a final solution for lesbians and gays.

A group called the Catawba Valley Citizens against Hate is planning a peaceful protest at Providence Road Baptist on Sunday, May 27.  They're trying to organize the rally on Facebook and I'm trying to help them by posting the link here.  (Please pass it on.)

This is how those good people want it to go: 

Reminder: This event is a peaceful protest organized in the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. All participants of this direct action must vow to remain peaceful and non-violent. We will not scream, shout or taunt Pastor Worley or his church's members. We will not vandalize, threaten or injury property or persons. We will allow law enforcement to handle harassment and disputes that may arise. Protest Peace Keepers will be in charge and will provide instructions. If you cannot vow to remain peaceful & non-violent, then this event may not be for you.

If you're going to be anywhere near that area in North Carolina, please help them out.  Huge crowds of peacekeeping activists would be great, but if you can't get there (as most of us can't) let's show our support by visiting their Facebook page to cheer them on. 

 (By the way, please don't confuse the Providence Road Church with the Providence Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC.  They don't like that.  With good reason.)

(Also, if you Google Providence Road Church and click on the link to their website, it'll take you to a dead end.  They've flown the coop.  So much for pride in their accomplishments.)

(UPDATE 5/27:  Anderson Cooper interviews a Worley defender.  You have to see it to believe it.  http://youtu.be/ez0AMf2U5RU )