“I write to you in your 15th year. I am writing to you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child they were oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not know before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding… Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. All of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.”
I used to read Coates’s blog all the time (in tandem with Andrew Sullivan’s) on The Atlantic website and it was always thought-provoking even when I didn’t agree with him. As for his paragraph above–think about the armed takeover of a federal nature preserve that is happening in Oregon right now. Can any of us imagine such a thing being permitted to continue for a day (let alone weeks) if the perpetrators were anything other than white? No? Me either.
/Soapbox dismount!
Deb, good point! We have very serous social and political problems in our country that aren’t being addressed. Instead, we’re getting a lot of Rhetoric about how America can be Great Again but only if you vote for the Right People.
Yes, we definitely need to take this country back from “Them” according to Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. And you know who “Them” is, starting at the top. There was a case in NYC this week, which I am not going to characterize until it is proven but so far seems legitimate, where an obviously Muslim man from Bangladesh went to pick up his 9 year old niece and got jumped and beat up by two morons yelling, “ISIS! ISIS” before they ran away.
Thank you Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. I guess this is the America you want, but it isn’t the one I want. No vote for you.
On the other hand, I don’t think overstatement by Coates or other commentators is helping. Police were wrong, dead wrong, and what they did was inexcusable, but I still wouldn’t say they “murdered” Tamir Rice. They got a report of a kid with a gun, rolled up and found …a kid with a gun. What they did then was wrong in every single way, but calling it murder is not what I would do. Eric Garner was a petty criminal. The cop who got his marching orders to “clean up that corner” from the Lieutenant was an out-of-control jerk who had no right being on the NYPD, much like previous bad cops like Francis Livoti, a hothead who killed a guy named Anthony Baez – also using an illegal chokehold – for the unforgivable crime of accidentally hitting his patrol car with a football.
/climbs off Deb’s soapbox
Jeff, we need to come up with more non-lethal weapons like Tasers. When the choice for police is to shoot to kill or do nothing, that’s not much of choice. Yes, there are a lot of Bad Guys out there, but too many innocent people are unfairly targeted.
There’s a similar discussion on a German language forum for USA visitors and Germans who emigrated to the USA and luckily there are many who think similarly to you, george and others here – thanks for that!
And also the fascination with guns “we” find really strange too.
Using non lethal weapons seems to me also one way out of this dilemma.
We often compare stats re murders and gun use in general and it’s kind of shocking for me that the USA has so many more murders but also suicides (via guns mainly) than Europe.
PS:
Even if someone is not innocent, that person shouldn’t be immediately “treated” with lethal force imho.
Wolf, in many SF stories police use “tangle” guns to immobilize their targets. No one gets hurt. We need more of that kind of thinking. In the United States there are more legal guns–over 300 million–than people. That sets the scene for so many senseless deaths here.
I just read an interesting article about how the upcoming election will be the first to use an almost instantaneous electronic connection between candidates and voters (email, text, tweets, Facebook, etc.). One of its interesting points: Trump doesn’t communicate in tv-friendly sound bites, he communicates in (even briefer) “tweet-speak” where all of his ideas can be captured in a 120-character tweet. Yikes!
Deb, yikes indeed! This will also be an Election where over a billion dollars in campaign money will be spent. What a waste! But, no one supports public-based campaign funding that would level the field and restrict “buying” candidates by big donors.
Wolf, you are correct. There are a tremendous number of gun suicides in this country. Sadly, there are also way too many accidents, where kids “find” loaded guns and accidentally shoot themselves or a sibling or friend or even parent. This should never happen.
Jeff, a lot of these senseless deaths could be avoided if the gun industry embraced the “safe” weapon design. If you bought a gun, it would be programmed only to work for you and no one else. But, the industry is resistant to such Common Sense ideas.
I have been meaning to read this one since a man next to me on a plane recommended it.
Somewhat but not entirely unrelated, on the beach down the block from us used to sit a structure known as the Windansea Beach Shack. (Just wood and palm fronds mostly) It was memorialized in a Tom Wolfe book and was just a simple little structure that got knocked over by a storm in December. (They are going to rebuild it and have many times). But someone put up a US flag in its place and now everyone who comes by gets their picture taken with the flag, So ironic to me that I never saw anyone get their picture taken with the shack. I have never understood patriotism. I guess it serves a function in times of world wars but on the whole…I’d rather be a citizen of earth than any country.
Patti, it was interesting. After 9/11 you’d see American flags flying from cars everywhere for a short while. Around the corner from us on 89 Street, usually you’ll see about 7-8 or the houses flying flags, but after 9/11 it almost seemed like peer pressure. I think one of the residents got enough flags to give each homeowner one, and it was only a few who refused to fly them. After a while this died down and now it is back to a handful again.
I have no problem with anyone who wants to display an American flag for whatever reason he or she might have. But I don’t like people who act as if doing so makes them “holier than thou” and inherently superior in some way, and hence makes me un-American in their eyes. Also, display the flag by all means, but wearing it as a T-shirt or sewn into your jeans or other garment is not appropriate.
Jeff, some people wear flag swim-suits at the pool. It doesn’t bother me, but some people get upset about it.
Patti, people love symbols. The flag and the political history behind it are two very different things.
Things will change when I become King of the World and outlaw stupid.
Jerry, you have my vote!
Eric Garner was not choked to death, though the lie continues. He died of a heart attack while resisting arrest for illegally selling cigarettes on the street.