A Bitter Moment

There are these moments when the road seems long and the legs are weary. This one of those moments. Nine souls lost under almost unimaginable circumstances. Except that’s not true at all. We have learned to absorb these events to such an extent and with such regularity we process them pretty well now. We understand the circumstances all too well. How awful, how truly brutally, awful. Can I just say that I'm angry?  I mean really f***ing pissed. I’ve had to explain a dozen murderous rampage incidents just like this to my now 17 year old son, each worse than the last only by virtue of their repetitive nature.  The truth is they all bear striking similarities. Violence is never the answer I say. If you hear of someone spiraling out of control, you must say something. We have an obligation to each other, and on and on and on, and nothing. Just the emptiness of more meaningless loss.

There are scales in our brains now. We’ve learned how to measure these things, or at least I have. From my point of view Newtown was worse than Charleston, but just barely. The attack at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek Wisconsin in 2012 at which seven people including the shooter died was in ways worse in my mind than the shootout at the Batman showing in Colorado, also in 2012. 12 people were killed at the theatre and 70 were wounded, so much more carnage, but NRA comments after the temple shooting landed in a way with me that I think left me feeling really scarred.

The NRA suggested absurdly in both cases that if only someone in attendance had a gun, preferably a high powered automatic, lives could have been saved. Somehow the suggestion that people would do that at worship cut so deep. Whenever I think of that moment, the thought of a gunfight in a church as an antidote to our loss… “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not…” Pow…pow… pow, pow, pow. I am so angry, and I think part of this at myself, that I’ve developed a thought process by which such heinous acts are categorized, measured, and filed in my brain. We have all learned the language of these events, the basic questions which must be answered, the soulless search for understanding, and the conclusions which must be drawn, even though they never, ever, ever, lead to resolution.

I'm angry that I have had to reteach myself the lesson a dozen times that love is stronger than hate, mostly now I think so I could imbed that in my kids. At 58, I think I have to admit the beloved community is still so far away, we won't see anything like it in my lifetime, and at least tonight while I write this I am not so sure when after that. I think I still believe love is stronger than hate, but evidence suggests that hate dies only after protracted struggle, and even then who knows?

We have become so comfortable with the folly of our violence. Not only the mass shootings, but the destruction of our youth in the violent sub-cultures of our cities. Literally thousands of husband shooting wives and wives shooting husbands each year. A staggering number of suicides, all because of our attachment to guns, and the easy availability we have allowed. 

How far are we away from the beloved community?  A huge number of our leaders are all over the media making a frightful case.  Days after a hate filled young white man walked into a black church and shot nine innocents, politician after politician tells us that we either can't possibly know what happened or that the cause of the rampage was anything other than race, even religious persecution. They leap over the obvious, racist hatred which motivated this shooter-- where the evidence points-- to find anything else, anything besides the killings being a result of America’s untended wound.

Even after the tags on the killer's sweater were identified as coming from the racist white supremacist states of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa some among us could still not ascertain a motive. Even after it was revealed that the domestically bred terrorist had claimed to his victims that he had to do it because they were raping our women and taking over our country Presidential candidates went on TV, scratching their head with uncertainty. F***ing cowards.

How resonant now, Trumps despicable claim of Mexican rapists pouring over the border, words he repeated when questioned two days before this assassin, also referencing  imagined theories on rape, took the life of a South Carolina preacher and State Senator as well as five women, along with four men. Five women. The oldest was 87. She was 87. 87? 87? 87?  Suzy Jackson was 87 years old. Three of the other women who were killed were ministers, aged 49, 74, and 45.

By what twisted logic did five women, three of them ministers, have to die? What social distortion was ringing in the brain of this murderer, a modern day Byron De Beckwith? While all were victims and none earned this in any way, even in this mind how did it translate that without the sin of rape they were still left with the original American sin of skin color? He passes judgement for this sin on his own from the barrel of a high powered weapon. Was the only crime, the only reason he sought to exact justice, that these nine were black in a state where white supremacy still holds sway, where Stars and Bars still flies over the capital? Was it just unbearable to him that the population of “his” country is no longer and will never again be his preferred color?

Was the assassin a lone gunmen or did he have dozens, even hundreds, of fellow travelers,  ranging from anti-immigration politicians and pundits longing for the old days of European immigration to the Police officer in Ferguson threatening protesters with a semi-automatic weapon? Was he a crazed shooter or a committed racist? Or both? Does it matter? And the church, Emanuel AME, so important in the history of our country. Though I am a student of such things I cannot  say I knew that history well until these last few days, but having heard I can understand why Emanuel AME belongs in the same pantheon as Ebenezer in Atlanta, Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, the 16th St. Baptist  Church in Birmingham, and the AME Brown Chapel in Selma. Are we to believe in our color blind, post racial, society that this Bible Study was selected at random. They say the killer asked for Pastor Pinckney. Was that random too?

This past week we have been subjected to another awful tableau. Before the real pain of our racial sickness was shown to us once again in panful detail, the tabloids were filled with the lighter-than–air story of the women who pretended to be black. Late night comedians had their fun, and the today show got their exclusive. Lots of ink, lots of column inches on the web, and lots of pixels devoted to a story of unmeasurable significance, a fifteen minutes of fame moment. We obsess about such cases I think because the real and honest awful truths, the lies we perpetuate out of shame and guilt, are too hard to bear. We hear a lot today about political correctness perpetrated by a bunch of white liberals ashamed and afraid of their past. The PC culture has run amok we are told. Some of that is true I think, but if we are running from anything it seems to me it is the much more basic truth that we are still a country sick with racism.

As Americans we know next to nothing about our history. We know all about the wars, but precious little about the crucible of fire by which African Americans won some measure of their freedom. Victories that too many have come to believe were a ticket for our country to be liberated from any further responsibility. This ignorance of who we are I think is a prime reason commentator after commentator, talking head after talking head, can go on TV and even dare to speak, with arrogant certainty about post racial-America.

This ignorance is how we slide breezily around the words terrorism and assassination as it relates to this racially motivated massacre. Most of us don't know what the reign of terror was like in Lowndes County before and after Selma, or the Mississippi Freedom Summer that preceded it. Southerners, both black and white, know of the history of attempts to silence the liberation voices by bombing and burning churches by the hundreds all across the South. America, so concerned with terrorism now, seems to have slept through or forgotten that chapter of our history. Attacks in the sanctuary are not new, especially those motivated by racial hatred. This massacre, this assassination, did not happen in a vacuum. For Southern politicians of any party to pretend ignorance to this history, and its recent antecedents (including a rash fires as late as 1996) is a blasphemy against every martyr of the Civil Rights movement, especially those silenced now by the cudgel of racist violence. Moreover, one can’t help but notice how we obsess about the phraseology of Islamic zealots, but take little notice of the gentle public treatment of this murderer.

The South Carolina governor made a moving statement about her state waking up to a broken soul and a broken heart. I am certain that her tears were a real expression of the deep hurt she felt at that moment. I suppose she and all the political head scratchers deserve a day of two to collect their thoughts. But for me their first reactions were the most honest. Now feeling pressure most are acknowledging the obvious racist intent of the terrorist assassin. We understand the need for time to process such a heinous act, but the first instinct to cover up and to obfuscate the horrible truth. That, it seems to me, is the terrible predilection of the conservative (and often liberal), southern, (and often northern), politician.

That obfuscation, that dishonesty, feels closer to the real, honest, and ugly truth. Dishonesty is the reason that police departments across the country, now exposed to the searing eyes of ubiquitous smart phones, have been exposed  in case after case to have too many officers hostile to and unknowing about the communities they police. Are we enduring a high time in the cycle of cases of police abuse or are we merely capturing in our hand-held lenses long held truths?

I do not say that all police are bad, but even there I tire of current dialectic into which I find myself so often forced. Those of us who are critical must always sprinkle caveats, but the same people who demand them are so easy to cast blight on whole communities. Condemnation of police misconduct is often met with the canard of black on black crime. Community efforts to fight violence among often desperate young men are routinely ignored. Even when community activists beg for more active policing the events get very little coverage.

The dishonesty is the reason we really can’t admit how isolated so many of our communities of color are, how bad the schools, housing, healthcare, economies, and systems of justice are. The police get all the attention, but it so much more than the crime of police violence that has isolated huge chunks of our population. How uneven the American application of justice. Even in 1976 Richard Pryor defined it as Just-Us. Back then there were 300,000 people held in American prisons today there are 2.3 million, and a lot of that has been driven by a racially biased for-profit prison system. Brother Richard had no idea how bad it would get. 

Economic isolation is the real crime. The nutty NAACP leader in Spokane sucks all the oxygen out of the air, while children in our midst, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, are allowed to rot and die in substandard, well, everything. And so it goes in post racial America. Who knew subtlety would prove to be an American skill of the first order? If separate but unequal gets struck down by the court, find another way to separate your children from the black neighbors. Class is the easily exchangeable currency of the committed racist. Whatever separation cannot be achieved by color can so much more easily attained by class. 

Americans have come to believe that the advances of a visible few are all the evidence they need that the Civil Rights movement has succeeded and they no longer need to pay attention. Pay no mind to the disproportionate numbers of African Americans swept up into the criminal justice system over the past 30 years. Try to ignore the fact that as a society we have become comfortable spending more to house someone in prison than it would have cost to send them to a university. Tell yourself about how great a justice system we have that locks tens of thousands away at Rikers or the Cook County jail for petty crimes simply because they are unable to make bail. Kalief Broader, a nineteen year-old who committed suicide after being held for three years without trial, is neither your responsibility nor mine. Unemployment is twice that for blacks as for whites, but keep telling yourself there are no historical legacy issues there, it’s all about bootstraps.  Pockets of poverty with inadequate access to healthcare suffering greatly elevated rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a whole range of preventable disease? Nothing can be done about that I guess.

To be fair these statistics are really driven by segments of the population in the most extreme poverty, but that is not news. The desperate hoods of New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere are the fertile grounds from which both athletes like Allen Iverson, and drug lords like Nicky Barnes rise. In desperation. Deep pockets of abject poverty, in post-racial America that is our chronic condition, just as it was in 1964 when President Johnson declared a War on Poverty. Before Nixon turned poverty into a political weapon the rate of poverty had been reduced from 25% to something in the mid teens, about where it is now.  But we surrendered all those aspirations. How easily manipulated we are on the matter of race, and how deeply dishonest we are in addressing that.  The statistics speak to our national priority, prison over education, white before black, wealthy before the poor.

Even as we soothe our conscience about the progress we have made, political entities at multiple levels whittle away at it. Voting rights are under attack by the courts and state legislatures. Measure after measure, passed to encourage people to vote, by mail, on Sundays and other days leading up to Election Day, on the internet, are all being swept away in a thinly concealed effort to deny blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the elderly and young people the right to vote. The non-existent fig leaf of voter fraud is often mentioned as justification, but just as often some hayseed redneck will tell you, “We’re a-tryin’ to hold down the democratic [black] vote.”

What they don’t decimate with the fraud of these efforts, they invalidate with the free-speech lie of Citizen’s United. Pity the poor white redneck that fell for all this radio-right freedom and liberty bullshit. The man, as he used to be called, is looking to make sure their vote doesn’t count either.  So what you get is enough poor white votes neutralizing black votes, really across the South. This happens just enough so that the states with huge black electorates are still overwhelmingly Republican, and beholden to economic interests that serve neither poor whites nor blacks. This leaves us with Nikki Haley, Stars and Bars, isolation, stagnation, and hopelessness.

This, as Stewart said Thursday night, is who we are and the sad truth is that even armed with these facts, which every politician in Washington and every state capital knows, we won’t do a f***ing thing. This is the back drop against which a 21 year old man, walked into Emanuel AME Church, and feeling his country slipping away, sat through an hour long bible study. Then with ample time to look into his victim’s faces, pulled out a high caliber pistol, a macabre birthday present, and shot nine people dead. 

Then finally, as if all that was not enough, the pain and utter misery of this moment is also made plain by the reality of the American obsession and tolerance of guns. I saved this for the last because any honest assessment would suggest that we will fix our problems of race long before we will address the literal fact that there is a gun in private hands in this country for every man woman and child, more than 300 million. Americans love their guns and their violent past. We have turned the genocide brought down on the indigenous peoples of America into national folklore. We wring our hands over war, but forget in time spans of three or four years what the fuss was all about, and so gear up for the next great evil, the next noble war. We are a militarist and often violent nation who calms its conscience with after the fact justifications for our adventurism.

Back in South Carolina we’ve already heard the comments of the gun industry lobbyists. If only Rev.  Pinckney or perhaps one of the others minsters had been packing as they conducted bible study with a group of seniors, and a few others sprinkled in, all this might have been avoided.  They make the same virulent claim after every mass shooting, and as I said the location matters not. No other advanced country so easily absorbs such violent chaos, but the president barely made a move to call for gun control laws. Everyone knows it won’t happen. Yes-we-can has been soul-crushed by violence and America’s unwillingness to face up to it.

In the battle over guns there are those that despair because the two sides can’t compromise. Their argument sounds fair, as it calls out the polarization in our body politic. If only the two sides could compromise. They envision, I think, two sober, earnest, committed, legislators arguing the merits, finding compromise and common ground. Those making this Solomon-like observations see their centrism as the obvious truth, but they fail to acknowledge that most Americans support moderate gun safety measures such as universal background checks even as they know that might not have saved anyone in Charleston. While there are citizen constituencies aligned on both sides of the argument over gun safety, the real battle lines are between business interests and citizens, and in that battle there really is no hope for the citizens. The gun lobby, and the manufacturers they truly represent, have poisoned our political process in such a way that even measures with majority support cannot pass. This is also who we are—Reform, f***ed in the ass at almost every turn by a commercial interest with political clout and only the morality of the bottom line.  

It is hard not to surrender to the cooling balm of bitter hatred. As I write I feel the beat of my bruised and bitter heart. America is not the greatest country in the world. It is my home and there are many elements of it which I truly love. I have no real desire to live elsewhere, but I have been fortunate to travel abroad enough so I can see that much of our story is built upon a mountain of obvious lies. (Perhaps I did not need the travel to see that.)  As these things go, I know my heart will heal (some) and in the days ahead I will recall the progress which has been made, even as ponder the work still to be done. I will seek out Dr. King’s words as I have so many times in my life. How long, not long, for the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But if I was being true, I would say that I am so tortured with anger at this moment, so hollowed out with a sense of hopelessness, I just don’t know.

I have been thinking about some of the activists pushing reform at this moment. Rev. Pinckney was one of those. There is a young man named Deray McKesson. I stumbled across him reading coverage from Ferguson, and then the shooting that Charleston was still reeling from when this latest incident took place, the execution of a Walter Scott after a routine traffic stop by a North Charleston Office, Michael Slager. Until earlier this year McKesson worked in the public school system in Minneapolis.  I am sure he pictured a different life for himself, but by any measure the truth of the struggle is his life now. I like McKesson.  I follow him on Twitter (@deray). He posted both of these today.

“As I stand here outside of Emanuel AME, listening to people sing & pray, I keep thinking of their last bible study. I can't sing yet.”

“There is work to be done. It'll take all of us to win.”

He will bring you low with his honesty and his genuine hurt, and then raise you back up with his commitment, and his eyes, always on the prize. We need that I think. Good luck, Deray, America needs you.