I can also understand what motivated George W. Bush to invade Iraq and take the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings there. The plot doesn't seem difficult to grasp: As a leader, he was caught with his pants down on 9/11 and he reacted with "shock and awe" in an unrelated place to bolster a fearsome image. It all went south from there. The point is, while I empathize with both Johnson's and Bush's decisions and their accompanying actions, I repudiate them both as criminal. As the Chilcot Report makes very clear about British Prime Minister Tony Blair, these leaders knew what they were doing. They lied their way into an invasion; they were not "misled" by poor intel. Unfortunately, something with the partisan-transcending integrity of a Chilcot Report is unlikely to happen in our culture at this time.
The types of killing being discussed here -- state mass killing, individual police killing and individual pay-back killing (some might call it terrorism) -- are treated differently in our criminal justice system for obvious reasons, most of them political and involving the relative status of the killer and the victim. On a pure existential level where the meaning-establishing narratives of politics and status we take for granted are removed and life is nothing but a Jackson Pollack confusion of chaos, killing is killing, dead is dead and mourning loved ones hurts.
The Muslim spiritual leader who spoke at the very moving grieving ceremony in Dallas on the day after the police killings earnestly asked the crowd why we so often have to wait for such violent and tragic events in order to do something about our problems. He's right. It may have something to do with our philosophy of profit and the free-market and holding out until the absolute last moment lest we make a premature "deal" and give away too much. In that case, violence becomes a punctuation in the process. Everybody at that ceremony in Dallas -- white and black, Jew and Muslim -- stressed, often with emotion in their voices, we had a real problem in America. The evidence was a week of two senseless police killings of young black men and the inklings of an armed civil war in the making. The fact good people have been screaming 'til they're blue in the face for years about this kind of crisis didn't matter. At the Dallas ceremony, the consensus was if something wasn't done and done quickly, the nation was in deep trouble. We can only hope this urgency endures beyond the usual mourning period following such incidents.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown, cops hunting Micah Johnson, and Mayor Mike Rawlings
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The remarks made by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings truly surprised me. My anti-Texas prejudice was not ready for this man, a large white guy who had been CEO of Pizza Hut, a Democrat, who spoke movingly about the need for racial healing, how slavery and other abuses in our history (including the two killings that week) were real -- and finally, that there was a need for forgiveness as a way forward. Granted, in his narrative it was white people who needed to be forgiven, but with forgiveness comes atonement, and the mayor seemed inclined to do some needed atoning. Likewise, Dallas Police Chief David Brown carried himself with great humility whenever he showed up before the cameras in the midst of leading the effort to capture or kill Micah Johnson. He spoke of police vulnerability and the need for public support. There was none of the strutting, macho braggadocio made famous by the former president from Texas. The traditional, old-west tenets of vengeance and violent response did not seem to be working anymore in this western urban collective. Something different had to be worked out. And we learned it was already happening: Dallas was in the process of de-militarizing its police into a more community-oriented force. Protesters told of friendly cops in non-SWAT outfits accompanying the Black Lives Matter protest; some cops had their pictures taken with protesters. Dallas cops were actually "protecting and serving" their community -- not patrolling it like it was Falluja.
As the Muslim religious leader emphasized, it's at these difficult junctures that people join together to figure out a better way. It's an uphill struggle, but we can encourage the spirit of forgiveness Mayor Rawlings spoke of. Forgiveness, despite what its slanderous detractors say, is a two-way street focused on difficult dialogue and change; it's about moving-on with life for the benefit of everybody. It doesn't work in all cases, but it's the way of love, a word the mayor and others emphasized over and over that afternoon. Hate gets us nowhere.
I have no need to see George W. Bush in prison; I just want his actions officially recognized as a national disgrace for Americans and, more important, the people of Iraq -- so nothing like it will ever happen again. Officer Jeronimo Yanez clearly should be indicted and convicted of homicide; but maybe more important than prison would be some kind of atonement work and the development of a nationally-driven effort to more effectively train police officers like Yanez to better manage their fears. As for Micah Johnson, he chose to avoid trial and went the route of suicide-by-cop, which may be the best justice in his case.
Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle, has a new book out called To Protect and Serve: How To Fix America's Police. He shows how virtually all police departments are used to collect revenues. Was this a pressure on officer Yanez? The word "quotas" is never used; instead, it's called "the numbers game." That is, a cop is told he must deliver two "movers" (moving violation tickets) every day -- and more if he's ambitious to move up in the department. This process was taken to an egregiously oppressive level in Ferguson, Missouri. Stamper also says "the discipline of recognizing and managing one's fears is not taught in the police academy. Perversely, recruits are taught the opposite. They're taught to be afraid, very afraid." He advocates, instead, teaching "the value of knowledge, and wisdom, and self-discipline." He also points out that police work "does not crack the top ten of the country's deadliest occupations." Truck drivers, construction workers and roofers are killed at a greater rate.
Many agree this amazing week is a crisis moment; but it's also an opportunity to examine the many roots of that crisis. Donald Trump is dead wrong: There's no going backwards to greatness -- except in one's mind. Life only moves forward toward an uncertain future. Anything else is arguing for a form of mass mental illness that would require even more violence to sustain than the crazy state of exceptionalism we're in the grip of now. Greatness comes with real self-knowledge.
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