A friend of mine who is a cross-country trucker living in Kansas has a metaphor that aptly explains the mess we're in: The country, he says, has entered a long, dark tunnel representing what I call The Trifecta, pandemic, economic depression and civil unrest spreading across the nation. His point is that the nation that will come out of this long, dark tunnel is not going to be the same country that went into it. Donald Trump wants it to be a police state with him "dominating" everything from the top. Many of us we'll find out how many the first Tuesday of November want something else, something that belatedly reforms the beleaguered mechanics of democracy, the police and criminal justice systems, our education systems, the environment, militarism obsessed with dominating the world, and the list goes on.
My wife and a friend organized a demonstration in our little township that turned out 300 people, one of whom was a young African American resident who told the crowd he had said to someone it was very unlikely the township's white residents would show up for a Black Lives Matter protest. He said: "I have to eat my words." Meanwhile, it was hitting the fan across the border in Philly. Angry black activists feeling their righteous fury were articulating being fed up even with good-intentioned, white liberals. The Philly police are facing an unprecedented intelligence operation of archived protest-friendly iphone videos that are being collected to make a case for an over-zealous police response to protesters. As in 1968 Chicago, the forensic question seems to be, who were the most obnoxious rioters, protesters or the police? My wife is getting Black Lives Matter lawn signs printed up to be distributed in our township, something we've avoided in the past.
On my dawn walk, I passed the home of a police lieutenant I've engaged with off and on in recent years; much of my incentive to engage with our cops had to do with three unfortunate interactions I had with one officer in the past. The lieutenant and I seem at odds, politically, but I don't know for certain. He doesn't seem to be a perfect man; but neither am I. But after getting to know him a bit, after a little good-natured joking around, he seems to be a good man, aware of the need for good police supervision of officers like the one I had problems with. Due to the current unrest in the streets, our relationship and my publicly expressed concerns with the department have been renewed. As I walked past his house in the first glimmer of dawn, a fantasy took over my mind of someone noticing a wandering lunatic in paint-splotched pajamas walking down the middle of the street in his socks. In my fantasy, a series of events are set in motion based on fear and delusion, ending up with me being shot six times at dawn in the middle of the street.
I've reached into the realm of fiction like this more than once in my life. But I don't know; I feel I've heard stories of dead men in the street that don't sound too far off such a fantasy. But, it's true, I am white. It seems to me likely that many police shootings of African Americans are due to similar delusional fears on the part of white cops terrified of black rage. I feel deep in their heart they understand black rage is real and even justified, an understanding that can only intensify a young, inexperienced cop's sense of fear. The only way to get over this kind of thing is for people of different races to engage and talk with each other. That especially means cops if real community policing is the goal.
The culmination of my dawn reverie came as I turned back to my house, where in the driveway I expected to find The New York Times. Once the sun was up, I looked forward to sitting with a cup of coffee, with Charlie on the table rolling over for a belly rub, and reading about the latest madness. I was at the point where the cul-de-sac splits left and right. I became aware of movement and air displacement above me and soon realized it was dozens of small bats soaring and whipping around this way and that, critters I presumed who had just woken up and were having breakfast of bugs caught on the fly.
I stood there in the middle of the road for maybe 20 minutes totally dazzled by the little flying mammals and following them with my gaze as they darted around. I imagined their amazing radar being aware of me standing there, in the same way I sensed the air displacement from their movements. These were small bats, but it made me recall one dark night in El Salvador years ago under a huge tree when I felt the air displacement of something in the air. I put the widest-angle lens I had on my camera and attached the flash. When I sensed movement, I'd hit the flash. This was the age of film, so I had to wait a week or so to discover images of bats with wingspans of up to a couple feet frozen in fine detail by the flash.
I was also reminded of a wonderful scene in Terrance Malick's post-Vietnam film of James Jones' classic WWII novel, The Thin Red Line, a tale of bloody fighting on a South Pacific island. A lone soldier is running in a shallow creek from a Japanese patrol that's after him; he's doing it to distract the Japs (the term used by my father, a PT boat captain in the South Pacific) from the rest of his small unit. Fear and adrenaline are palpable in the scene, which includes lots of crashing in the brush and splashing in the creek. Breathing hard, our man hides for a moment under an overhang of vegetation. The camera turns and focuses on a cluster of bats hanging upside down under the large overhang of vegetation. They've been woken up from a daytime snooze. Their eyes are wide open, as if to say: "What's all the commotion?"
Instantly, the whole adrenaline-intensive reality of humans at war is thrown into the jolting new perspective of Nature itself. You realize how wrapped up we can become in our squabbles, some of those human squabbles reaching the level of horrific world conflagration, in this case on an otherwise beautiful island in the Pacific Ocean. The film is one of my wife's favorite films, due to its strange spirituality. In another powerful scene, soldiers are ordered by their lieutenant to move forward into a sea of tall grass. If you know Malick's work, the sea of grass image reappears in other films. We hear gunshots. The men fall one by one and disappear into the beautiful swelling and flowing sea of grass moved by the wind. The men are gone, yet the grass continues to move the way it always moves in the wind the way it always has and always will. The Earth abides and will cough us off at some point if we don't figure out how to do better preserving it.
The point is as I was slapped down recently by an old friend about something I had written concerning petty politics that she didn't like to "get over it." (I accepted her comment and re-applied it here.) We need to get over so many of our petty little differences, to slow down and employ some strategic forgiveness so we can move on to better things.
And keep our eyes on the prize.
What is that prize? To me, no one said it better than Rodney King, who an LAPD squad beat without mercy as plumbing supply salesman George Holliday made history with a video camera. Rodney's crime? Beyond fleeing police at speeds up to 117 MPH, he was high on PCP and, after a night of drinking and carousing with friends, was feeling just a bit too full of himself for those LAPD troopers.
When he came out of the hospital after all the cops had been let off for "qualified immunity" and "past practices" and other legal sleights-of-hand and after six days of rioting that cost 63 lives Rodney did not express bitterness toward the cops or rant against the history of white oppression against his race. He certainly would have been justified in doing so, given the nightmare scene that has become iconic of white cops wailing with billy clubs on his prone black body. But he seemed to feel some human responsibility for some part of the horror of the riots.
"Can we all get along?" he humbly asks the gathering of press cameras, his voice breaking from emotion. "Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids. . . . We're all stuck here for a while; let's try to work it out."
We're all stuck here for a while . . . stuck between our births and deaths, between the "kids" and "the older people", caught without being consulted, in a flash, in our individual lifespans, like those Salvadoran bats. To me, Rodney was saying, slow down and cherish the marvel of life itself. Get to that perspective that includes the world of the bats of the world, creatures who inhabit a hidden world of night and dawn that we rarely see much of. It's good to ponder something so ordinary, but so marvelous, as bats feeding at dawn, especially when bats are often associated with horror and fear in our perceptions. When, really, like all creatures large and small, they're incredible living things.
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