On the Brink...

Perhaps it's the tryptophan, perhaps it's just the pure saturation of "think pieces" concerning the Mike Brown/ Darren Wilson grand jury/ latest round of Ferguson protests, but I'm having a moment of sleepy hopefulness.  I know, it seems weird because: injustice, riots, broken system, dead kids, crooked prosecutors, hapless (and very white) police officer, and a whole slew of absolutely abhorrent hate-itude from both sides on the social media, but I feel like there's a moment coming here, a moment that was probably too narrowly avoided in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.
Call it a reckoning.
Call it the chickens coming home to roost as Malcolm X did.
But notice, please, that this is much more of a Malcolm X sort of moment than it is a Martin Luther King moment.  As much as I hope the cooler heads prevail here, as much as I hope that non-violence wins the day, I also hope the protests and the outrage over the events of the past six months don't just fade into the background.
This racial injustice issue needs to stay on our front burners.  We need to talk about this, we need to stop building walls of ignorance that allow us to write off what is happening in Ferguson and around the country as lawlessness.  Sure there are looters and people who may just be out to break some things and watch the world burn, but we need to keep perspective.  We need to recognize that these are protests at the core.
This is chemotherapy for the cancerous injustice that has once again reared it's head in our nation.  There are some pretty stiff side effects, but that doesn't mean we need to stop the treatment.  It is pretty clear to me right now that we have finally begun to notice how sick we really are.  We are looking at this whole mess and finding that the tumor is not contained as neatly as we would like.  We are seeing a couple of African American teens in a poor section of town, en route from basically robbing a convenience store, being confronted by a police officer, not because of their recent miscreant behavior, but because of basically jaywalking.  The officer is rude and forceful, the boys are belligerent and possibly violent, but the officer has a gun, and when you bring fists to a gun fight, you have made a tactical error.  Violence gets out of control quickly, and a young man is dead.  The system then springs into action, not to bring justice, but to basically exonerate the guilty, to make excuses, to explain away the dead black man in the street.
No matter whether you believe Wilson or whether you believe any of the other possible scenarios, this is a story we have seen far too often before.  The truth is never told, justice is reckoned by a system that can only be seen as unjust from the perspective of the victims.
And most of us don't know what to think.  White, wealthy America retreats into an introspective fog of privilege and "listening."  We're confused, we want someone to tell us what to do and what to think, but we're not going to challenge our police or our prosecutors, because mostly they protect us, they protect our interests, they make sure that Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin are not lurking around our neighborhoods or jaywalking down our streets or hustling our convenience stores.  We're not sure that all this anger is called for, because it's not the blood of our children on that street.
So we try to make some sort of balanced and thoughtful response, we assure the people who are suffering that we're on their side, but we probably won't do anything about it.
We probably wont use our voices and our votes to really try to fix the system, partly because we maybe don't think there's any difference between one politician, sheriff, DA or prosecutor and another.  But also because we want those people to ensure our safety, and to most of us young black men look dangerous.
You can probably tell I'm a little angry about this, but believe me I understand why it feels like it does on a pretty visceral level.  I have stood face to face with a black man, a kid I grew up with, and who had taken a very different path.  A man who had a gun when all I had was words.  A man who probably wouldn't have minded using the gun on someone.  Fortunately that day, he didn't really want to use the gun on me.  I wasn't the target, I was the mediator, but I couldn't say anything clever or thoughtful enough to convince him that violence wasn't the way.  Everything in his world told him that it was, that it was the only way to get respect.  In the end, I suspect the only thing that really kept something pretty horrible from happening that day was some long ago playground bond that a middle class white kid and a poor black kid once had.
It was what I would call a pretty intense situation, but what saved it was not anything clever I said, it was that I was able to invoke a relationship of some sort, I knew where he was coming from, I knew his brothers, I knew (sort of) where he was at the moment.  Do we train our police to understand the people they are called to protect and serve?  Or do we train them to out-violence criminals?
In the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, I felt that the ultimate result was far from unavoidable.  As it turns out Zimmerman has proven to be a highly disturbed individual who never should have been out riding around as a vigilante.  In this case though, we are dealing with a police officer who had all sorts of training; training with a gun, training in "command presence," training in how to react to a threat.   I guess what I wonder is whether we require our police officers to get trained in empathy.  Do we train them in restraint?  Do we indoctrinate them with the spiderman doctrine: "with great power comes great responsibility?"  Do we train them at all to try and understand human nature?  Do we prepare them to enforce the law with something more powerful than a sidearm?  Do we teach them to wield their own humanity?  Or do we just hope that they'll figure that out for themselves?
In the wake of all this, there have been many anecdotal "good cop" stories, and I'm glad.  I know there are good cops out there, I know there are cops who find lost children and puppies.  I know there are cops out there who show great compassion to people having the worst day of their lives.  We need to help those cops do their thing.
We need to attack a culture that promotes "big man with a gun" syndrome.  We need to attack a culture that treats certain people as an inherent threat, and shoots first and asks questions later.  We need to increase accountability for street cops and the lawyers and judges up the ladder as well.
Want respect?  Be respectable.  Want honor?  Be honorable.
It's not actually as hard as you might think.