Progress?

I've got a couple of different things jangling around my head this morning.  The first is the movie about flying that we went to see with the kids in the Science Center at the new High School here in Charles County.  The Science Center has one of those big spherical, planetarium style domes where they can show specially designed movies that make you feel all swoopy.  Last night's movie was about the human dream of flying and the long process by which we have come to make jets and space stations a reality.  The movie is designed around the ooh and aah factor of making you feel like you're flying, but it contains a history of human flight, it goes from DaVinci's flying machines to hot air balloons to the Wright brothers in 1903, and then things get pretty dark, WWI and the age of fighter planes and bombers.  The dream of flight becomes a nightmare of violence.  Included was a Pink Floyd-esque moment where squadrons of B-17 flying fortresses lumber across a red sky and drop bombs by the thousands and then morph into sinister computer animated ravens.  It was kind of emotionally intense, and it reminded me that, rather more often than not, our greatest achievements have a sinister underside.
After all, the first thing we did with the ability to split the atom was to blow up two Japanese cities.
It's a little tough to say whether or not we've learned our lesson.
But there is a lesson to be learned, and I think we're capable, as a species, of learning lessons.  We learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear warfare is a horror that none of us really want to unleash on the world.  That knowledge has been held in a precarious balance ever since, but we managed to tiptoe along the edge of the void of self destruction without falling in.  The lesson was apparently dramatic and tragic enough to keep us from ever pushing that fabled button.
But it wasn't enough to push us away from war and violence altogether.  I wonder if any event ever will be.
The second set of thoughts for the morning is about Ferguson, Missouri, and the decision by a grand jury not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown, for any crime.  My gut reaction to the decision was for injustice alarms to start going off at full blare.  It seems like another terrible link in our long and disgraceful past of racial discrimination.  A police officer shoots an unarmed black teenager and gets off scott free.  But there are some peculiar things about how this played out: first of all, this is a grand jury, not a trial jury, all they had to do was decide whether or not to prosecute.  Usually this takes place in fairly cursory fashion.  The grand jury listens to a recommendation from a prosecutor and weighs the evidence that tells them primarily that a crime was committed, not whether the accused is guilty or innocent.  This grand jury did not get a recommendation from the prosecutor, one way or the other, in other words the system did not tell them what they were expected to do or to say.  They did get something like 70 hours of testimony and evidence presentation, which I'm guessing is more than most grand juries usually get.  To top it off, I'm sure they knew the world was watching them, and that they had better get this right.
What they said was that Darren Wilson was operating within the parameters of his training and his experience when he shot Mike Brown, which is, I suppose, the only thing you can really expect from a police officer.
Mike Brown's father has issued a statement asking for people to refrain from looting and violence.  His hope is that his son's death will not be in vain and that the dialogue about racial justice and police conduct can continue.  Which will almost certainly not happen if the fears of the American people are played out in riots and violence.
Many people are lamenting that Darren Wilson is "getting away" with killing Mike Brown in cold blood, but I think that there is a deeper truth to be dealt with here, a truth that is perhaps better served if we don't allow Darren Wilson to become our lone scapegoat in this situation.
My thinking goes like this:

1. The grand jury indicts Wilson, an emotionally charged trial further inflames the feelings and, no matter what the result, large numbers of people feel violated.
2. As we saw with the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, no one really listens to people who disagree, they just shout at each other over a wall of ignorance.
3. If Wilson was convicted, he becomes the villain.  He becomes the bad cop, who overstepped his authority, he becomes the evil exception rather than an all too representative sample of a broken system in which young black men are guilty until proven innocent.
4. If Wilson is exonerated, then we have let the system totally off the hook and the same people are still feeling like they have been let down... again.

Is this perhaps the best way that we can learn from our mistakes?  Darren Wilson has been judged by a grand jury to have acted in way that is within the parameters of his training and experience, and he shot an unarmed teenager.  If you say, "stuff happens," and move on, you're not learning, but what about if you say, "perhaps the parameters of training and experience need to change."  What if you continue to analyze and work to change the relationship that police (and the larger society) have with young black men.  What if you drop the assumption that Darren Wilson was a stone-cold racist who was just itching to kill a black kid, and work with the reality that this sort of thing is all too characteristic of the daily experience of both police officers and black men.
Obviously, I'm talking to the middle ground here, but I think the middle ground is what needs to rise up in this case and in most cases.  Our system is broken, being young, black and poor is a crime in and of itself, and our criminal justice statistics show it.  Police do treat people differently on the basis of their skin color, and it's not always because they're racist, it's because of the parameters of their training and experience.  If we say that this was an isolated incident involving one bad cop, we are exonerating the system.
If on the other hand, we accept the grand jury's judgment that Darren Wilson is, if not a good cop, a pretty standard and decidedly not bad cop, who something that has been determined to be within reason by a panel of people who heard the evidence, and we also accept that Mike Brown did not deserve to get shot dead in the street, then we have to look at the system, we have to learn a lesson.  We can't ignore it any longer.
Is this dramatic and tragic enough for us to start to have the conversation, and maybe even fix what is broken?
I certainly hope so.  I don't want Mike Brown to have died in vain either.