This past week was a bad one for the United States of America and its people. I don’t know how else to say it. I am heartbroken. There are radiating layers of failure that I cannot look away from. Nor should I (We). Our systems, large and small are failing all of us. If we don’t think it applies to all of us, we aren’t looking hard enough. After I left Patagonia on Saturday, my wife told me about a staging area for police, SWAT and the national guard at East High School in Salt Lake City. I drove by and saw Guard troops piling into an unmarked pickup truck to head downtown. I followed them. I imagine it looked like a patrol unit heading into a neighborhood in Afghanistan or Iraq. I can’t actually know what that looks like because all I know of those wars is what I read about for two decades or what I saw exported from Hollywood studios green lit in their boardrooms. Because that is the thing about our individual liberty, it compartmentalizes everything.
As I followed the truck downtown, our paths diverged. I went a different way to arrive at the Salt Lake City and County building, which served as an epicenter of the protests against the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police department officer, Derek Chauvin. I made two quick observations as I got out of my car in front of an expensive restaurant watching people dine outside on a patio with a lit fireplace. (It was 90 degrees outside). One, my chest was pounding watching protesters run to and from the forming line in front of Library Square. I felt the heat of anger and fear. Two, I noticed the people (white people) eating and drinking at the restaurant looked like they were observing a show as they sipped Rose al Fresco during police brutality protest wrapped in a global pandemic. It was an observation not a judgment. I have been to that very restaurant before with family and friends but it showed the choices some people have and others don’t. The observation is rooted in my own inventory of my white privilege. I need to constantly audit and still I have a blind spot as vast as the chasm between my understanding of myself and my cognitive dissonance. By the arbitrary nature of the universe, I was born into my privilege. As was my son. As was my father, his father before him and his father before him. I feel an obligation to examine this, question this and continue to evolve my worldview through my experience. may it continually evolve toward empathy for all people and our planet.
I made my way to the line. On one side I saw youth, activism, diversity, anger, frustration and fear. On the other, I saw authority, duty, status-quo, order and fear. I saw fear on both sides. the metaphor of ‘the line’ is so powerful. There is a line drawn at all protests. I have seen it from occupy wall street to george floyd. It forms naturally as it buttresses up to force. It holds Until it doesn’t. Until it breaks. Lines formed almost simultaneously in 140 American cities on the same day. After centuries of systemic racial injustice following America’s original sin of Slavery, there is no way those lines were going to hold. The injustice cannot be kept inside a tidy box anymore. (Has it ever?)
As I left the protest to get back to my family, I passed the second tragedy of our modern world. Salt Lake City’s downtown is like many mid-sized American cities, A financial center. As I drove block by block passed commercial buildings, law offices etc. I saw so many different people presumable suffering from mental illness, homeless, hungry and seemingly fucked up on drugs to cope. I noticed the diversity again. Young, old, white, brown and black. these people wondered our “financial hub” like zombies in a field of despair. These are people. Our people. this population is growing.
If the arc of time bends toward justice, now is the time. America is a failed experiment socially, culturally and economically. (Cornell West) If I were to write that statement in my own words I would write: “American is approaching a failed experiment… and if we don’t get our act together we will be one… There is my privilege..
America is a failed experiment. Because until all boats rise. No boats rise. Until we defend our constitution and amend our constitution to protect all people as we evolve through time, no one wins. people need help and we need to help each other. Individual Liberty and Capitalism create compartmentalization, isolation and greed. We do not see each other through a collective lens. We get ours (if we are privileged) and everyone else can fend for themselves. The stratification of class widens as the ideology of Democracy and her institutions are crushed with ease by unregulated markets and its gatekeepers. The military industrial complex grows and the department of education shrinks. The for-profit media machine tells you what you want to hear, when you want to hear it and where to point your pitchfork. Say nothing of the craft and art of journalism as a public good. A morally bankrupt fool occupies our White House and he is nothing more that the answer to a perverse equation of how we lost our way. The prison industrial complex thrives. we need to end any legislation that incentivizes mass INCARCERATION and directly benefits private prison companies and their SUBSIDIARY contractors. to do that we need to defund the police to ALLEVIATE disproportionate police violence in minority and vulnerable communities and also to take pressure off of police officers who are asked to do far too much they are not trained for. we can build a new standard of policing that focuses on ‘serve’ instead of ‘protect’ we need to reallocate funds away from militarization and toward community resources for mental health professional partnerships, boys and girls clubs, public education and other community resources for those in need so the idea of calling ‘911’ is the last thing people think about because they have what they need.
We need to start seeing our country for what it is. Not what we think it is. More importantly we need to make our country what we want it to be. we are not a collection of consumers. we need to keep money away from the democratic process. The baton of power is there for us to take. these protests are an opportunity for us to start to climb the hard road to higher ground. we will bring our children with us. We must teach them the difference between right and wrong. Between good and bad. Between Kind and Mean. Between Lawful and Lawless. let’s teach them to do hard things. to be citizens not consumers. To see beauty in diversity. To see creativity in all things. To protect our planet at all costs. To Vote. To Pay taxes. To help those who need it. To always be humble. To laugh and cry and feel. To apologize. And most importantly to love themselves and all mankind equally.
My wife is an arbiter of action. As I hung my head, she said let’s go. So here we go.
