I am not used to this.
I am used to New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow putting up numbers from this or that survey, and using them to “prove” Black aggrievement, often without any context or recognition of any side but his own.
I am not used to Mr. Blow writing commentary that, in my view, sees both sides of the issue and, for the most part, makes all the sense in the world.
So it is with great pleasure that I note today is the day.
You can read Charles Blow’s entire column by clicking here. But let me show you a few key segments – in rust, with my comments in blue:
Last week was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our nation.
After two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon Heights, Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly ambush at an otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people. The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black Lives Matter” and “about the recent police shootings” and “was upset at white people” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.” All true. No judgment about the reasons for Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile’s shootings by police, because we don’t yet know all the facts. But a full judgment about micah johnson, who perpetrated a self-defined racial massacre on the Dallas police force, because we DO know the facts.
We seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way out, without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction, without resolutions that will satisfy. Yep.
This is not a level of stress and strain that a civil society can long endure.
I feel numb, and anguished and heartbroken, and I fear that I am far from alone.
And yet, I also fear that time is a requirement for remedy. We didn’t arrive at this place overnight and we won’t move on from it overnight. How can anyone dispute this?
Our American “ghettos” were created by policy and design. These areas of concentrated poverty became fertile ground for crime and violence. Municipalities used heavy police forces to try to cap that violence. Too often, aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive policing. Relationships between communities and cops became strained. A small number of criminals poisoned police beliefs about whole communities, and a small number of dishonorable officers poisoned communities’ beliefs about entire police forces. And then, too often the unimaginable happened and someone ended up dead at the hands of the police. This is the one part I have any serious dispute with – and not because the words are untrue, but because some words were left out. Police are under attack in those neighborhoods too, and they have the injuries and fatalities to prove it.
This is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations are tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause be able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to use each dead body as a societal wedge?
Will the people who can see clearly that there is no such thing as selective, discriminatory, exclusionary outrage and grieving when lives are taken, be heard above those who see every tragedy as a plus or minus for a cumulative argument?
Will the people who see both the protests over police killings and the killings of police officers as fundamentally about the value of life rise above those who see political opportunity in this arms race of atrocities?
These are very serious questions — soul-of-a-nation questions — that we dare not ignore.
Anger and vengeance and violence are exceedingly easy to access and almost effortlessly unleashed.
The higher calling — the harder trial — is the belief in the ultimate moral justice and the inevitable victory of righteousness over wrong.
When we all can see clearly that the ultimate goal is harmony and not hate, rectification and not retribution, we have a chance to see our way forward. But we all need to start here and now, by doing this simple thing: Seeing every person as fully human, deserving every day to make it home to the people he loves. YES. We are all INDIVIDUALS. Rogue cops – and they surely exist – do not define all cops any more than violent criminal Blacks – and they surely exist – define all Blacks.
Thanks you, Charles Blow, for providing us with a meaningful, unflinching, fair statement of reality.
May this be the start a prolonged streak. And may it spur more commentators – for The Times and other media venues – to do the same.
