An event I watched on MSNBC of a large black man running to escape and getting shot dead in the early evening, run down by two policemen, all three in a desperate battle of survival.
It looked like the police were trying to subdue the man, perhaps quite routinely. Apparently the man was parked at Wendy’s, holed up in his car asleep. The police came to check it out—maybe some employee called about it.
“Put your hands where I can see them and get out of the car”, he was ordered.
“I don’t have to, I haven’t done anything.”
He resisted as they were attempting to handcuff him. He took a taser out of the hand of one policeman and tried to run away.
In one sense this all looks like the police were simply doing their job, except we know nothing of the circumstances of the man and why he was there.
What if he was fed up with having no money, no job and hopelessly swamped in debt. At the end of his rope, having lost his self respect due to his inability to provide for his family. Was he enraged and frustrated? Maybe he left his apartment, got into his car, drove around with the little gas he had, and settled in at Wendy’s, desperate and psychically broken.
This story has many parts, and a complex underpinning, including that the policemen whose work might have intensified as tolerance diminished in growing numbers in the neighborhood they worked in. People having crude, insensitive, hostile encounters with each other as they resist authority more and more.
There are always, beneath the surface, unknown ingredients.
The struggle for survival in desperate circumstances loses its sensibility. Its cause may be understood in deprivations, but its effects on its victims stimulates passion and feelings of frustration and desperation that come from deep within the core of ego’s sense of primal survival as the only sensible reaction. Reason subsides and rage takes over.
What should we expect the response to be?
The white, American middle class have almost no insight as to their own history of the past 500 years of colonialism that lay beneath what has formed the Americas. It’s an experience of violent, cruel, and insensitive exclusion—oppression of all except the white conquerers.
Adding religious oppression to this equation of the exclusion and oppression of others not like themselves, most white, Christian people don’t want to look, to see, to know.
Saturate a soul with cruel neglect, repression and denial, and up comes an explosion of violence—down goes the world of empathy,
God Bless White America and its exclusive ownership of capitalism.
You break it, you own it!