I have been watching events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri,
the past few days, as has the world. I know that troubled suburb of St. Louis,
have a friend who recently moved there, have driven past or through it many
times. Ferguson and St. Louis occupy the
northeastern corner of Missouri a straight shot across the state on I-70 from
where I live in a similar area of Kansas City in the northwestern corner of the
state.
I live on the “wrong” side of Troost Avenue in Kansas City,
the poor side, the dark side, of this street that divides this city, racially
and socioeconomically. The people in my neighborhood and the neighborhoods
around us were suffering severely for at least three years before the economic
crisis hit the stock market and was finally declared. It seems we only worry
about the economy when it adversely affects the well-off. What does that say
about us as a country?
Where I live is similar to Ferguson where Michael Brown was
killed, a street with a strip of businesses surrounded by working-class homes
on all sides. I know what it’s like to have a SWAT team pull up and cordon off
my neighborhood and block my driveway while armored and assault-weapon-armed
men sweep through our backyard because of something that happened at a business
up on Troost. I can imagine the plight of the people who are being teargassed
in their own driveways and yards because they just happen to live where
something happened. That’s something I think people forget. It’s mostly homes around there. Many of those
people gathered around the body of Michael Brown when the police came in so
hard and heavy that first day with guns and dogs were actually standing in
their own or their neighbor’s yards. This is a whole community under siege by
its own police force.
When the white men at the Bundy standoff, armed to the
teeth, pointed loaded assault weapons at police and threatened them, no one
shot them, and no one teargassed them. Apparently, that kind of behavior is
saved for people of color in this country.
I remember the riots of the 1960s. More people would do well
to remember them. If you’re not old enough or weren’t aware enough when they
occurred, google them. And imagine them now, with the population in many cities
much larger than it was then, with automatic weapons in the hands of much of
the population, as they were not at that time. There is frustration,
hopelessness, and anger of that immensity that is building in this country
right now.
The riots of the 1960s were a wake-up call for the United
States. As a country, we set up programs to deal with the poverty and
hopelessness and racism that brought them about—programs that brought more
people of color and people from poor backgrounds into the middle class than
ever before, programs that brought medical care, nutritional care, education,
job training and many other good things to what were essentially bad places to
live one’s life.
In recent years, we’ve been dismantling the structure of
safety-net services and programs that we set up after those riots, even as
racism has become ever more overt and in-your-face in this country. Things have
been peaceful through the decades of greed. No one’s been pitching bottles or
breaking windows, though poor people and working-class people and people of
color and women have been suffering. So we take—and take and take—from the poor
and the working class and, now, even the middle class, and give it all to the
wealthy and the corporations. We militarize our police forces and allow too
many of them to think of the streets on which we live as a war zone in which
they have the right to act as if they are an occupying army. We allow racism, which had been forced
underground at least, to rise up and blossom in front of us, on our television
sets, in our state legislatures and governor’s mansions, in the United States
Congress and Supreme Court. We don’t listen when people protest. The country
turns its back.
My husband once knew someone who was writing a dissertation called
“Violence Works.” I’d like to think his
friend’s analysis is wrong, but reality is slapping me in the face right now. People
trying to peacefully protest a young man’s brutal death, with hands held high
in the air, are teargassed and have their lives threatened by a police force
that views them as enemy combatants. If
you look at the U.S.’s history, you’ll see plenty of proof of that dissertation’s
thesis, as well. Basically, it is when people can’t take it any longer and
erupt in violence that we, as a country, wake up and do something to improve
the situation. Most of our social improvements have followed that chain of events.
When we wipe out program after program designed to help
people pull themselves and their families out of poverty, we are playing with
fire. When we ignore the damage the economy sustains from short-sighted greed
until the damage spreads to the wealthy—and then provide bailouts only to the
powerful—we say something about what kind of country we are and what we value. When
we allow wealthy white men to threaten law enforcement officers with loaded
weapons with impunity while teargassing unarmed African American mothers and
children in or near their own homes, we say something about what kind of country
we are and what we value. And that something is sour to the taste and bitter to
the heart for a country founded on the ideals this country still claims to hold
as its own. Maybe it’s time we took a look at what we truly value versus what
we say we value. What kind of a country do we want to be? We are creating the
future now.
REPLY TO COMMENTS ( because Blogger):
Sara Sue, thank you. It's terrifying to see this. Everyone should read about all the militarization of police forces in this country and the attitudes their leadership publicly espouse about our neighborhood streets being a war zone. In a time when violent crime of all types has dropped to its lowest levels in decades, they are arming for battle and treating the citizens whose taxes pay their salaries as enemy combatants in an occupied territory.
Mary, thank you for reading it and thinking about it. What we need now is people who will stop reacting in a knee-jerk, visceral way and instead think seriously about these things.
Yes, Reine, and Fox News and their ilk were proclaiming outside agitators in the first hour after Brown's death. I think there are some people there now from both outside and from Ferguson itself who want to provoke conflict. Any time you set up a powder keg someone always seems to want to play the spark. But I know some folks from KC who drove across the state to support friends and relatives who were residents and were demonstrating and being treated abysmally. Someone in power needs to take control of the militarized police and ease back the intensity so negotiations can take place. Unfortunately, a number of drastically bad decisions have made that prospect look dim. When police force Amnesty International observers, who are wearing clearly identified shirts and are trying to leave with hands held high to show they're harmless after being told to leave or be arrested, to kneel on the ground for no reason other than to exert power, when a policemen aims his rifle at people with hands in the air and with obscenities threatens to kill them, etc., unfortunately etc., chances of peaceful outcomes look distant and unlikely.
