The power that is American policing has conceded nothing.
Black men and women are still dying across the country as
police unions continue to codify policies designed solely
to shield their officers from accountability—such as
rules ensuring that officers who kill can’t even be
interviewed by investigators about it until their victims
have been dead for days.
In the days since one of their
own killed George Floyd, many American police officers
have shamelessly brutalized the protesters whose chief
demand is that the police stop brutalizing people.
A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how
merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable
cruelty people treat each other.
…
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon
and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other
people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made
no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the
gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as
who has not?—of human love, God’s love alone is left. But
God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that
tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white. And if His love
was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were
we, the blacks, cast down so far? Why?
…
Something very sinister happens to the people of a country
when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply
as they do here, and become as joyless as they have
become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of
white American men and women, this inability to renew
themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes
the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any
conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The
person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for
reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a
person interposes between himself and reality nothing less
than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes,
furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it
(is unaware of so much!), are historical and public
attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than
they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white
people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and
inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
Baldwin, again:
I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these
people is more real to them than their uniforms.
…
The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this
country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling
white men may be to hear it.
I have no wise words to offer during a time such as this. I never dreamed of such a scenario in my life; I always imagined the more mundane disasters: hospitals, accidents, bankruptcy. I’ve had a brush with none, and yet here I am, with all humanity, in this disaster.
Have I, this whole life, been picking my way through a labyrinth, each choice sending me down another corridor of choices? Or was I launched from a canon, my trajectory unknowable, and yet fixed? Am I the latter, thinking I am the former? Do I write silly questions, straw men in dual, false dichotomies, the truth an ineffable middle-place?
Well, anyway. I played tag in our backyard with Essie today. She loves tag. She chases me and laughs. I chase her and laugh. She chases me and laughs. She loves to run, just like I always have. Her doll, Abigail from Spirit, found dandelions and then I had to find her. Find Abigail, find the dandelion. Kneel down, pull the weed. Repeat. Would I’ve done this on a cold spring Monday without a global pandemic raging in the wider world? I have no idea. I don’t even know if I chose to do it, or if it chose to have me experience it.
And tonight: uproarious laughter from Ess as Mykala tickled her in the tub, made funny faces at her wrapped in blankets afterward. Sweet, sweet, sweet.
To see the suffocating intoxication of agency, amplified by the unhinged id, to realize that we may steer the boat, but not control the squall… it is not to relinquish that agency, but rather to be humbled by finitude and smallness. I feel humble today.
My grandfather Emil Bartylla (we all always called him Bup) passed away this morning. I took this photo of him and my mom at a Father’s Day gathering almost fifteen years ago. Bup was such a fixture in my life — and this picture is at the house I would take the bus to occasionally when I was in kindergarten. It was the house where my mom grew up. The house Nannie and Bup built in the ’50s, when all of Woodbury was just potato and corn fields, an apple orchard, and some radio antennas.
I told Mykala it feels like the foundational bedrock-givens of our lives, those pieces of ground keep falling out from under us, and we land in a hole, and then the bottom of that hole once again falls out from under us. This pandemic means having a large get-together to hug and cry and remember Bup has to wait.
But I can remember a little on my own. I remember the coffee percolator always running at Nannie and Bup’s. I remember Wheel of Fortune on the TV in the evening, shortly after Nannie died, nearly thirty years ago. I remember when everyone came over to re-roof the house. I remember how Bup helped me build a school project in his wood shop. I remember his warm hugs on holidays. And I remember all of our families, all four of Nannie and Bup’s children and their kids on vacation at Wolf Lake… I must have been just four years old. I remember the Christmas when I got this huge Lego helicopter, and how Bup and I marveled at the mechanical winch on it. I remember the story Bup would tell, how he sailed on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific straight through a hurricane, engines on full speed on one direction for a day, then a day in the eye of the hurricane, then another day, engines on full speed in the opposite direction as they sailed out the other side of the storm.
I guess I don’t know where we are now, in the eye of a hurricane, on our way out, or just on our way in. Hard to say. We’ll miss you, Bup.
Well, life was quite a bit different the last time I wrote down anything here. Here we are, in the midst of the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Forgive my poor writing, the parts of my brain that handle reading, writing, and higher order thinking have been exhausted. Here’s a synopsis…
As a part of my job, I take a drill spinning at 200,000 rpm and use it right next to the mucous membranes and oral tissue of patients. This whips up whatever bacteria and viruses are present into a large, invisible cloud. Doing this day in, day out, with many patients per day means I’m going to get exposed to high viral loads in the air. (Per recommendations from our national and state dental associations, I am not working right now.) So, when I return to work, the thing that worries me is this is precisely the kind of environment that hospital personnel are in right now, and it appears that this repeated exposure (when combined with immune systems depleted due to stress) causes a relatively high rate of symptomatic COVID-19 infections amongst them. But I am lucky to be young, here’s why:
This says it is highly unlikely I am going to die from COVID-19 caused by an infection with SARS-CoV-2. That’s good! But my lizard brain keeps telling me it is possible, so I bounce between thinking I’ll be fine for 50% of the time and worrying this will kill me for the other 50% of the time. That’s bad!
Another thing that bears repeating and repeating and repeating —- look up at that chart again, where its data originates. It’s not from the CDC. It’s not from the United States. It’s from China. And their neighbor, South Korea, is currently testing nearly as many people PERDAY as the United States has tested INTOTAL. Here’s Derek Thompson writing at the Atlantic in a piece called “America Is Acting Like a Failed State”:
Finally, large nonprofit organizations are stepping up to
fill the void left by the administration’s testing
failure. Amazon and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
have offered to provide testing kits to people in Seattle
with coronavirus symptoms. Yesterday, the Jack Ma
Foundation, a charitable organization established by the
founder of the Chinese retail company Alibaba, announced a
donation of 500,000 testing kits to the United States.
Acute state failure has reduced the richest nation in
world history to a charitable cause.
Taking into account total population and time since outbreak, that means South Korea is testing people at a per-capita rate about 200 times that of the United States. Testing is so SO important because it helps us track the asymptomatic people who are infected! And with this virus, those asymptomatic people exhibit viral loads comparable to symptomatic infected individuals. We need to know where (and when!) the asymptomatic infected people are!
Without testing, we don’t know where this is spiking, we don’t know the true number of cases, and we don’t know when or where it is going to spike next. We can’t see trends. We can’t see curves. We do not have the public health data we desperately need to track this. Our best hope to contain the first spike (what everyone is, accurately, calling ‘flattening the curve’) is to try to do what Italy did (drastic isolation and quarantine measures) sooner than they did (before our hospital system is overwhelmed). The United States’ inability to test for this is a catastrophic failure.
At the same time, my grandfather Bup is dying in the hospital. He lived at home, the same home, since my mother was about five and of course for my entire life. He lived there until only a few days ago, when he was admitted to the hospital, with symptoms of dementia, delirium, and metastatic colon cancer in its most common form: multiple myeloma. He has a few days left. I can’t visit him because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; hell, we may not even be able to have a timely funeral because the current recommendations are against a gathering of greater than ten people… and on the coasts that has evolved into a recommendation against leaving one’s house unless absolutely necessary. This is, without a doubt, the strangest, most extreme, most stressful constellation of uncontrollable, bad, tragic, scary things that has ever happened in my life. I’ve been at home, not working, for just two days and I literally can not believe how the British people mentally dealt with The Blitz for 8 goddamned months. Oy.
And on the other hand: Ess just blossoms when we pay her attention. She loves to share whatever she’s doing or imagining or watching with us. These moments, watching a silly show on Netflix, or playing an invented marble game in the basement, or taking a walk as a family — these are the ones I hope I remember from this time. But hearing your five-year-old say she’s “tired of everyone talking about coronavirus all the time” makes you realize how impressionable, sensitive, and attentive one’s child can be. But she is loved, and I think, I hope, she knows it.
In the U.S., executive compensation has increased, on
average, by nine hundred and forty per cent since 1978,
according to one estimate; during the same period, worker
pay has risen twelve per cent. Income inequality hasn’t
been this extreme since the nineteen-twenties.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that, as a result
of cuts to estate and corporate taxes, as well as the 2017
G.O.P. tax bill, the four hundred richest Americans pay a
lower over-all tax rate than any other group in the
country. In a Times Op-Ed, Saez and Zucman wrote, “This is
the tax system of a plutocracy.”
First off: 940%. Wow.
Saez and Zucman’s research continues to provide evidence of the extent and damage done by runaway inequality, which is of course the aforementioned plutocracy. The hard, numerical reality of inequality was first presented to me by Paul Krugman, which made me very interested in the exhaustive review of historic, global inequality (and government’s role in curtailing it) by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. My point: it is incontrovertible fact that inequality hurts societies. But here’s what the wealthy think about it all:
When I asked Payne how hard it was to persuade rich people
to join [Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people who support hiking taxes on the rich], she said, “I think the last time I checked there
were about three hundred and seventy-five thousand
taxpayers in the country who make a million dollars a year
in income”—there are now almost half a million—“and we
have a couple hundred members.” She laughed. “If you ever
needed a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many of
America’s élite are concerned about the basic well-being
of their fellow-citizens, that should give you a rough
estimate.”
Let’s do the math. That’s just over 0.06% of millionaires who see enough of a problem to join a group that asks for higher taxes. So I think it is very very safe to say that essentially all millionaires feel that they have, to use the old expression, earned every penny. And they intend to keep them.
After that, you get a series of tired old expressions to justify stupendously low taxes:
“I worked hard my whole life”
“Nothing was ever given to me”
“I pulled myself up by my bootstraps”
And then you get the books written by these people:
Do Just What I Did and Succeed in Business
Copying My Successful Business Will Make You Successful
And the narrative corollary from those millionaires: “I earned so much money in my life, it must be solely because of the things I did and not at all because of my luck.”
It’s not difficult to see why many people take offense
when reminded of their luck, especially those who have
received the most. Allowing for luck can dent our
self-conception. It can diminish our sense of control. It
opens up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about
obligations to other, less fortunate people.
Nonetheless, this is a battle that cannot be bypassed.
There can be no ceasefire. Individually, coming to terms
with luck is the secular equivalent of religious
awakening, the first step in building any coherent
universalist moral perspective. Socially, acknowledging
the role of luck lays a moral foundation for humane
economic, housing, and carceral policy.
To rephrase Roberts: if we can not sit down and reflect on our lives and conclude the frightening degree to which luck has shaped our selves and our circumstances (to say nothing of our monetary assets) then we are completely blind to the role of luck in other’s lives.
And, honestly, read that piece from him. It include an outstanding discussion of genetics, epigenetics, nature, nurture. Here’s a bit more:
So, then, here you are. You turn 18. You are no longer a
child; you are an adult, a moral agent, responsible for
who you are and what you do.
By that time, your inheritance is enormous. You’ve not
only been granted a genetic makeup, an ethnicity and
appearance, by accidents of nature and parentage. You’ve
also had your latent genetic traits “activated” in a very
specific way through a specific upbringing, in a specific
environment, with a specific set of experiences.
Your basic mental and emotional wiring is in place; you
have certain instincts, predilections, fears, and
cravings. You have a certain amount of money, certain
social connections and opportunities, a certain family
lineage. You’ve had a certain amount and quality of
education. You’re a certain kind of person.
You are not responsible for any of that stuff; you weren’t
yet capable of being responsible.
And of course Roberts includes the necessary rebuttal of those who would claim that assigning luck the large role it deserves undercuts our free agency. Of course it doesn’t. But! Understanding luck reorients your understanding of everyone else on earth and better prepares you to exhibit the compassion and generosity that people deserve.
Yanagihara may love her apartment, but she doesn’t love
New York. “I hate it, and more with each year,” she says.
“The reason you stay here is for the thrill of constantly
encountering people who are smarter and more interesting
than you. But almost everything else about the city – the
weather, the poor infrastructure, the overpriced and
mediocre food scene, the subway system, the traffic, the
idea that what you do is who you are – grates.”
Here’s the first question we ask kids of a certain age: “what do you want to do when you grow up?” Inevitably, the answer comes in the form of an occupation.
So this is not a question about what kind of person the child wishes to become, no. Rather, the rote call-and-response tells a truth about American thought: your job is who you are.
*The opening montage of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron begins playing*
I just HAVE to run at this part, Dada! I have to run when the horses are running!
*Essie runs many laps around the first floor of the house.*
