I feel that it's somehow incumbent on me—on each of us—to say something about the events in Ferguson. That not speaking is accepting. That silence is death. And yet, I have nothing to say.\n
My Perfect Non-Reader, who doesn't follow the news much, found herself confused this morning about which incident this was. Was it the one with the kid and the toy gun, or the one with the hoodie and the Skittles? This is the world we live in.\n
The world we want to live in is very different from that. The world where young black men aren't shot to death with such frequency that we confuse one for another. The world where police rarely feel themselves at such risk that they kill to protect themselves against citizens. The world where no neighborhoods see the police as an occupying army. The world where our courts are trusted, our prosecutors trustworthy, our governments governable, and the citizenry see options other than fire.\n
Is there a path between this world we live in and the one we want? I have to believe that there is.\n
But when I say I have to believe<\/i>, I am implying, I know, that my belief in that path, like my belief in the Divine Creator, is not based on evidence, but on my own need. Or perhaps it's just that like a mathematical proof, the existence of such a path does not mean that it's possible at this time to find it, or even know what steps from here follow the path or stray from it.\n
I find it hard to believe that indicting Darren Wilson would have been a step on the path from where we are to where we want to be. Darren Wilson didn't create the world we live in, and when he shot and killed Michael Brown, he was playing his part in that world. Following his training, responding to the circumstances, protecting himself against what, in his experience, was a real threat. Individual responsibility seems like it must be part of the path to justice, but at the same time, isn't there a danger that Officer Wilson would be used as a scapegoat, and his prosecution as yet another reason not to address the underlying problems? And all the awful behavior of the police in Ferguson and the county, from leaving the corpse on the ground to the horrific standoffs of militarized police with the incensed residents, the official lies and misrepresentations, the effortful miscommunication that exacerbated the pain and anger—none of the things that happened after the bullets should make Mr. Wilson any more or less guilty. And if minimizing the death of Michael Brown (or any human death) would be horrible and inhuman, heaping the problems of the world on the man who killed him doesn't get us along the path toward the world we want.\n
What moves us along that path? What steps are the right steps?\n
I believe that the longest marches happen because everybody just takes one step after another. That's one of my firmest and most cherished beliefs about the world: everybody just taking one step after another eventually moves the whole world. I am at a loss, right now, to know what steps to take.\n
My Latin tag—Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>—is one of those jokes that is not a joke. Deal we shall, for deal we must; it's not a choice. We live in the world we find ourselves in. We have to take steps; we have to do what we think is right; we have to hope that it moves us toward justice.\n
I don't have anything to say about the events in Ferguson. But silence isn't right, either.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger cannot speak of what he cannot speak of, and yet cannot remain silent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16526,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15003\/revisions\/16526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}