My pandemic journal continues (see my previous entry here). It's an understatement to say that a lot has been happening the last couple weeks. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll see. And of course, there are memes.
Wed. 27 May 2020
The black man killed by police in Minneapolis was named George Floyd. There were protests in Minneapolis at the local police precinct (that I instantly recognized on TV). I also figured out from news articles exactly where he was killed.
Here’s something I just put on Twitter…
A feeling too complicated for a tweet: seeing the protests in Minneapolis and recognizing exactly where that is and then realizing that Floyd was killed six blocks from my Grandma's old house and within two miles of friends and family ... #GeorgeFloyd #BlackLivesMatter
Part of what’s complicated here is my own whiteness. And my desire to not make this about me while acknowledging that this does hit me in a different way because of where it took place. I don’t know.
I can’t even imagine a scenario in which police killing a human being like that was justified: pinned to the ground, strangled by the weight of an armed office while three other armed officers stood by. The trouble is that many white Americans can’t even imagine a scenario in which it was unjustified.
Thurs. 28 May 2020
There are riots in Minneapolis. Cue all the usual bullshit from white people. Some white people love nothing more than an excuse to think about violence against black people. Not that I like riots or don’t feel bad for small businesses or homes caught in the crossfire or realize that there are some outside agitators. But I think MLK said it best, “Riots are the language of the unheard.” Justice is the best riot prevention there is.
Hey America, it looks like maybe most of your major political narratives are literally killing people, so maybe, I don’t know, think about changing the way you think and talk about politics?
America: Nah.
I’m thinking of writing a blog post or something called “America’s Philosophical Problem” or even “America’s Philosophical Sickness.” Our problems run deep, far deeper than most of us think. We just don’t need the right people winning elections or the right bills passed (although that would help). We just don’t need more diversity among the rich and powerful (although that might help, too). We need a radical rethinking of everything about this country.
Sun. 31 May 2020
The last few days have been… strange? Worrying? Long-overdue?
The situation in Minneapolis has spread around the country, and even around the world.
Today a truck driver in Minneapolis tried to run down protesters on I-35W, which was closed at the time. They pulled the driver out, and police took him away. But there are protests in almost all cities in America right now, sometimes with destruction, fires, looting, and violence from the police. We’ve even had some protests here in Chattanooga.
I’m putting off writing “American’s Philosophical Sickness” for the blog. Instead I’m working on “Some Questions for White Americans in the Aftermath of George Floyd’s Murder.” While I was doing that, I heard some tear gas was used on protesters here in Chattanooga not far from here.
I was thinking of going to some of the protests earlier today (I probably would have left a few hours ago and missed the tear gas). I’m pretty nervous about crowds during the pandemic and was feeling pretty demoralized. Not much of an excuse, I know, but maybe I’ll try to make the next one.
As if the world isn't weird enough right now, my blog got spam for an offer to turn people into vampires. Here's the text, which I admit starts with a provocative point: I am often tired of being human.
"Are you tired of being human, having talented brain turning to a vampire in a good posture in ten minutes, Do you want to have power and influence over others, To be charming and desirable, To have wealth, health, without delaying in a good human posture and becoming an immortal? If yes, these your chance. It's a world of vampire where life get easier,We have made so many persons vampires and have turned them rich, You will assured long life and prosperity, You shall be made to be very sensitive to mental alertness, Stronger and also very fast, You will not be restricted to walking at night only even at the very middle of broad day light you will be made to walk, This is an opportunity to have the human vampire virus to perform in a good posture. If you are interested contact us..."
I should probably also mention that the commenter name was listed as "Lord Mark." Lord Mark probably noticed I was tired of being human from reading my blog.
In news that feels even less important right now, the other night I finally started reading The Gunslinger as my next read through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I tried to wait for my official tenure, but I’m just waiting for one, final layer. I jumped the gun (so to speak). I don’t know if I should feel bad or if this is something I need right now.
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| I forgot to mention this: Hari Kondabolu liked my retweet! I'm famous! |
Mon. 1 June 2020
It’s the first day of June… and… I don’t know.
I feel like I’m not okay. But right now it wouldn’t be okay to be okay.
A man was killed by police during protests in Louisville last night. We also shouldn’t forget that Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home by police in Louisville in March.
After large protests outside the White House last night, the President gave a speech today in which he said he would deploy the military to states that didn’t get protests under control even if Governors did not request help. While he was speaking, the Military Police cleared protesters out of the way with horses and soldiers in battle gear deploying tear gas. Then the President walked to the church nearby historically attended by Presidents and awkwardly waved a Bible around for a photo op. I’m not making this up. I wish I was.
Granted I’m no criminal justice expert, but the strategy of responding to protests against excessive police force with additional excessive police force could maybe use some rethinking. (Yes, I’m sure there’s a coherent and insidious reason for this strategy, but I point this out more to show that de-escalation does not seem to be the goal here.)
Another thought: If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be obvious now: our leaders in America care more about property than human lives, especially Black lives.
Tues. 2 June 2020
During the last week I’ve heard a lot of politicians talking about how they’re dealing with protests and damage to property. I’ve heard few, if any, talking about specific policy changes that will transform how policing works in our communities.
So yesterday and today I’ve been emailing all of my city, county, state, and national leaders to simply ask them what specific policy changes they are going to make to address these deep and systemic issues. It’s not enough, but it’s something.
Wed. 3 June 2020
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (who was tasked by the Governor to prosecute the case) is charging the cop that killed George Floyd with second-degree murder and the other three cops are being charged with aiding and abetting.
This, along with some other hopeful new last night, is giving me the first feeling of something like hope that I’ve felt in a while (not expectations, but hope that changes might happen). Yesterday had some good election results: a Black woman elected as Mayor of Ferguson, MO and racist motherfucker Steve King lost his primary in Iowa (Stephen King the author had a great tweet about it).
I’ve heard that a bill barring choke holds for police and sending military equipment to police are being considered in Congress. I’ve even heard back from a few of my elected officials about police issues, and called a few more today about higher education funding (the state legislature is meeting this week to determine the budget and my union, United Campus Workers, had a day of action about it).
Surely, we need much more than this. But it’s already more than I was expecting during most of the last week.
But we’ve still got a deadly pandemic, the President threatening to use military action on American citizens, virulent white supremacists, systemic racism, economic doom, and many more horrors. Still plenty to be angry and terrified and depressed about. But for now maybe the barest hope of a possibility of a few changes is enough.
Fri. 5 June 2020
Last night I finally went down and joined a march here in Chattanooga. I’m not going to go every day, mostly because it’s not good to have everybody always gathering in larger crowds during the pandemic even if I totally understand why some people feel they have to given that racism and the police are greater risks than Covid for some people. But I figured I should show some support in person for some of the events.
The crowd had by far the highest percentage of people I’ve seen wearing masks in public since the pandemic began (probably about 80-90%). I tried to stay at least a few feet away from others. I tend to hang to the back of the crowd at these things, anyway, mainly from my inner-shame at being a large and tall human being who will block everyone else’s view but also in this case wanting to respect Black leadership.
I go to marches and protests from time to time and I support them wholeheartedly, but I admit I usually feel a bit awkward at such events. Granted, I feel a bit awkward pretty much everywhere. I’ve never been one of those people who is comfortable in their body: chairs are never comfortable, airplane seats are a joke, a bed with a footboard is impossible, and I’m always worried about looming over the shorter smaller masses. The pandemic has brought a new one: many masks don’t quite fit my giant head. I literally do not fit into this world. But this isn’t sad to me. It’s just part of who I am.
Protests in person are important, but they’re not everyone’s thing. And that’s okay. Luckily there are other ways to support the cause. I’ve given money to bail funds and other community organizations, written to elected officials, written a blog post, signed petitions, attended an online protest, and done a lot on social media. Is it enough? Of course not. But even if it genuinely feels like we may be at a turning point right now, we’re in for the long haul. And white people shouldn’t forget that. This won’t cease to be an issue once the hashtags stop trending on Twitter.
And there are other deep issues that we should also consider that will be difficult for well-meaning leftist white people to tackle: gentrification, segregation, disparities in health, education, and wealth, the failure of America to come to grips with the many horrors of its past, uprooting 500 years of racism in “Western culture” with legacies most of us aren’t even aware of, and so on.
Another thing I worry about: It seems like there is some real unity right now. A wide range of people now believe that the police have to change (a recent article on small town protests makes this point well). But I already see rifts coming once we start asking questions like: How do we change police? And why? And what is the goal? Is the left going to eat itself on this issue as it often does, with stark rifts between reformers, defunders, and abolitionists, while the status quo remains? Or will people be able to build coalitions for the greater good even though they don’t completely agree about goals and strategies? Will a lot of centrists and people on the right get involved (or at least out of the way) for widespread change?
Sat. 6 June 2020
More online D&D tonight.
Protests here and across the country (and in many parts of the world) show no signs of letting up. I’m planning to go to a short one tomorrow for Black trans lives while trying to socially distance, but I don’t think I’ll stay for the march that will probably happen afterwards. I’m still worried about large gatherings even if most of the protesters are wearing masks, and I’m still pretty worried that our typically-American way of thinking about health decisions in terms of personal risk rather than public health is not doing us any good during this pandemic.
So I’m trying not to go too often to in-person protests or stay too long to minimize the risk for everyone. And I’ve been trying to support in other ways. I donated again to a local community bail fund; even though there haven’t been any arrests at the protests here in the last couple days, the bail system is seriously biased against poor people and people of color, which makes it well worth circumventing on general principles.
As I mentioned a few days ago, I started my Dark Tower re-read. I finished book one, and I’m about halfway through book two now. I’m loving it. It’s a series well worth re-reading. I’ve been enjoying becoming reacquainted with these characters and this weird setting. I even have some Dark Tower reference materials this time. The multiverse of those books is horrific and confusing in its own ways, but the turnings of the wheel of ka make sense in an oddly comforting way during our own horrific and confusing times in this dimension.
Long days and pleasant nights.
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| For Dark Tower fans... |
Sun. 7 June 2020
A pandemic update for today:
Worldwide cases: 7, 019,734; Worldwide deaths: 402, 809. US cases: 1, 990, 602; US deaths: 112, 128. Hamilton County TN cases: 1, 423; Hamilton County TN deaths: 19
Tonight I attended a Black Trans Lives Matter event at Miller Park in downtown Chattanooga. The speeches were moving. The event was mostly socially distanced. Almost everybody was wearing a mask. I’m still worried a lot about the virus, but at least the local protests are taking better precautions than almost anywhere else around here right now.
Then later I was walking by my campus office and stopped in just to visit my books. I miss them.
A late night thought not specifically inspired by the last few weeks, but something I’ve thought about for a long time: the tragedy of the human race is that we could make this Earth a fucking paradise for every single person if we weren’t so dim-witted and narrow-minded. All we would have to do is decide we care more about people than the mindless accumulation of wealth or the hollow pursuit of power. The problem isn’t a lack of scientific knowledge or technology. It’s not a lack of resources. Ultimately even our critical thinking deficits are manageable. The root problem is moral. We just have to figure out if we truly and deeply care about each and every human being. If we did that and could remember it for more than five minutes, we could put all our human ingenuity into building a real world here and now that would rival the utopias and heavens of thousands of years of human imagination.
Or to put this in the terms of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: We need to be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes!
Mon. 8 June 2020
Somewhere I read someone refer to the protests of the last two weeks as a “Fed Up-rising.” Nice. While I think this uprising runs deeper and will go much further than firing some racist cops, it’s amazing how public perceptions about race and policing seem to have changed so quickly. I should emphasize the “seem” there – it’s unclear how much of this impression is the result of my social media bubble, how much is the scattered seeds of fair-weather good intentions that will not be cultivated into the fruits of action, and so on.
I’m already seeing some evidence that my predictions of the other day of the left eating itself might be coming true, especially on the misunderstanding/backlash/backlash against the backlash about the concept of “defunding the police.” Mostly I just wish people would actually read a couple articles about the concept instead of letting knee-jerk reactions to the slogan – pro or con – become the extent of their intellectual work.
As someone who has read a fair bit about Gandhi’s and MLK’s philosophy of nonviolence, I am often annoyed by this sort of knee-jerk rejection based on a shallow misapprehension of the word “nonviolence,” perhaps most especially those who tell others to act in accordance with their misunderstanding of nonviolence. We need to do better this time. Will we? I don’t know. The good (?) news is that I would have been a lot more cynical about all of this even just one week ago, but I’m not sure if I can muster anything beyond an honest suspension of judgment at this point—neither hope, nor despair. Wait and see.
I’m still not sure where I stand, but I don’t think either defunding or abolition are the complete non-starters they seem to be for many moderate white people. On a purely philosophical level, I’m probably an abolitionist about police as I probably am about prisons (thank you, Angela Davis!). It just requires some imagination, the kind of social imagination that philosophy and science fiction cultivate when they are at their best (thinking of the concept of “visionary fiction” by adrienne marie brown and Walidah Imarisha).
But I would hope people might be able to see that working strategically with people who disagree with you about bigger philosophical issues can yield smaller victories that can reduce suffering and save lives. For example, the reforms proposed in Congress right now would probably help even if they don’t solve all the problems. Rejecting them outright instead of seeing them as first steps just because they fail some ideological purity test seems politically and morally unwise to me.
But what do I know about politics? I’m just a philosopher. Actually, I think a big problem lately is that many people’s political discourse has glommed on to some of the baser effects of philosophy–dogmatism, intellectual narrow-mindedness–at the expense of its finer effects—intellectual empathy, conceptual nimbleness, imagination, creativity, compassion.
Yet we truly live in strange times: a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis city council members have vowed to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Will it happen? Will it work? Who knows? But will whatever happens be better than what Minneapolis has now? Most likely.
Tues. 9 June 2020
A union meeting today. Lots of stuff going on with the budget and of course police and violence against Black people. It’s exciting, but organizing is a lot of work and honestly a bit draining sometimes. I’m not doing that much compared to some people, but I can totally see how people get burnt out.
Now I’m listening to the Chattanooga City Council meeting. There are hundreds of people signed up to speak, almost all of them in favor of defunding, divesting, or radically reforming the police. Some are sharing stories of police harassment or brutality. It’s interesting. Inspiring. Enraging.
A thought: now that many respectable white people are taking defunding/divesting or even abolition seriously, it seems like the strategy of responding to protests against excessive police force with additional excessive police force really backfired for the police.
In sillier news, the trailer for Bill & Ted 3 came out today. Is it silly to be excited about that? Probably. Is it a great idea to be excellent to each other? Most definitely.
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