It is depressing. It has been a long time since I have witnessed and felt this level of tension across the United States. The protests, the marches, the debates on social media are intense and emotional. The recent Grand Jury decisions not to indict police officers in the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases have lit the fuse of these emotions, but they were merely triggers. The tensions have been present for a long time.
I am not sure how else to say this, and I realize how this sounds, but most people on both sides are wrong. They are wrong because they are trying to win. They want to show the world that their side is right and the other side is wrong, period. The truth is there are more than two sides, and each side is both right and wrong.
Eric Garner’s death, like Michael Brown’s death, is a tragedy. Life is sacred, every single one. But the tragedy extends beyond their death. The fact that Eric Garner was standing on a street corner selling single cigarettes is itself tragic. How did he get to that point? How did Mike Brown’s life end up at a point where he felt they need to strong-arm cigars from a convenience store?
Before we even get to the point of discussing the events surrounding their deaths we need to take a look at what went wrong that brought them to this point. Part of it involves families and society and schools and media and our culture. After we are done discussing police and Grand Juries and prosecutors and marching and protesting, we need to come back to the root cause, which lies here, with all of us looking at how so many people end up in this condition.
We want to group things together. The folks protesting in the streets want to group Mike Brown with Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and create a narrative that ties them all together. Lots of people agree with me that the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases are very different. This does not sit well with my friends on the left and right who need to lump them together as being the same to support their narratives.
Michael Brown initiated the use of force. Eric Garner did not. Michael Brown was a threat to the officer. Eric Garner was not. Michael Brown stole someone’s property and assaulted an officer. Eric garner was selling single cigarettes.
On the other hand, both men resisted arrest. Both men broke the law. Both cases involved a white officer causing the death of a black man. Both cases involved a prosecutor and Grand Jury failing to indict a police officer who was responsible for someone’s death.
When I suggested this week that everyone needs to stop and take a look in the mirror and examine what they might do differently to change their own behaviors to improve the situation, I was surprised by the intensity of the response from what I will call the “law and order” crowd. They wanted to know what on earth I was talking about. To them, there is nothing to see in that mirror. The police have done nothing wrong and there is nothing to review.
I understand to some extent the defensiveness involved there. The police are being criticized and attacked enthusiastically and labeled as racists and murderers. They feel defensive and they rightly feel that these attacks are completely unfair, which for the most part is true.
The police have a very difficult job and they perform a critically needed function in our society. The vast majority of law enforcement officers are great people who are fair and polite and reasonable. There is no moral equivalency between those who enforce the law and those who violate the law. The police are often tasked with enforcing unpopular laws written by politicians. They are just doing their job and they do not create the laws.
And many of those laws are completely outrageous. The taxes on cigarettes in New York are prohibitive. I do not smoke cigarettes, and I do not recommend that people do so. But putting such a high tax on cigarettes has created a black market and dysfunctional situation. One factor in why a young man ended up on a street corner selling single cigarettes was the misguided laws that made those cigarettes $15.00 a pack.
The purpose of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. The tobacco laws in New York City are not a legitimate function of government. They are an attempt to raise more money to feed the insatiable hunger for larger and more intrusive government. They are an attempt to try to control people’s lives so that they conform to someone’s vision of how everyone should live.
And so a man ends up on a street corner selling loose cigarettes and the police, at the direction of misguided government officials, are tasked with shutting down this lawless case of free market capitalism. They surround Mr. Garner, concerned about his large size and confronted with a man who has had enough of a system that is dysfunctional.
Eric Garner had reached his limit. He told them, in his final words, that he’d had enough. He was tired of the harassment and just wanted to be left alone. If I may take some liberty and put myself in his head, he was tired of a society that had failed him. He was tired of struggling to survive. He was tired of being subject to dysfunctional laws and tired of being harassed by agents of the state for conducting what amounts to free enterprise in the public square.
And yet, he was breaking the law. The police officers were there to enforce the law. Their job was to arrest Mr. Garner for violating the law, and he refused to put his hands behind his back so they could cuff him.
He should not have resisted arrest, partly because there was no way he was going to win. They were going to arrest him. There were lots of them, and the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor. I believe in the right of people to protest and perform civil disobedience, but it is unwise to resist arrest. They are going to win and you are going to come out on the short end. That is simply the reality.
Having said that, like most people who saw the video of what happened next I was greatly disturbed by what I saw. I have heard the explanations and spin from both sides. I have heard all of the discussions about the difference between chokeholds and strangleholds and what is legal and what is banned and what officers are trained to do.
I am not a doctor or a lawyer or a cop. But I have eyes and ears and the video was disturbing and a young man is dead. I will note that the folks I have labeled the “law and order” crowd have even lost Fox News on this one. Nobody is saying that any of those police officers wanted that young man to die. It was not murder, but the coroner did label it homicide, which means his death was caused by the actions of others. Did his asthma and weight and heart condition play a part? They very well could have. But when a man keeps saying he cannot breathe, a reasonable person would expect that the police would check on his condition and make sure they were not doing irreparable harm.
I am aware that the paragraph above will cause many to label me a cop-hater and accuse me of cop-bashing. All I can say is that neither is true. I have already made clear that I think they had no intention of causing him permanent harm. I understand the difficulty of arresting someone of his size who is resisting. But in my opinion the cries of “I can’t breathe” were compelling and disturbing and a reasonable person might expect them to stop and check on his well-being.
I don’t know what is in the heart of another person, but in my opinion skin pigmentation had nothing to do with this. I am aware that the Mayor and Sharpton and the protestors think that this is about nothing but race. Like most people I am really tired of the claim. I think it is counterproductive and does a disservice not only to police officers but to the minority communities.
There is racism, and the current tensions and protests and debates are just making it worse. I was debating the issue with someone last night and went to his timeline and saw blatantly racist posts from the guy who was defending every action of every police officer every time. This is one person; I am not projecting his stupidity onto anyone but him. But I know racism does exist.
And similarly, there is a culture of lawlessness in many minority communities. Everyone uses the rampant black-on-black violence in Chicago as an example. Police officers working to enforce the laws in those communities would have to work very hard to avoid stereotyping everyone who lives there as being lawless. That would be wrong, just as it is wrong to project racism onto all police officers.
The truth is that we cannot boil these issues down to short bumper sticker sound bites. We cannot choose between one side or another, between black and white, between cop and victim. It sure would be a lot easier if we could but that is not the reality. I understand that idiots like Sharpton have no intention of looking in any mirror and asking what they can do different to lessen the tensions and solving the problems in his own back yard. That does not fit his narrative or bring in any money.
What is harder for me to understand is the refusal of those on the other side to admit that there is any need whatsoever for any review of their position. When I suggest that they might make things better by softening their stance and trying to understand the other side and maybe even taking a brief look in the mirror they become apoplectic. That is too bad, because the “us versus them” dichotomy must end before we are ever going to make progress and reduce the tensions that are flooding us.
That adversarial mindset is present in so many places, not just here but around the world. Republicans versus Democrats, right versus left, black versus white, Arabs versus Israelis, Shias versus Sunnis – the “my way or the highway” ideology is the norm. We should not compromise on our core principles and I am a fan of vigorous debate, but not the oversimplification that goes with it. The purpose of debating ideas is to convince others of the truth and eventually arrive at consensus and peace. If we all refuse to consider the other side’s position and consider that there may be weaknesses in our own views that cannot happen.
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