IS BEING WOKE A MENTAL ILLNESS?

“Floyd was a drug addict. He was on drugs. He had severe health problems. We don’t know why that cop killed him. Yet the narrative police racism.“

Liz,

You’re trying to sound all horrified about how George Floyd was lynched, but at the same time making the case that everybody is overreacting. You want to claim that the Democrats lack your reasonable subtlety and nuance in understanding all these complex and dangerous issues of community policing. Then my lovely brother goes and says the Republican crazy talk right out loud and undercuts your whole argument.

I love my brother dearly, but he hates Democrats so viscerally that if they say anything is unjustified, his default setting is to figure out how the thing was actually justified. Like a Trump, but with actual sincerity, Tom makes it so obvious that you shouldn’t believe what we all saw with own lying eyes that all your reasonable arguments just go right out the window.

“And while I’m at it, need I point out the death of Floyd happened in a Democrat run city? But couldn’t be the fault of local government. NY City is turning into Gotham city (again) fast.“

D’awe! You think I’m hurt by your saying that Democrats behave badly. I bet in my lifetime I’ve voted for more Republicans than you have. The last campaign poster I put in my yard was for a Republican State Senatorial candidate (she got robbed by another Republican). My Republican Governor has walked such a fine line between trying to keep people from getting sick and dying from COVID and appeasing libaty loving, confederate flag waving, misanthropes in his own Party that I may actually have to vote for him next time.

The problem is that you want to be on the team so badly that you have to keep owning the next crazy, incompetent thing your coach says and does. I have no problem with your criticizing Democratic kookiness – I’ll help you, if you like. But first you have to realize that in a “Who is the moray dangerously crazy?” contest, between the Dems and the Repubs, the Trumpublican Party is always going to win that dishonor hands down.

Liz,

You seem to think that there are only two sides here, the rioters and the reasonable people which, very conveniently, just happens to include you and amazingly, your incredibly divisive dear leader, Donald Trump. The vast majority of people in the country empathized with George Floyd as he lay dying and calling for his Mother. Many have (myself included), through this experience, come to realize a legacy of institutionalized white supremacist racism imbedded economically, culturally and legally into our democracy, a history that goes back centuries and didn’t just suddenly end 50 some years ago when I was growing up in the Jim Crow South. I think that to fully comprehend this institutional racism and our own often unconscious implicit biases that allow us to be blind takes some actual deep systemic study and some open minded introspection rather than the dualistic approach of just figuring out how the other side is perfectly wrong just so that we can can consider ourselves and our side as perfectly right.

We all run the spectrum of being right and being wrong and just being complicit. The Democrats, the Liberals and the massive ground swell of BLM supporters (like my daughter) who took to the streets in protest are no more completely responsible for the few people who rioted and looted than you are perfectly responsible for that sadistic cop feeling that he could publicly lynch George Floyd and get away with it (although, in a way either explicitly or implicitly, we are all complicit to differing degrees with both evils).

In my opinion, police restraint tactics are a surface issue. From a battlefield perspective, it’s like spending all our resources arguing about and tinkering with the Rules of Engagement while purposely ignoring why we are even in a war to begin with and how we might address the causes of that war. For example, no one is even worried about what kind of choke holds get used on rich white frat boys when they get drugged up, drunk and rowdy at a posh night club in a white neighborhood. No white kid ever gets pulled over only for the infraction of driving while pale and feels that a wrong move could end his life. As a white attorney, I can get away with being a complete ass to a cop even if he pulls me over for a good reason – it’s not against the law to be disrespectful to the police and to be a complete jerk (otherwise half the white guys in the country would be in jail) but it seems to be a possible death sentence to do so if you’re a person of color.

What are the imbedded social, historical, systemic and yes, Tom, psychological causes and the possible solutions for our racial biases? Once we figure that out and work on it, then I predict that the problem of which choke holds can be safely used will mostly be an inside baseball procedural debate.

However, before we can even address the real underlying issues, we got to at least quit the dualism and the tribalism of who is on what team and who is a race traitor and what trite religious platitudes we can throw at each other, and instead take a close, hard in-depth look at ourselves and our society to admit our common problems of humanity as well as our peculiar national original sin, all this before we can even get to the difficult and often imperfect solutions to those problems.

You want to lecture on maintaining Law and Order and the necessity police restraint techniques and Tom wants to preach about the hopelessness of our human nature without divine grace. Duh…. I’m not the sharpest tool in the tool box but you’re not telling me anything that I didn’t know before I went to law school or before I read my first theology treatise. Can you even see how incredulous this might appear to a black person who has lived and studied the underlying issues his/her whole life?

And not just his tweets and presidential product endorsements. Here is just one short excerpt from his recent rambling news conference:

“We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

Ugg!

“The police don’t put people in prison. They arrest them.“

Wow? Seriously? I never knew that. I guess that three years of law school just went right over my head. Don’t tell Kate – she’s gonna want her money back.

“Blacks disproportionately come from single parent homes, do not learn to read and live in high crime neighborhoods. That contrasts with the 1920’s when blacks had stable families and were more likely to have jobs than whites. Then black boys grew up with their fathers in their homes.”

So all the problems with blacks just happened to start about the time that the Civil Rights Acts were passed. Everything was absolutely hunky dory before then. What have you been smoking? And are you going to share?

Seriously Tom, I’m not saying that Democrats haven’t done their share of screwing things up. We can catalog the failure of all our political parties and all our leaders all the way back to the first slave ships if you want. We absolutely can attribute considerable responsibility to our founding fathers and framers as well as the framers of the Post Civil War Amendments who failed to follow through for another hundred years on the freedoms bought by tens of thousands of lives. Let’s study that whole 400 year old history for the whole truth and own up to it rather than just pointing fingers at anyone but our entire nation and what we did and failed to do as a nation. Only until we face our national sins, all of them, even now, can we, with God’s help, hope to find some reconciliation and atonement for them.

And spare me the antigovernment platitudes. We have systemically robbed blacks for for four hundred years to pay for our nation’s wealth and power. Even if you disagree on how to reconcile such past wrongs, you can at least quit pretending it didn’t happen and acknowledge that all those injustices all have accumulated to this point and continue to accumulate in our entire justice system (not just the police), in our Heath care inequities (further exposed by COVID), in our impoverished black communities and in our disproportionate incarcerations, and on and on.

We have a metaphor in our holiest scriptures that says that we (every man woman and child) have been in some way culpable for the enormous sin of eating a fruit of a tree that was put off limits by God. It took God’s own son to pay the price of that sin that happened long before anyone was born, and certainly longer ago than a mere 400 years. Is it possible that one reason that the descendants of that first couple continue to be punished is because we continue to enjoy the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, and that we therefore continue to share in the sin of corporate Adam and corporate Eve, and that we therefore continued the pay for a legacy of an original sin that began all sin?

If that story is not to much for you and I to believe as an act of faith, then why would you think it is too far fetched to at least acknowledge the sins of our currently living breathing sovereign nation, a nation that still acknowledges treaties and debts that go back hundreds of years, especially if you and I and every American still benefit from what was stolen from others?

Like the Original Sin of Adam and Eve that we all carry, we can at least start with an acknowledgment of the original sin of America. Only then can we at least try to stop sinning. Even Christ can’t save us until we acknowledge our sins.

“The truth is Democrats are just trying to cook up another excuse for dividing us.“

Wouldn’t know, they don’t consult me. I only know what I think. Thank God that I don’t have to defend every racist and incompetent thing Trump says and does every day.

However, I think that your conspiracy theory gives the Dems far more diabolical competence than they actually have. It’s also kinda patronizing to everyone else, especially black folks, don’t you think?

Oh well, nuf said. Thanks for the entertainment.

“I also know that blacks sold blacks into slavery. Slavery has little to do with skin color. It is a sin of pride.”

This is too precious to let go. Do you really believe your own propaganda?

I’ve been to the old black slave auction house in New Orleans (it’s a restaurant now). Where exactly were the white slave auction houses there where they paraded white men and women naked to check out the breeding stock? And where were the slave ships headed to the South where they packed white men, women, and children below decks like sardines laying on top of each other in their own and each other’s ’ urine, feces and menstrual fluids until, in their madness, those that continued to survive took every opportunity to jump overboard to be eaten by the sharks that learned to follow those death ships? Did you get all that in your more woke Northern education?

Tom,

Your anthropological and etymological scholarship on the human psychological propensity to place other humans in various forms of bondage notwithstanding, the American experience of slavery and then Jim Crow right up until our softer and harder prejudices of right this moment have been based on the notion of white supremacy and black inferiority. To pontificate otherwise is not only asinine historically (where were all the white American slaves), it’s insulting to the memory of the people who have endured and struggled against that white evil oppression. It’s like saying to a German Jew,:

“Systematic racial and religious genocide is nothing new or special in your case and there is nothing especially or uniquely evil about the German culture that hunted, tortured and exterminated whole Jewish families on an industrial scale. Look, some Jews turned in some other Jews. Jews were not innocent and the German people were not really guilty. Jews need to just get over themselves. Tear down those concentration camps and holocaust museums. Let Germans revel in their great Nazi heritage and fly their swastikas with pride. Jews are making the Germans feel bad. Of course, they’d never do that again and there are no German fascists always lurking in the shadows trying to take advantage of the minimizing and whitewashing of their tribal history in order to make it happen again. Remembering this terrible history is divisive and it’s holding back Germans who want to ‘Make Germany Great Again’, you know, like it was in 1939.”

Tom, you imply that racism is about pride. Truth. Can’t you see that this unwillingness to face the truth about OUR nation, OUR past is just the sort of blind, one sided, male WASP centric cultural pride that is soft white supremacist racism and that can be the fermenting ground for the harder stuff? This making fun and deriding of the mere epiphany of this American truth which the Left calls being “woke”, that too is just false pride talking.