A few years ago, the best friend I ever had left Earth. Our core group - we who had gone through college and "the revolution" with him, had married and had kids, bought homes, made ends meet, and had gone through all manner of crises together - were devastated.
We met up the night before his funeral at the Bicycle Shop, ala Big Chill. I knew everyone except one member of the group, someone my departed friend had connected with on his fishing trips to Mississippi. We chatted and made small talk, reminisced about our friend, drank to wash away our grief.
But little by little this character exposed himself as someone who hated unions (my friend had risen to the ranks of the national AFL-CIO), Democrats, Northerners, the poor (who he was afraid would take away the large amount of money he had inherited) and, of course, Black folks.
He was your textbook Cracker.
Except that he was affluent and had a lot of money. He wasn't exactly covert about any of this. He was haughty, made arrogant comments and had a full-on condescending grandee attitude. I couldn't imagine how this guy could in any way be my friend's friend. How could either of them spend more than an hour with each other? Why had he traveled from Mississippi to be here amongst us?
As the evening wore on and the liquor flowed, his comments became more and more irritating; they offended the moment and the memory and eventually it came to a head.
It started out by my confronting his barely-veiled racism and his political amnesia, or ignorance, about things political and cultural. I needled him (I spared no petulance, "reminding" him that "without the Democrats Mississippians would still be running around barefoot and illiterate". ) I took every political cheap shot and enjoyed it.
Another friend joined in. The rest of the group watched the train wreck in silence. It devolved to the point that he finally stormed off. Some might have been offended but I fancied that others thought it well deserved. I really didn't care, I had gotten my pound of emotional flesh.
That was grief talking, not me.
I witnessed something similar to this years before. Having received a telephone call that my terminally ill mother was at journey's end, I rushed to Tampa to be at her side. Rather than die immediately, though, she held on for three weeks. We witnessed the grinding march of death eviscerate our queen in ways worthy of a horror movie. My siblings tore at their grief by uncharacteristically emasculating each other. No one was spared, not even their children.
That was grief and fear talking, not them.
I don't make any excuses for my Big Chill behavior. I'm not sure I wouldn't do it again. But I've examined my actions, where I was coming from and why I did it. Future me might do it differently. I don't know. My family's reactions to each other were not lightly brushed away. Some of those wounds are still healing but as siblings we all knew each other and understood the grief and that helped.
Here's the parallel I see to the George Floyd matter. It's one thing to intellectually understand that people get killed, that it is sometimes accidental and sometimes intentional, sometimes criminal, sometimes unavoidable, sometimes inevitable, justifiable; It's another to actually witness it. death was callously displayed before us. That could be you or one of your loved ones.
No one should be making excuses for obvious excesses like looting and violence. But neither should we be oblivious to the underlying conditions that brought some to that point, that this has become an all-too-familiar scenario: a young person (black and white) has his or her life snuffed out yet no one seems willing to do anything about it.
That's grief talking.
