The rules of engagement have changed

A few years ago I was on a road in southern Honduras. I had been there one or two weeks working a case and was, finally, going to the airport, headed home, obliviously driving a convertible Mustang in one of the world's poorest countries. 

I came up on a checkpoint and was questioned by a policeman. At some point he asked for a bribe. Instead of giving him some pittance, I scolded him: He was a disgrace! A policeman! He was one of the reasons his country was sliding into the abyss.... 

I had just screwed up terribly.

There was no mistaking the evil that emanated from him. Clearly he was contemplating killing me. His face became contorted. You could see the pure evil engulf him. And for an excruciatingly long three or five seconds, I savored the prospect of a violent death.

But it wasn't my time to die, maybe because I hadn't embarrassed him in front of the other officers or maybe he just didn't have the time. 

The debate about Alex's murder now centers around the fact that he had a gun. "Why bring a gun to a protest?" is, on a loftier philosophical plane, a valid question. You can debate it back and forth and in that process the truly salient point - that he was the hapless victim of murder, that the gun is just an after-the-fact rationalization, is lost. It wasn't his exercise of his right to carry a gun that got him killed. It was the lack of respect for the first amendment.

The things we take for granted as birthright appear now more and more like ignorant fantasies. The rules of engagement have changed and we must take note of that. 

This administration sees us as something to be dominated, not governed. Alex had no way of knowing that we were playing by new rules, but now, we do. We need to stay on our toes.  Do not underestimate what they will do, how they will deny, fabricate, justify or cover up and what they will use against you. Stand tall but be wary.

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A Sobremesa

 A Sobremesa

Frustrated and depressed from the crushing world news that things are far from getting better, I took a break from Facebook this morning and went and made myself some Puerto Rican comfort food; maduros and eggs-over-easy, and buttered white bread. I shared them with the oldest child. We were having a sobremesa, that time when the meal is over and you just lollygag around sharing moments with loved ones.

"Yeah," she said, "you tell me that every time." I had told her what "maduro" meant and then launched into an etymological explanation of the word. "I know," she said. She was good natured about it, but, still, damn it, I had to explain to her why I constantly launch into tutorials about things ostensibly mundane, that it wasn't pedantry, that it was because I care; that while we live in comfort, it hasn't always been that way for me and that I appreciate the responsibility that comes with, that I would rather risk repeating myself than miss an opportunity to share something with her that may or may not be important, that the important part was the sharing. 

Every decade, I explained, I've noticed how geometrically my understanding of the universe had expanded, that ruefully I had come late in life to the meanings of things - etymological or otherwise - and that, while my mother was the sun in my universe, I couldn't help but wonder where I would be had I not had a parent hobbled by education, language proficiency, and a poverty survival mode to help me piece some of life's mysteries together. 

My kids, my partner's kids, are beneficiaries of where he and I find ourselves. Our kids have had tremendous advantages and I have seen how it has yielded the quality people that they have all become. I credit the fact they they have been presented with positive role models that take a proactive approach to their education and life choices and I try to pay it forward.

And then I told her another story about the time my mother came home to the catastrophe of the "hair cuts" I had given my brothers. She chuckled at my misadventures; my butchering their hair, trying to hide it by making everyone wear paper bag hats, my mother lining us up and forcing uncover, her over-the-top Latina reaction.  And somehow, the carnage in Minnesota - at least for these precious moments - seemed far away.

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Breaking the Close

Breaking the Close

They have arrested a lawyer, supposedly one of the organizers of the protest that took place inside a church in Minneapolis, illustrating why some of us thought that protest was wrongheaded to begin with on more than one level. 

I have a lot of heartburn, maybe that's just my formerly Catholic tapes, but going into a place of worship, whether that's a synagogue, a church, a mosque, ashram, is wrong. Not a bunch of folks would see that differently. Given the facts behind their reasoning for picking that particular church there would be nothing "wrong" with a protest outside that church. They "broke the close". Would Martin Luther King have condoned that?  

It's wrong on a practical level too. Even if our times wasn't being held in the constant grip of emotional fracture by this horrible administration - even were this some other time, a time when these goons haven't somehow managed to convince a very large swath of our population that Christianity (but not Judaism or Islam) is under some sort of an attack - these are bad optics. This incident is now being exploited well beyond the events of that day. It appears that the legitimate pastor handled the whole situation pretty well by engaging with the protesters.

People on my side are trying to rationalize what happened by pointing out the other bad things that have been happening - Taking kids, five-year-olds, off the streets and sending them off somewhere, Going into schools, No knocks, battering people's homes, breaking into cars, the jackboot hooliganism. We are understandably angry and emotionally frazzled. But that is just Whataboutism. Don't act in a way that falls into the game plan of the people who are more concerned with propagating the myth that they are champions and we are the evildoers, not the victims. If this was meant somehow as propagande par le fait (Propaganda by the deed), it comes perilously close to having the adverse effect. 

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BASTA!

BASTA! 

Trump is the poster boy for Marcuse's criticism of modern societal systems as one-dimensional. He gives thin excuses for engagement, takes synaptic leaps in the consideration of weighty and complicated issues - the economy is linked to tariffs...the border and immigration is linked to drug trafficking...is linked to the border and crime, and immigration...is linked to drug trafficking...is linked to Venezuela...Greenland...NATO...etc. - as somehow binary and easily addressed without upsetting stasis. The immigration issue right now is somehow tied to Minnesota supposedly because of fraud and it being a sanctuary city.

To be clear, the blame - for the immigration issue in general and the border problem specifically - can rightfully be placed on the inaction of both sides (as well as other complicating factors such as armed conflicts elsewhere, economic problems, migration flows, COVID, etc.). The solutions are so complicated and problematic that even when folks on my side of the calculus try to deal with it, we have issues. I've lived through two or three of these roundups. I was a very strong critic of Obama's deportation policies, primarily as a tribal thing because I felt like he was being much too cruel. 

For years, those of us that consider ourselves moderate on this issue would argue that it was  well past time to address the immigration issue. Reagan was the last one to truly attempt to do it. We would argue what is essentially a laches concept: that "hey, you're just waking up to the fact that there's 12 million people here?"; that you can't sit on a problem and all of a sudden decide that you're going to fix it without taking some responsibility for the fact that you've been a willing consumer; and that throughout you have delayed dealing with the problem. You are complicit and have actually worked against solving the problem without any legitimate explanation for the delay. 

It's unjust. That, that is the rub. It's just not fair that after 10, 20, 30 years, you're all of a sudden going to decide in this brutality. While you are "putting on your big boy pants" you engage not just in a shock treatment against people - them and us - but also to the economy as well as to the whole concept of this country's rightful sense of justice and dignity.

Whether Obama's approach was right or wrong, some folks now use him as a justification for what is happening now in our major cities. They are woefully missing the point. And it's well past style points. Trump is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It takes a certain type of arrogance, brazenness, imperviousness to this cruelty and to what these politicians are doing to the concept of truth. That's why you get to the point where the folks that for years haven't wanted to deal with the veteran's homelessness, runaway corporations, health care or any of the other social problems get to talk about solutions that are not helpful. The most brazen example of the arrogance of power - what was feckless power politik - was when Trump told the GOP to scuttle the solution that Biden and other GOP senators had arrived at but now uses it to justify this jackboot behavior.

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