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psocopteraNo short fiction recs tonight, sorry, maybe tomorrow, although we're having another snow day so who knows.
I've been thinking a lot about hypocrisy, the "you were fine when Obama did it" retort pro-deportation people keep bringing up, and complacency, Andrew Sullivan writing about how in a stable democracy, you can safely ignore the news, but that "you" really only ever applied to white dudes and affluent white women. And, like, it's true! I didn't protest Obama's ICE raids (or drone strikes - honestly I was more aware and concerned about the drone strikes, not that I ever did anything about them), and my political activity was pretty much just voting/charitable donations/signing online petitions/occasionally writing letters to a rep or governor or something. I went to two protests in 16 years. And I don't mean to defend any of that, I guess I just find it interesting to think about having turned the corner into This Is A Crisis, Oh Shit mode (which for me was I guess some time in Sept/Oct, whenever it was I started volunteering for Hillary?), not in a regretful way either, just, I don't know, here in my lj I get to navel-gaze about what is feeling right now like a significant life change, that "how is the resistance doing" is now like this central and crucial thing.
I'm sure some of it was just partisan. Obama was already so ridiculously besieged by utter bullshit that it hardly seemed productive to pile on. I mean, I would have liked it if he had drone-murdered fewer people, but I didn't actually want him out of office or thwarted in his every action, it wasn't like there was anyone better out there. Trump I do want out of office, I don't care if they impeach him on the bullshittiest of grounds if it actually gets somewhere, and I do want him thwarted in his every action. This is hardly interesting enough to bother writing about.
But what hit me today was something that I hadn't thought about in a long, long time, about how my particular sense of complacency formed. Back in my frosh year, I remember trying out different college clubs, as one does, and I went to some meetings of what I believe was called the Swarthmore Civil Liberty Society. At that point, their main focus, as I recall, was on the case of a Philadelphia prisoner named Mumia Abu-Jamal, facing the death penalty in a cop-killing case, and on anti-death penalty work in general. 18-year-old me was not yet anti-death penalty, and, as I recall, was not convinced from reading about the case that there had been a miscarriage of justice there. (I re-read some about it today and have reached the conclusion of "yeesh, I don't know, what a mess".)
I can imagine that if the club had been engaged in something that I agreed with more, I might have gotten involved, and, I don't know, maybe been more politically active in the two decades following? But I don't mean this as a criticism of the club's priorities at the time, I'm sure they've all done much more useful work with their lives than I have, and they were totally right to be fighting the death penalty.
What I really think is interesting is the possibility that this unconsciously shaped my assumptions about the nature and severity of the justice crisis in the US. Because I really was shocked, when Trayvon Martin was murdered, when Michael Brown was murdered, when Tamir Rice was murdered, when John Crawford was murdered, etc, I really was naive to how casually and frequently black lives were taken without consequences. And it has occurred to me to wonder if one part of that is that way back when I was a baby civil-libertarian, the "type case" that was presented to me as the crisis we needed to work on was a black man who maybe killed a cop and then stood a maybe unfair trial, which makes the police brutality crisis seem less extreme, than black men and children being definitely killed *by* police who don't even stand trial! I mean, jesus fuck, 2017-me is amazed Mumia made it to trial, like, they shot him, but only once, and took him to the hospital and he got medical care! A miracle!
Or maybe not - I didn't march this past summer for Black Lives Matter, although apparently there was one in Boston, I have no idea if I knew about it or not, but I certainly knew by this past summer how bad things are. (Or were, I mean. They were not yet as bad as they are now. "Maybe Hillary will be able to do more than Obama could", I vaguely thought.) I don't know. I don't really have a good conclusion here. Maybe I just want to try to think about, in the best-case I-don't-believe-we'll-really-get-it scenario where we survive the Trump crisis/the Republican crisis and get to keep having a democracy/representative government/freedom of speech and assembly/rule of law/etc, I think there's this "let's just get back to normal" thread of the resistance, and, I don't know, am I going back? Maybe if we survive the democracy crisis we keep right on doing serious work on the justice crisis, maybe it's crisis all the way down, I don't know.
I've been thinking a lot about hypocrisy, the "you were fine when Obama did it" retort pro-deportation people keep bringing up, and complacency, Andrew Sullivan writing about how in a stable democracy, you can safely ignore the news, but that "you" really only ever applied to white dudes and affluent white women. And, like, it's true! I didn't protest Obama's ICE raids (or drone strikes - honestly I was more aware and concerned about the drone strikes, not that I ever did anything about them), and my political activity was pretty much just voting/charitable donations/signing online petitions/occasionally writing letters to a rep or governor or something. I went to two protests in 16 years. And I don't mean to defend any of that, I guess I just find it interesting to think about having turned the corner into This Is A Crisis, Oh Shit mode (which for me was I guess some time in Sept/Oct, whenever it was I started volunteering for Hillary?), not in a regretful way either, just, I don't know, here in my lj I get to navel-gaze about what is feeling right now like a significant life change, that "how is the resistance doing" is now like this central and crucial thing.
I'm sure some of it was just partisan. Obama was already so ridiculously besieged by utter bullshit that it hardly seemed productive to pile on. I mean, I would have liked it if he had drone-murdered fewer people, but I didn't actually want him out of office or thwarted in his every action, it wasn't like there was anyone better out there. Trump I do want out of office, I don't care if they impeach him on the bullshittiest of grounds if it actually gets somewhere, and I do want him thwarted in his every action. This is hardly interesting enough to bother writing about.
But what hit me today was something that I hadn't thought about in a long, long time, about how my particular sense of complacency formed. Back in my frosh year, I remember trying out different college clubs, as one does, and I went to some meetings of what I believe was called the Swarthmore Civil Liberty Society. At that point, their main focus, as I recall, was on the case of a Philadelphia prisoner named Mumia Abu-Jamal, facing the death penalty in a cop-killing case, and on anti-death penalty work in general. 18-year-old me was not yet anti-death penalty, and, as I recall, was not convinced from reading about the case that there had been a miscarriage of justice there. (I re-read some about it today and have reached the conclusion of "yeesh, I don't know, what a mess".)
I can imagine that if the club had been engaged in something that I agreed with more, I might have gotten involved, and, I don't know, maybe been more politically active in the two decades following? But I don't mean this as a criticism of the club's priorities at the time, I'm sure they've all done much more useful work with their lives than I have, and they were totally right to be fighting the death penalty.
What I really think is interesting is the possibility that this unconsciously shaped my assumptions about the nature and severity of the justice crisis in the US. Because I really was shocked, when Trayvon Martin was murdered, when Michael Brown was murdered, when Tamir Rice was murdered, when John Crawford was murdered, etc, I really was naive to how casually and frequently black lives were taken without consequences. And it has occurred to me to wonder if one part of that is that way back when I was a baby civil-libertarian, the "type case" that was presented to me as the crisis we needed to work on was a black man who maybe killed a cop and then stood a maybe unfair trial, which makes the police brutality crisis seem less extreme, than black men and children being definitely killed *by* police who don't even stand trial! I mean, jesus fuck, 2017-me is amazed Mumia made it to trial, like, they shot him, but only once, and took him to the hospital and he got medical care! A miracle!
Or maybe not - I didn't march this past summer for Black Lives Matter, although apparently there was one in Boston, I have no idea if I knew about it or not, but I certainly knew by this past summer how bad things are. (Or were, I mean. They were not yet as bad as they are now. "Maybe Hillary will be able to do more than Obama could", I vaguely thought.) I don't know. I don't really have a good conclusion here. Maybe I just want to try to think about, in the best-case I-don't-believe-we'll-really-get-it scenario where we survive the Trump crisis/the Republican crisis and get to keep having a democracy/representative government/freedom of speech and assembly/rule of law/etc, I think there's this "let's just get back to normal" thread of the resistance, and, I don't know, am I going back? Maybe if we survive the democracy crisis we keep right on doing serious work on the justice crisis, maybe it's crisis all the way down, I don't know.
