Another day of inanity. Itemizing it seems tedious, though each iteration of it has its own unique patina, a creative cretinism if you will. No masks around the President by decree. POTUS is afraid of looking weak. But two cases so far of his very inner circle have been diagnosed positive for Covid-19. No masks at the White House today either. More of the same.
Today would have been Ahmaud Arbery’s 26th birthday. He didn’t make it. He was gunned down while jogging down a residential street in Georgia. His crime? Jogging while black in Georgia. This happened two months ago. They had the video of this event the whole time. No charges were filed. No arrests were made. Nothing until the public saw the video.
You have probably seen it by now. Horrific, but it did not rise to the level of a crime to law enforcement in Georgia. Two white men in a pickup truck armed with shotguns and a young, unarmed black man in shorts and sneakers in a pool of blood on a street probably much like yours.
To Georgia law enforcement, there was nothing to see here. One of the hunters was a former police officer, so there was no ignorance of the law as an excuse. No, he and his son were unquestionably empowered by their understanding of Georgia law. Well, not the law, exactly. More the application.
The two men have used the Georgia law to hide behind, but the barrier is crumbling around them. Citizens Arrest is a thing in Georgia, but it isn’t intended to be the Wild, Wild West. There are parameters, like having to have witnessed a felony for which the arrest is being made. The family outing for these two was certainly aware of the law, but more importantly they knew how it was applied in such cases and were not in the least bit concerned about the consequences. They would walk.
This is like the virus. As long as it was contained everything was safe, normal. If the video never left the safe haven of law enforcement, their calculations apparently would have been accurate. Former white law enforcement officer and son with a dead black kid at their feet. No harm, no foul.
We are right back to where we were in the early sixties. We had apartheid in the southern United States back then. Not that northern states were immune. I grew up in Boston and bussing nearly tore it down. We hid it better, though. In the south it was an established lifestyle with rules, regulations, signage for who was allowed to do what, and it had been an accepted norm in the Land of the Free for generations.
Until it actually appeared on the TV screens of America it didn’t exist. It happened elsewhere and it was certainly an exaggeration. People would never do that.
But then the Bridge was in your living room. The dogs. The hoses. The billy clubs. This horrible non-secret was real. Police chiefs and governors like that actually existed. Once that happened, once the images made the truth undeniable, a flurry of corrective action occurred. Civil rights acts got passed, the National Guard protected school children and some progress was made.
We thought.
Since the laws had to change, what had to happen now was selective application, and we have seen that change in both law enforcement and the justice system, and not limited to just the southern states. Laws were passed to make it very difficult to justify prosecution in cases of vigilante justice. Stand Your Ground laws appeared in 25 states, and not all of them were below the Mason-Dixon line. The abuse of them was almost instantaneous, and it almost always turned out just ducky for the shooters. You had to be a very special type of cretin to be convicted of the crime of murdering a black man. Your victim’s criminality was assumed and you would be back to work on Monday. Didn’t you see? That “kid” got expelled for three days when he was 15 for smoking a joint, or there are pictures of him with his shirt off at a party. What are we all supposed to do? These “people” are animals. We must defend out daughters!
The jackals have been released in the age of the Orange Menace. It started under Obama. Most of these laws were passed during his administration, and it would take a certain blind acquiesence to imagine that as coincidence. A black man was leading the country. He won, but there was a huge swath of people, people in power, that found that completely unacceptable. Laws got passed. A quick check of the Southern Poverty Law Center maps that catalog the distribution of hate groups by state would clearly show a connection between which states housed these groups and where the laws got passed, whether in the North or the South. Hate could still be a legislative priority, it just had to be more artful. The levers of power were still in dependable hands.
In the age of Trump, the laws seem almost superfluous. The threat of black and brown people was simply a given. Innocent, desperate people were being villified at the border as an invading hoard of marauders, jailed, children stolen and allowed to die in custody. Horrific, unacceptable, unthinkable to happen here in America.
Quaint. We barely talk about it anymore.
Young black men are being hunted down and killed by both law enforcement and pretenders, and all are being protected by the hate machine to the greatest extent of the law which had been altered to make that a reality.
The threat to the country is not a bunch of yahoos in pickups. They are the grunts, the gun fodder in the war. Some of them will get sacrificed as the unforgiving glare of media attention swoops them up and make ignoring their crimes untenable. That will be rare, the martyrs few.
But the threat to the country is the legislatures that traded their pickups for armored Tahoes and Suburbans. They would not gun down people of color on the streets of your town or city, they would kill them in the courts.
And then of course there is Trump. If people don’t agree with him or inconvenience him, they cease to be people. They are “scum”. He likes that word. He uses it alot. He has described all kinds of folks this way. Immigrants, Democrats, abused women, judges, congresspeople (especially brown female ones). One of the indoctrination procedures that occur in basic training during wartime is a dehumanization of the enemy. It is difficult to kill a person. Not so much vermin. An infestation must be addressed, it is a public service and a public duty. The buck-toothed bespectacled Jap with a cockroach’s body or a rat’s was a common recruiting poster in the 40s. These weren’t people.
There is a very controversial group of collectors out there. They catalog the physical remnants of the Jim Crowe era, when blatant racism was policy. Analagous to the Nazi collectors, the controversy comes not from the real necessity to preserve these artifacts of human cruelty as a record, a warning. No, the controversy comes from the varying motivations for their preservation. Warning or wistful? Collections exist to both ends.
So do laws. So do leaders.
The Civil War will not return from the ash heap of history.
It will simply continue.