Use your Camcorder, not your Polaroid.

When I was a kid and couldn't defend myself, my mother took me to a Souther Baptist Church, where the endpapers of the hymnals promoted a really big bit of fake news:  "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.'

Unfortunate as it may seem to us enlightened folk in the twenty-first century, racism or something like it has been the default attitude of humans in nearly all places and at all times.  The Navajo don't consider the Hopi to be people.   The Hottentots did not consider the Bantu to be their  equals.  Shucks, Mark Twain had doubts about the French.  Rather the idea that all people, regardless of their 'race', should have equal political rights is exactly that, an idea.  An idea of Europeans, mostly English, thinkers during what we have come to call the Age of Enlightenment.  It's a fragile idea.

It's an idea that had been approached before the great adventure of Englishmen that led to their Empire and their empirical experiences with folk around a world on which the sun never set.  There were more or less equal political rights for all Roman citizens, whatever their race or nationality, and something like racial and even sexual equality had been suggested in the letter to the Ephesians, written during the Pax Romana, but both of those equalities were qualified, depending on  Roman citizenship or citizenship 'in Christ'.  They fell short of the 'all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights' of the Enlightenment founding of the United States.  It was this idea to which underpinned Martin Luther King's calls for racial justice, not some some traditions of African tribalism.  It was the idea of the Rights of Englishmen, the rights the American Revolutionaries were demanding, that underpinned Ghandi's call for social justice in Indian, not some values of the traditional Indian caste system.  (I've always wondered if the Black Muslims recognized the irony that it was black muslims who rounded up and sold so many Africans into slavery.  Of course, they weren't supposed to enslave muslims.)

However, just having an idea does not let it become a reality.  It has been, I would strongly suggest, the immense technological advances which were just beginning at the time of Locke and company which have allowed for the sorts of mobility and wide-spread wealth that we have come to expect.  Jesus may have had a nice idea with 'you feed them' when he did his loaves-and-fishes act, but it didn't seem that his followers could really do any such thing until the development of modern agricultural techniques in the twentieth century. And certainly ending slavery sounded nice, but it was not a viable alternative to thousands of years of human economics until the steam engine and its children were born. (Dare I point out that the inventions that make modern life with its social and racial and sexual and whatever you want to add possible are all offspring  of the same Enlightenment ideology which made it possible for Sundar Pichai to be the CEO of hugely successful Google, a corporation  which makes almost all of its money from and whose primary products are, ideas?)

Now, we folks tend to find stability comfortable, which is a big part of why the hymnals at my mother's church could get away with lying.We blather on about wanting 'real change' while the changes that surround us and which we hardly begin to understand keep us from sleeping at night. The changes in which we live and move and have our being are coming faster all the time.

Enter 2020, with the Covid 19 pandemic and the economic collapse that accompanied it.  I had been reading Aftershock, a book looking at the events following Alvin Toffler's tremendously important work Future Shock, which described some of the changes we might expect and how stressed they would make us.  But all of a sudden the future became much more dystopic than even our fears and worries had made it.  

Enter many more people staying at home and watching 'news' far more often than is healthy.  I mean, even I have started watching the NBC nightly news because it's such a bizarre lens and it comes from the same studios, more or less, as Dave Garroway and his apish sidekick that were my introduction to 'network news.'

Enter images of Minnesotan policeman leaning on the neck of a black suspect until he's dead.  All of a sudden that is the only story on NBC news. You want racism?  You want tribalism? You want identity politics?  You want righteous indignation?  We got it.  We're selling more hand sanitizer, i.e., soap, than ever.

There are studies to suggest otherwise, but  it does seem that in this country police are more inclined to use violence against black people than against white people.  It also seems true that black policemen are just as inclined to violence as are white policemen.  Or as asian policemen, something about which The Verge says we need to talk.  Now I realize that there are good cops. But there are also enough bad cops to make the good cop-bad cop meme work.  I have never had an encounter with the police in which I felt comfortable.  I have not been shot--although once there were six--SIX--policemen with drawn or hands-on guns surrounding me because I was hitch-hiking in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Only three policemen drew their guns on me in Bellingham, Washington, because I was riding a red bicycle.  I was kicked and pummeled and beaten with sticks for distributing a free newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, but not unto death.  I suppose that police and brutality need to be two separate words much more often than they are, but governments make folks cops to use the force for which they claim a monopoly.  The sort of behavior we expect from the police in this country is part of the general, mostly English, Enlightenment attitude towards people.  Look at photographs of  police enforcing the Covid 19 rules in almost any part of the world, and it will not look much different from the treatment of George Floyd.

So:  Instead of looking at this moment in time as a Polaroid of how it always been and how it will be forever, I suggest we need to look at the long Camcorder video of where we have come from and the opportunities for improvement that lie ahead.  I suggest we need to pay little attention to what people say are their intentions and look at the means they are using.  We rarely achieve our intentions, but we are stuck with our means.  It is not as it was in the beginning.  It does not need to be as it is now forever.  

That we in this country are upset by racial injustices, by income inequalities, by differential treatments of different folks is our heritage from the Enlightenment.  Let us not discard that heritage and descend into barbarianism.  I for one prefer Amazon, with all of its imperfections, to a future in which I need to buy books at Mad Max's Bartertown.

These are not the best of times, I hope, nor are they the worst of times.  But they are just among the most stressful of times. They are perilous times.  The Washington Post 's motto is 'Democracy Dies in Darkness." No enlightening ideas have been developed by mobs, no matter their intentions.