2/5/23

 Sunday, February 5, 2023

In bed at 10:10, awake at 4:20 and up at 4:35.  32 degrees out, steady temps all day with a high of 35.  Winds SSW at 10, 5 to 11 mph during the day, gusts up to 21 mph, wind chill now at 25, ranging from 16 to 28 today. Sunrise at 7:02, sunset at 5:09. 10+7.

True Love

Lilly lying in the snow, looking down County Line Road, waiting for her Geri to return

Tyre Nichols  There have been 3 police killings that have especially tugged on my emotions.  The first was Eric Garner on Staten Island, the first "I can't breathe" killing, the chokehold homicide.  It hit me so hard for several reasons, not the least of which was that Garner was the father of a loving family with 6 children, but mostly because his murder was so symptomatic of our ruthless, capitalist, grossly, obscenely unequal society.  Garner was stopped by the cops near the Staten Island ferry terminal for selling "loosies," individual cigarettes.  'Loosies' sold for 75 cents apiece on Staten Island. There was a market for them because a pack of cigarettes in New York City sold for a minimum of $12 and many people couldn't afford to or chose not to buy cigarettes by the pack.  The high cost was attributable to high state and municipal taxes on tobacco which led to a black market in untaxed cigarettes often sold individually as 'loosies',  which in turn led to a police crackdown on such sales.  That is what led to Eric Garner's arrest, chokehold, and death.  In different circumstances we might consider him a hardworking entrepreneurial type, identifying a market and servicing it, much like immigrant peddlers with their carts a century earlier.   His market was those who could not afford to buy full packs of Marlboros or Newports.  For servicing that market of poorer folks who might be depriving New York City of revenues extracted from their addictions, Eric Garner was wrestled to the ground and choked to death.  The cop who killed him was Daniel Panteleo who was not indicted for the killing, another 'justifiable homicide.'

    The second police killing that gripped me hard was of course George Floyd, notoriously murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who pinned him to the ground with his knee on Floyd's neck for more than 9 minutes.  Floyd, like Eric Garner, repeatedly advised the cops "I can't breathe" and, also like Garner, he was ignored as he lay dying in the custody of the cops, the "Serve and Protect" guys.  Unlike Daniel Panteleo, Chauvin and his subordinate officers were charged and convicted of crimes.  What was so striking about the Floyd homicide was the seeming casualness of it, Chauvin keeping his knee on Floyd's neck despite Floyd's pleas and despite the fact that Floyd was no threat, on the ground with his hands handcuffed behind his back, and despite the fact that there was an audience witnessing and recording all of it and asking Chauvin to stop.  

    And now there is Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, fully employed on the second shift at FedEx in Memphis, father of a 4-year-old son, amateur photographer with his own photography website.  He had Crohn's Disease, inflammation of both the colon and the small intestine, and was skinny as a rail, 145 pounds and 6 feet, 3 inches tall. Nichols was beaten to death by 5 Memphis police officers, all Black.  They pepper sprayed him, used a taser on him, punched him, kicked him in the head, and beat him with a baton, a 'billy club', as he cried out "Mom, Mom."  It took 22 minutes for an ambulance to show up to transport him to a hospital.  The EMTs who were dispatched to the scene before the ambulance arrived rendered no assistance to Nichols, who was visibly in medical distress.  Everything about this crime is stunning but it lays me low in large part because Nichols appears to be such "a good guy," a model citizen, a loving son and a loving father, a gainfully employed worker, a nature lover and an artist, the kind of man Bill Clinton used to refer to as one "who works hard and plays by the rules."  He posed no threat to the police officers who killed him or to the EMTs who ignored him.  He was 'a stringbean' with a BMI of 18.1, seriously underweight, and unarmed.  The other aspect of the crime that is so gripping is the ferocity, the viciousness of the cops' treatment of him, from the moment they pulled him from his car to the time they seated his handcuffed, beaten, and limp body against the police car and watched it slump to the pavement.  The cops were clearly intent on battering Nichols from the time they stopped him.  To use an old phrase, they 'had blood in their eyes' from the get-go.  They treated him with no respect from the beginning.  It could be easy to say they were stoked to anger by his running away after they had initially mistreated him, defying their 'authority' to savage him, but they were vicious before he tried to escape their abuse.  Why?  Why treat this traffic stop as if he were a wanted mass murderer?  And can any reasonable person believe that the behavior of these 'Scorpion' cops towards the unthreatening Tyre Nichols was different from their behavior towards other stops? other detainees?  other arrests?  Can any reasonable person believe they would have acted this way if the stop had involved a White man, wearing a suit and tie, driving a Lexus in a "good" neighborhood?  Can any reasonable person doubt that these officers and even the EMTs thought they enjoyed immunity and impunity, license to act (and not act) as they did precisely because Nichols was a young Black man in a 'bad' neighborhood who had challenged the abuse he was suffering by attempting to flee his abusers?

    I have long been distrustful of police officers, at least those in cities with significant minority communities.  I suppose I learned this growing up in Englewood on the South Side of Chicago, an area that Time Magazine once called 'the city's seamy south side.'  Chicago's police department was notoriously corrupt and, within minority communities at least, notoriously racist.  Indeed, I could have added to my list 17-year-old Laquan McDonald gunned down for no reason on Pulaski Road by CPD officer Jason VanDyke in 2014 with a coverup aided by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.   I've never not thought (the double negative seems appropriate) that Milwaukee's police department has a significant racism problem and a general problem of abuse of authority.  I can't help believing that racism is part of our American DNA, that we live in a largely apartheid society, and that we have never been able to free ourselves from the psychological, social, economic, and political vestiges of the nation's Original Sin of slavery.  We are all,  as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. put it, "tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the belief may seem superficial, but it is indelible."  Jim Crow laws and other social forces largely ensured that the easily-identifiable descendants of former slaves would be segregated into neighborhoods separate from Whites.  The same forces ensured that the residents of those neighborhoods would have fewer and lesser economic, educational, vocational, social, and political opportunities. Over time, and especially with the War on Drugs and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in capitalism's Global Economy, those neighborhoods experienced higher crime rates than 'better' neighborhoods.  Young Black men became the chief victims of this history and Tyre Nichols, crying for his Mom, joined the list of innumerable other young Blacks who paid the ultimate price of our shameful history.  Oremus.