Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Does Money Make You Mean?

1 comment:

markroest said...

Right on, Greg! This fits with a cluster of other Web finds. One described how in colonial times, after a slave rebellion in which whites and blacks fought side by side, the ruling elite decided to pit the whites against the blacks by favoring them with resources compared to blacks, for the price of policing the blacks' oppression, thus creating a white lower middle class. Then you see that evolve into the behavior of the militarized police today, killing blacks who do not submit "whether or not they think it is just", or who are 'out of control' for any reason. This is exactly what whites did to blacks before the civil rights movement. When you see Mayor DeBlasio openly challenge that social agreement by stating that he and his wife have many discussions with their son to try to ensure that he has a good chance of growing up alive, making it clear that this is not an acceptable condition, the police union revolts. When a tall, muscular black man gets in the face of a cop in Ferguson, telling him how wrong the situation is, with reporters and cameras filming it, you can see utter rage and utter frustration at not being able to kill him on the spot in the face and body language of the cop. The connection? The police are exactly that class that has been set up and trained, and enforces laws designed, to dominate and suppress all black males in particular, and all minority and poor people in general. The hundreds of experiments the speaker's team has conducted over the years have simply proven that the mechanism is embedded in our culture.
The VALUE of the connection is that the last experiments, introducing compassion, show the possibility of demanding, educating for, and getting an end to this behavior on the part of police, as in Cincinnati, is real and generalizable beyond the few cities which have made the change under Federal mandate. What would be extremely interesting now, that the NYPD is in deep slowdown mode, would be for the Mayor's office and others in the community who value community to say, OK, let's see if we are nicer to each other, since we don't have to worry about the police harassing us for a while, whether the mood spreads and we actually don't need the police to get back to the levels of 'enforcement' that they were engaged in before this happened? And let's start a Truth and Reconciliation process in public, in New York, not only about police, but about the class system and its abuses, and how we could reconcile as human beings, each sacred in her or his own right (like how we experience our young children), starting with replays of this Ted talk at each convening.
Regards,
Mark Roest