Political Theatre

We have more sympathy for Flaco than we do for Aaron Bushnell. It doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t, but we do.

Flaco, for those of you who do not know, was a eurasian eagle owl that escaped, with a little help, from the Central Park Zoo just over a year ago. He spent that year hunting Manhattan’s pests and perching for Instagram-able pictures, alone, the only one of his kind flying free in New York City.

Aaron Bushnell, as you should know, was a United States airman who killed himself yesterday by setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. He did so, he said at the time, to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and his unwillingness to remain complicit.

Odds are, Flaco will still be remembered, fondly, long after Bushnell has been forgotten, “human interest” stories filling our airways and web portals for weeks or months. The reason isn’t that difficult to grasp.

We can project our fantasies onto Flaco, imagining how happy he was, how happy we might be if we were set free in our own way. The reality of how and why he died - he crashed into the side of one of New York’s glass towers - is easily brushed away. 

We’ll tell ourselves he had his time, as if a year of lonely freedom is all anyone could want, and maybe even build a small sculpture in some park, like we did for Balto, the sled dog.

Bushnell, on the other hand, only offered reality. At least, he only offered the chance to look at the reality of our decision making, of our indifference to the suffering of others, of our need to push that suffering away into some kind of abstract, far off warfare between equal sides, as though the people of Gaza had any means of defending themselves. 

Bushnell’s belief that his act would carry more weight than the death of an owl was, of course, delusional, but that, for too many of us, is the most comfortable thing about it. We can hold onto that delusion to belittle him and justify belittling why he felt compelled to do what he did.

We will always prefer to celebrate those who seem free over those who are held in captivity. This is a large part of what drove the Palestinians of Gaza into the hands of an organization like Hamas. It is what led Hamas to take hostages on October 7th. We will always pay attention to hostages more than those who take them. We identify with their captivity. We want them to be free.

For generations, Palestinians have effectively been hostages themselves. Beyond the systematic arrests by the Israeli military, almost as if they have been filling a quota, the entire populations of the “occupied territories” have served as hostages, all of them kept prisoner so Israel’s Muslim neighbors would not attack. Anything happens to Israel, the Palestinians would die, too. 

This hasn’t prevented anti-Israeli terrorism, that has been a constant, but it has played a significant role in preventing attempts at full invasion or bombardment. You might think, “What about Israel’s nukes or the support of the United States and Europe?”, but they did not prevent previous attempts in 1967 and 1973. 

No, the Palestinians have served as hostages, the price paid, along with the destruction of the holy sites in occupied territories, for another invasion or full-scale attack, and that is no way to live a life.

What is more insidious, though, is how Israel has held the entire religion and ethnicity of being Jewish hostage. This is not unusual in politics. Religious groups of all kinds seeking political power have always held their own religions hostage in the same way: an attack on our politics is an attack on our entire religion.

This is ridiculous, of course. To criticize a politician or an army is not to criticize a religion or an ethnicity. A child could see that. And yet, for Israel it has been effective, exploiting guilt and shame over what the the Nazis did and, in the case of Germany itself, laws preventing actual anti-semitism.

If only the Israeli government were the only ones doing this. In the United States, our own government is routinely held hostage, threatened with shut downs by Republicans if the Democrats don’t give them what they want. The Republicans actually campaign on this, boasting of the power of the threat while blaming the Democrats for making them use it.

Bills in Congress are tied together, too. The same bill that would give Ukraine much needed money to defend itself against Russia also contains money for Israel to continue its onslaught against Gaza as well as money for Taiwan to defend itself against China and money our own armed forces.

Oh, and money to deal with immigrants crossing the border, you know, the thing Republicans say they want. 

But if they don’t fix the problem, they can campaign on it, much as they did with Roe v Wade for decades, so they’ll stop the bill - hold it hostage - to extract concessions to help them win votes. Or, you know, they’ll shut the government down, holding its entire function hostage. They’ll do that, too.

The problem with this kind of hostage taking is that you eventually have to let the hostage go. In overturning Roe v Wade, the right wing now has to defend having overturned it, their choices reduced to making a rational argument for why they did or doubling-down on the rights of eggs and embryos, effectively taking them hostage, like they have in Alabama. 

They couch this not as a way to control others but as an exercise in faith, in protecting life, in love. Making critics have to choose between defending themselves from charges of hate and keeping silent is merely a political tactic, something from the toolbox to be used, and to be used without empathy.

Hamas acted without empathy. Even now, Hamas would sacrifice every Palestinian life if it meant removing Israel from the maps of the world. What they did on October 7th was an atrocity. They committed that atrocity in order to draw their enemy into committing an even greater atrocity. And they succeeded, as much as any terrorists could hope to do.

Israel and its allies have now been exposed in ways they cannot have imagined. Instead of killings, territorial seizures, and kidnappings of their own being done away from international attention, they are now being done in front of thousands of cameras, a 24 hour-a-day newsfeed. The government and military have slaughtered tens of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, and have been seen to show no empathy for a single one of them as they did it.

What happens, then, when Israel has no Palestinian hostages left, or simply not enough? What happens if the countries that have held back for so long no longer have financial incentives not to attack? What happens if the authoritarian leaders of those countries feel they must attack Israel in order to hold onto power over their own people?

If they have spent the past 75 years building the foreign policy of their countries in the same way Israel has built its own, those countries might, as Israel did in Gaza, decide to sacrifice the lives of the hostages held by Israel. All of them. Better to let the holy sites burn, they’ll say, than let Israel hold onto them one day more.

If that sounds, well, “biblical”, that’s what you get when people treat the world as though they are fighting a holy war. If Israel doesn’t stop what it’s doing and release all of its hostages, literal and figurative, it may end up giving Hamas exactly what it wants. 

And we’ll pay for it, too. Because we are complicit and there is no one coming to break our locks and set us free. That, we’ll have to do on our own.

- Daniel Ward

Traffic lights.

With everything done in the world this past week, with all of the decisions made by the United States Supreme Court, my mind goes to traffic lights.

They are, of course, a form of regulation, one that most of us accept as a necessity to protect each of us from the poor decisions of others, and others from our own.

They are also, of course, not protected by any constitution, federal or state. They did not exist 235 years ago when the federal constitution was written, and no amendment comes close to justifying their use.

And yet we have them. The evidence of their necessity is easily found in statistics, both in collisions at intersections and in pedestrian deaths.

Many of those deaths were caused by men and women driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol. We have laws against that, too, both against their use and their use in motor vehicles, neither of which are, since 1933, protected by the federal constitution, which means, if we take the twisted logic of Alito, Thomas, and the other right wing justices to its twisted end, driving under the influence on federal highways should be legal, and stop lights and stop signs should not exist, since they do nothing to stop a person who wants to ignore them.

This is the problem. The laws and statistics in support of the laws the Supreme Court struck down were there for all to see. Those laws saved lives. The justices who voted against them looked at those laws and statistics, understood them for what they were, and chose to ignore them anyway.

Because they are accountable to no one.

We know the legal arguments used by the right wing justices to justify throwing out laws they don’t like and keeping laws they do like are bullshit. They know they’re bullshit. Odds are, the policians who put them on the bench and most of the people who voted for those politicians know it, too.

They see the law as a means to an end, as a way to win over their enemies, not as rules designed to protect everyone equally, like a traffic light.

In their perfect world, traffic lights would be for other people. They could drive as they please. That’s what it is to be right wing.

Which brings us, once again, to what this is really all about: to be right wing is to believe that you must not have to be accountable to others while others must still be accountable to you; to be left wing - truly left wing - is to believe that if you want others to have to be accountable to you, you must be accountable to them.

That, ultimately, is the war we’re fighting. And it is a war. Much as Ukraine did not want to fight a war but had the choice taken away from them, the left wing didn’t want a culture war or a war for human rights. The right wing has taken that choice away.

Not only that, like Russia, the right wing won’t be content with the gains it has. It will always want more, using violence, legal or physical, to get it, to take it away, because to the right wing that is how anyone gains anything, by depriving it from others. That is how you win.

Of course, it never works that way. The right wing spent almost 50 years campaigning on the need to overturn Roe v Wade. The success of that campaign was rooted in never succeeding in court, in portraying themselves as the underdog.

Now, that dog has finally caught its tail.

The result of this will be defending that victory. They will be defending territory they cannot hold, because the vast majority of Americans didn’t want them there. It will be an occupation. We know how those go. Or should.

In the short term, the right wing will shower itself in glory and threaten to take more and more away from those who want equality.

In the long term, they will have galvanized not only the left wing but the moderates who agree with the left wing on these issues. Give it 20 years, abortion rights and demanding the same accountability for owning a firearm that we now have for driving a car will be codified into federal law.

We must remember, nobody wanted traffic lights at first. Or seat belts. Or any of the other safety requirements we now take for granted. It took time and tragedy for their necessity to sink in.

It will be the same with this.

- Daniel Ward

Like anyone old enough to remember that day, I have memories of September 11th that I will never be able to shake.

The first was the cloudless sky. Few of us really think about the weather when we think about 9/11, not first, but that morning was one of those perfectly beautiful September mornings we in the Northeast always look forward to after the long, humid summer. It was warm and dry and clear, not a cloud in the sky, and that should have been all any of us ever had to remember of that day.

The second was the subway. That’s where I was when the planes hit, on my way to work. I remember feeling dread, but it was the dread of going to work and the dread of being crammed in a car with so many other people dreading going to their work. We were spoiled in that way, being able to believe that the pressures and petty feuds of our jobs could be the worst thing in our lives.

The third was someone in an office calling out that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. I was rushing between cutting rooms, trying to keep the plates spinning. All I could think of was a private two-seater flying out of Teterboro in New Jersey. They had crashed into buildings before. That was all my mercifully sheltered life experience would let me imagine that morning.

The fourth was our collective reaction: confused, slow to accept, trying to rationalize, speculating, and trying to find out what was really going on even as it really was going on in plain view just three miles south of us.

The fifth was trying to give blood. When they finally sent us home, we all called our families to let them know we were okay and stepped out into that clear, blue day. We had to do something, to try to do something, anything at all to help, partly so that we could help and partly so that we wouldn’t feel helpless. We walked to St. Clare’s, one of the hospitals on Manhattan’s west side that just isn’t there anymore. They told us they weren’t accepting blood, that if we wanted to give blood we would have to go down to St. Vincent’s, another hospital that isn’t there anymore.

The sixth was the man on the payphone. As we walked down 9th Avenue, we passed the Main Post Office. It’s a railway station now. There was man on one of the payphones near the corner on 33rd Street. The payphones aren’t there anymore. It was so quiet outside. There was almost no traffic at this point. We were walking down the middle of 9th Avenue. The man was covered in gray dust, head to toe, a thick, gray powder. I can only imagine who he was talking to; his wife, his family, someone who would worry. “I’m okay,” he said. He kept saying it, again and again and again. It was all he said.

The seventh was the crowd of people around St. Vincent’s. Hundreds had had the same desperate thought we had. There were lines heading down 7th Avenue and heading up Greenwich Avenue, all of them waiting patiently, hoping against hope to be allowed to give something. The hospital was still preparing to receive victims at that point. They made sure to keep clearing 7th Avenue in case an ambulance had to go or, they hoped, came back. They were only accepting O Negative blood. I didn’t have it, so I had to go.

The eighth was the view from LaGuardia Place. It was one of the best views of the Twin Towers in New York. Looking down West Broadway, you could see them rising up at the south end. I still remember listening to the Yankees win the 1996 World Series on a radio from a delivery truck. The driver had stopped in the middle of the street just to listen. It hadn’t been strange that he had. Of course, he had. The Yankees won, we cheered and high-fived, and we went on with our lives. Of course, we did. It had been then I looked down at the Twin Towers, making them part of that memory. Five years later, I stood in that same spot and tried to remember what they looked like. There was only smoke.

The ninth were the military vehicles driving along my street to get downtown. My street was and still is one of the ones you take to get there. I don’t remember how many there were. They passed through for hours.

The tenth was going to a bar to look for coverage. The antenna so many of us used for broadcast television had been on the North Tower. Of all the unreal things that day, sitting in a bar watching the news with a bunch of strangers may have been the most unreal thing of all. No one knew what was happening. We could guess. We could smell the fires still burning. We could imagine what it must have been like down there when the buildings came down. We had all been down there at some point, some of us days or hours before.

The days and months that followed offered their own, indelible memories.

There were the fighter jets flying low on patrols up and down the rivers. It got to be that just the sound of jets brought back that sense of dread, like the clear, blue sky, like heading for another bad day on the subway. Some may see them and hear them and think they are an ultimate symbol of power, but they never had to see them and hear them that way for that long.

There were also the tourists, the ones who kept stopping us on the sidewalks and subway platforms to ask us how to get to “Ground Zero”. They were always so excited to get there. Always. You aren’t missed.

And then there were the politicians, the ones who wrapped themselves in tattered flags and used the pain and anger of that day to justify things that had nothing to do with it.

Everyone old enough to remember has memories of that day, far too many with ones far more painful and scarring than any of mine. The thousands who died left tens of thousands behind. Of them, hundreds died trying to save lives. They had given their lives to it before they gave their lives for it. They represented the best of us, that part of humanity that reaches out to help others, that defends those in need. That is the part of ourselves that we need to remember. We promised ourselves that we would.

Somehow, in these past twenty years, that was the memory we too often chose to forget. It left us far too easily. We allowed the need for revenge to lead us to war, to accept collateral damage and the deaths of innocent civilians. It was far away, a war fought there so we didn’t have to face it here. We learned too quickly to dehumanize others there, and then, in the years that followed, to dehumanize each other here.

In forgetting the sacrifice of those first responders, those who perished in the towers and those who died in the years after they sought to find survivors, we failed to protect those who needed and deserved our protection. We failed them and then we failed ourselves.

It isn’t too late. That’s what memory is for, to remind us, to steer us back to where we should be, to help us find that best part of ourselves and live up to it.

The other memories I have are strong, but not nearly as strong as that.

- Daniel Ward

Another 4th of July weekend in the books, our bellies are filled with hot dogs, burgers, and apple pie, and our social media with gifs of fireworks and our fellow Americans embarrassing themselves.

It’s almost a guarantee that few if any of us took the time to think about what celebrating that day truly means, let alone read about what somebody else thinks it means. We’d rather fire up the bbq and think about anything else.

In America, our national holidays are more and more about escapism. Given time, the newest, Juneteenth, will no doubt become one more three day weekend filled with grilled meat, beaches, and traffic jams.

That’s not the worst thing. We deserve a day off, or three. And yet, we would do well, especially we Americans, to read the Declaration of Independence at least once.

Most of us have not. It’s only one page, but ask an American to quote a line or tell you what it’s about and they’ll likely quote a line from the first two paragraphs (the title of this essay is taken from the second) and tell you “taxation without representation”, and while neither is entirely wrong, both highlight everything wrong with how we teach it and think about it.

As for quoting it, not being able to is perfectly understandable. It was written in the late 18th century, a time when English was a flowery, long-winded language on both sides of the “pond”, spoken as well as written.

As for what it actually says, well, that’s where not reading it is a problem. About half of it is a series of complaints - protests, if you will - only one of which was about taxing us without our consent. The irony there is that that specific complaint is one of the few not still relevant to protests in America today.

One of the relevant ones, for example, is about British soldiers - the 18th century, colonial version of a police force - who were quartered in colonists’ homes and faced no consequences for “Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of the States”; after “mock trials” they would be set loose to go on killing as they pleased. Sound familiar?

The last in the series of complaints, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”, manages to reflect the right wing, populist riots at the Capitol six months ago as well as the fear mongering against Native Americans at our borders. Some things never change.

All of the complaints have two things in common: 1) they are protests against systemic imbalances of power, and 2) they completely sidestep the unconscionable hypocrisy of doing so to maintain an economic system based on systemic imbalances of power: slavery.

That the document is so relevant today could be seen as a reflection of the foresight of its authors. It could, however, reflect something else, that in founding a nation on the basis of colonial economics and politics, the country has never actually stopped functioning as a colony.

Bear with me.

The life cycle of a colony is this: the colonizer arrives, offering advances in technology, knowledge, and trade in exchange for resources such as raw materials and cheap (free) labor, which in the short term is welcomed by the colonized; as short term grows to long term, the colonized have learned and grown and no longer believe the imbalance of power is right; the colonizers fear losing the imbalance of power and try to force the colonized to maintain it, first with persuasion then with ever increasing violence; the more violent the colonized are, the more the colonized want them to go; eventually, the colonizers have used so many of their resources to hold onto power that they cannot do it anymore and they leave, creating a power vacuum which is quickly filled, almost always by the worst the colonized have to offer.

Colonies are built on imbalances of power. They rely on it. In the case of the British leaving the 13 Colonies, the power at the top simply changed hands. We eventually gained a constitution, one undermined from the start by language enshrining slavery, but otherwise nothing else changed.

The absence of any mention of slavery in the Declaration - seriously, check it - foreshadowed everything that followed, from the westward land grabs of Manifest Destiny to the Civil War to the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age to Jim Crow, union busting, the series of economic crises stemming from unregulated, speculative markets, and the endless string of wealthy Americans “getting away with it” to this very day.

Reading that list, you might think this is all about capitalism, but it is not actually capitalism that threatens us.

Ask the average American to define capitalism and they’ll give you something as accurate as their understanding of the Declaration of Independence. True, capitalism is the economic system underpinning most colonialism, but nothing in it causes or advocates imbalances of power.

Seriously, try reading “The Wealth of Nations”, the “bible” of capitalism, published by Adam Smith four months before the Declaration of Independence in March, 1776, and even more misquoted and misunderstood. 

It would be easy to blame that on the writing, as it has the same, long-winded 18th century language as the Declaration and is very, very long, but the basic points are actually quite clear: money (capital) should circulate, not sit still; people on both sides of a transaction will look out for their own self interest (the “invisible hand”); and government should prevent self-interested people from screwing other people over.

Yep.

It turns out that Adam Smith, god of free-market Wall Street, was a fan a regulation. His book wasn’t a How To on getting rich in zero-sum games, it was meant as a work of moral philosophy, one in which morality and ethics were good for business and necessary for civilization. The bigger an industry, which is to say the more influence it has on other industries and the lives of citizens, the more it should be regulated. The more business an industry did with the government, the more it should be regulated.

So, it isn’t people using money to make money that causes us so much misery, it’s the self-interested people pushing deregulation, both de jure and de facto, and ever greater imbalances of power that cause so much misery.

The problem with capitalism, or any economic system, is that it can and will be corrupted just like any religion, always to serve the needs of a powerful few at the expense of a suffering many.

Ask anyone who suffered under the fascism of Hitler, Tojo, or Pinochet,  - fascism being the methodology of colonial population control imported for domestic use - and they won’t tell you it was capitalism that killed so many millions, they’ll tell you it was people who enjoyed being able to murder others for personal gain thinking they would face no consequences.

Ah, but ask anyone who suffered under the communism of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot - communism being the corruption of socialist accountability into an oligarchy - and they’ll tell you it was the systemic imbalance of power which allowed those in power to slaughter millions with impunity that killed so many millions of them.

Want something more current? Ask Afghans how they feel about the American military withdrawal. The leaders the United States has been forced to leave in power are corrupt, living by one set of rules while funneling foreign aid meant for their people to foreign banks. Effectively, they are the worst of the colonized filling the vacuum left by the Americans, only they’ve been there the whole time.

Of course, the Taliban, who are quickly retaking the country after twenty years of American occupation, are actually worse. They recruit by claiming to fight colonialism, but happily kill anyone who disagrees with them because they can and believe they’ll face no consequences. Yes, they certainly care about money, but no one would ever associate them with capitalism.

Imbalances of power lead to corruption. They encourage it and reinforce it, leading to a cycle almost identical to that of a colony. In the short term, we excuse corruption because we are getting something from it, but as short term grows to long term the imbalances grow with them and any attempt to close that gap is met with resistance from those gaining the most from it. In the end, it is only catastrophe born of corruption that ends it.

For example, the lax construction regulations and lax inspections that seem to have led to the building collapse in Florida were because developers did not want to have to be accountable to those who would live in their buildings and had the money and power to make that happen. That corruption was perfectly fine for just about everyone, right up until the moment it wasn’t.

Another example of corruption harming Americans can be seen in the resistance to vaccinations in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite ample scientific evidence that the vaccines work and ample supply, one third of eligible Americans still haven’t gotten their shots, most of them in deeply red, Republican-led states and in poor urban areas.

The lack of trust among Americans in vaccinations has many causes, but two really stand out: the first stems in no small part from the corruption of pharmaceutical companies in testing and selling drugs.

Once upon a time these companies’ test subjects were the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, either paid peanuts to risk their lives because the companies knew they would take it, or forced to do it for free because the companies knew they had no choice in, and often no knowledge of, what was being done to them. Now, they use citizens as beta-testers, raking in billions in profits while waiting for the inevitable class action lawsuits filed by those who survived their products.

The second cause is the political corruption that makes the first cause possible. That it is done so nakedly also breeds a distrust of government, which is in turn exploited by politicians wanting to look like they care about those without power, who then betray that trust which undermines the politicians who actually do care. And so on.

Is it any wonder so many Americans don’t trust vaccines made by these companies and offered by this government? Is it any wonder Republicans are exploiting that fear for political gain?

Speaking of which, let us talk of the corruption that are all of those laws to disenfranchise minority voters, passed by Republican-led legislatures all over the country in the name of protecting voters. Again, naked corruption passing itself off as “politics is a game you play to win”. The Founding Fathers would be so proud.

The U.S. Attorney General suing the state of Georgia to end its openly racist laws is, perhaps ironically, Merrick Garland, a former judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court was blocked by Senate Republicans also in the name of protecting the rights of voters. No action taken by Republicans this century has exposed for all to see just how they see government and how they are willing to use it to gain and maintain imbalances of power in their favor.

Oddly, the Democrats  let them get away with it. It was easy enough to see what Mitch McConnell was doing and why and who he was really doing it for, but the Democrats feared losing, they feared giving right-leaning voters an excuse to vote Republican. And those voters went ahead and did it anyway.

Maybe, though, the Democratic leadership understood what in American culture we really should fear, that Republican politicians aren’t doing these things because they hate minorities, they’re cultivating and exploiting hatred of minorities to gain and hold onto the imbalance of power that leaves them unaccountable and, they hope, untouchable, such as when they don’t want to pay their taxes.

Make no mistake, it is the growing loss of imbalances of power, or the fear of it, that drives Trumpism, Q-Anon, white supremacy, and every other right wing movement.

The violence of the 6th of January was all about trying to hold onto an imbalance of power. It was an affront to the 4th of July, or at least to the myths we like to tell ourselves about it. We tell ourselves that we believe in the American Way, in freedom of speech, of thought, of opinion. We tell ourselves that tyranny, the ultimate imbalance of power, is our enemy. And then they tried, through tyranny of their own, to to seize power for themselves and themselves alone.

That’s the thing about freedom: you don’t find it by holding others beneath you, you find it by holding them equal in all things, and especially equal under the law.

- Daniel Ward

Let’s start with this: Jamal Kashshoggi was a man.

Do you remember him? He was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories.

He was also a journalist. After years of supporting the Saudi royal family and their authoritarian regime, he was murdered in 2018 for writing and speaking out against their abuses and, eventually, their war in Yemen. That was the version of him who fled Saudi Arabia, and the one who was marked for death by the Saudi crown prince he had once called a friend.

Last fall, the Saudi regime commuted the death sentences of the men it offered up as his murderers. Three months ago, an investigation confirmed that it was the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who had ordered his death.

We’re forgetting him. Even now, reading this, we are already forgetting. We can’t help it. At least, we tell ourselves we can’t.

In many ways, Kashshoggi was a lot like Alexei Novalny. Novalny hasn’t left the news quite yet. Like Kashshoggi, he supported the corrupt, authoritarian regime in his country, Russia, before turning against it. The attempt on his life, by poison, failed. Barely. He’s still alive, locked up in a Russian prison, a cautionary tale for those daring to oppose Vladimir Putin.

How long before we’ve forgotten him, too?

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, remembering everyone around us. Sure, in some abstract way most of us try, “Good will towards men,” and all that, but we have the luxury of looking away and of not having to commit ourselves to thinking of others the way those two men did.

For each of them, it was an inescapable empathy for the suffering of they saw around them that compelled them to risk their lives to draw attention to it. They did so knowing the cost.

That cost - personal loss, imprisonment, death - is enough to keep most of us looking away. So much of what we do is to enable us to look away, to keep unpleasant reality at a distance. When others are already physically far away, it only makes it that much harder for us to do the right thing.

Looking out past our borders, the world today is filled with men, women, and children suffering, more than a few at the hands of authoritarian regimes, and of them far too many paying that cost for standing up against abuse.

The most present case this past week, because videos on social media have made it impossible to ignore in ways that it has been, has been that of the Palestinians.

The facts of this latest series of abuses against them should not be in doubt. During the last days of Ramadan, Israelis began forcing Palestinians out of their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district in East Jerusalem. This was followed in quick succession by Israeli troops occupying the Al-Aqsa mosque following a confrontation between Palestinians at the mosque for Friday prayers and Israelis celebrating the capture of the mosque in 1967.

This was all a deliberate provocation, beyond the aggressive offense of what the Israelis were doing. The timing of it, during the Muslim holy month while right wing Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to cling to power, was intended to add insult to injury.

It worked. Clearly.

Hamas, ever eager for an excuse to be violent and to be seen to be violent, gave an ultimatum that would make Netanyahu’s regime look weak if accepted, Netanyahu gratefully rejected it, and Hamas began firing rockets, knowing that Israel would escalate and retaliate with a kind of brutality that can only be described as criminal.

The unpleasant reality is that both political powers rely on perpetuating the conflict between them, doing so at the expense of the people they claim to want to serve and protect. And those people pay the cost of it.

Note, please, how I have avoided referring to those instigating these atrocities as Muslims or Jews. That they use their religions and their histories as justification for violence and abuse should not be taken as representative of either religion. If anything, it should be taken as a kind of cruel irony, or perhaps an insight into how the abused, as individuals or groups, can become abusers themselves.

Zionism is not Judaism. It never was and never will be. It grew out of two things: the technology-driven late 19th century belief by Europeans, and their North American “cousins”, in their right to colonial domination of non-Europeans; and the centuries-old, routine and systematic attacks on Jews - pogroms - especially in Central and Eastern Europe that led millions of Jews to flee for their lives, many of them to the United States.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 followed the same pattern: that same, late 19th century belief in the right to claim or assign ownership of others’ land - no matter that it had once belonged to your ancestors; and the routine and systematic attempted genocide of all Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - by Europeans who chose to believe Jews not to be Europeans but some other, lesser race from West Asia.

That, of course, has been the assigned role for Jews the world over: they are accepted as insiders when times are good and scapegoated as outsiders when times are bad. To be Jewish - I am - is to understand that this never quite goes away. There’s always somebody having a bad day, always a big lie ready for justification.

Technically, it is true that Jews are Asian, in the way that Palestinians are also Asian, and that Egyptians are, too, but also African because different people have had different maps which they used for different purposes at different times.

Also true is that these things are only true due to the arbitrary drawing of continental lines on maps made by Europeans, from the ancient Greeks to those carving up the “New World” in the century after Columbus to the 1885 conference in Berlin carving up Africa for colonial exploitation.

This is not, strictly speaking, a European thing. Every culture has a tendency to see themselves as the center of the world. Just ask those living in China, or as they call it, Zhongguo, the “Middle Kingdom”.

The difference here is that modern day Israel was carved out of Palestine, a colonial “protectorate” which was itself carved out of the Ottoman Empire and awarded to the British following World War I. As a spoil of war, formerly-Ottoman Iraq, with its vast oil reserves, had greater value to the British. Palestine had ports on the Mediterranean - “the center of the world” - but was otherwise an afterthought.

Not, however, to the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. We must remember that the rest of the world didn’t want them. Jews attempting to flee the atrocity they and everyone else couldn’t help but see coming were turned away by everyone else, including the United States.

This in no way justifies what was done in Palestine in the 1930s and 40s, it’s just to place it in context. By turning Jews away, by attempting to forget them and their suffering, the world gave weight and power to right wing groups within the refugees.

Starting in the 1930s, those groups began to engage in terrorism against Arabs to force their position into Palestine and against the British to force them out. Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and later the Stern Gang carried out assassinations and killed hundreds of Arabs and British with bombs.

After what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, memorialized in newsreels for all the world to see, who would take the Arabs’ side? Who could? The British were in no position to hold onto their colonial possessions anywhere, so they gave up and pulled out and in 1948 the state of Israel was born. Palestinian Arabs were forced from their homes and stripped of rights they had held under the Ottomans and even the British.

Again, this was not Judaism. As the name “Irgun” suggests, those terrorists were a right wing, nationalist militia doing what right wing, nationalist militias have done before and since, using an ethnic or religious identity to justify committing atrocities to take land and property.

After standing by and allowing the Nazis to do what they did, the world vowed never to forget; part of the price they were willing to pay - that they were willing to allow the Palestinian Arabs to pay - was to forget what Irgun and the Stern Gang had done, and to turn a blind eye to anything the Israelis did going forward.

There was a racist element to it, to be sure. This is part of the pattern of colonial withdrawal, negotiating a partition of land and possessions among the colonized groups, pitting them against each other, and then letting them fend for themselves. Nothing like creating a power vacuum to draw out the worst of us.

The British did the same thing in South Asia in 1947, pitting Muslim and Hindu groups against each other, erupting in spasms of violence before settling into a Cold War, complete with nuclear weapons. Even in their most secular eras, religious nationalism has defined the politics and leadership of each nation.

The result of this, naturally, has been an increasingly corrupt leadership exploiting religious hatred and mistrust to gain more power and wealth for themselves. It should be noted, yet again, that the political entities of Pakistan and India, though led by religious nationalists, do not represent Islam or Hinduism.

Their actions and failures do not represent those religions in any way. They are the actions and failures of men and women seeking power, seeking to acquire it and seeking to hold onto it. They are no different than the Netanyahu regime or Hamas, or our own right wing leaders in the United States.

For all of them, it is in their interest to cling to memory of conflict as a means of manipulation; in Israel and Palestine, nationalist leaders preach as if 1948 or 1967 are now; in India and Pakistan, it’s still 1947; and for America’s white nationalists, it’s either 1865 or 1965, take your pick. For the Serbs slaughtering thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica twenty-six years ago, it was 1389, the year the Ottomans conquered the Balkans.

The wars, cold or hot, can never end because time is never allowed to change. This, again, is a function of proximity. By freezing themselves in the increasingly distant past, the leaders and those choosing to follow them do not have to accept the changes facing them in the present. Their fantasy is to return to that idyllic, earlier time, when they possessed everything and did not have to be accountable to anyone.

And they will all fail for the same reason: in the present or near future, we will have reached a point at which we can no longer allow ourselves to ignore those suffering and in doing so forget them.

That is what we have done to the Palestinians. What has been done and what is being done now is in no small part because we forget them, routinely and systematically and purposefully.

The videos sent from Gaza of children being pulled from rubble should help us remember. They should. Ideally, they will have the same effect as those of last year’s Black Live Matter protests, but the people of Gaza remain far away. For many of us, it will be enough that the missiles and rockets have stopped.

Videos sent from India’s emergency rooms and crematoria should help us remember, but they, too, remain far away. Already, we’re starting to put India’s crisis behind us.

Will we remember either of them a month from now? Two? Or will they fade into the background, as the imprisoned Hong Kong democracy protesters have, or those dying of Covid-19 in Brazil, or those shot down in the streets fighting police brutality in Columbia, or those caught between warring factions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region? Or, for that matter, those half a century ago in Argentina who were simply “disappeared”?

What about the coup in Myanmar? Remember that? How about the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people, supported by the now-deposed and jailed regime of fallen-hero Aung San Suu Kyi? What was done to them was no different than what was done to the Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. That genocide was recently recognized by President Biden, an act of official, international recognition that took over a century and which itself is already being forgotten. The Rohingya may have to wait as long to be remembered themselves, or longer.

The point of all this isn’t that we forget, try as we might, but that despite it we find ways to remember. That Biden recognized the Armenians came because they did not forget and did not allow that crime to be forgotten. 

If this sounds like what nationalists all claim to do themselves - always demanding that everyone remember this date or that insult - remember that actual justice never seems to be their goal.

Justice requires memory, full memory. For us to remember anything fully, we must take the good with the bad. We must recognize the good and bad in each of us and in each group and in each series of actions. We must understand that for the worst act done by anyone in the name of any group or religion, there remain those within those groups and religions who stand against it.

So, let’s end with this: George Floyd 

George Floyd was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories. He died one year ago today in no small part because we forgot him. 

We remember now, today especially, because of what was done to him on this date, but we should recognize the role that forgetting him and people like him played in the events that led to his murder. We as a society have looked away from the suffering of minorities in this country, and from the violence done to certain groups within our society.

The easiest thing to say, certainly as we watched that video and the countless videos of police brutalizing non-violent protesters all last summer, was that “all cops are bad”. They aren’t. Hard as it may be to hear, they aren’t.

They are, however, led by men and women who push an adversarial culture, who encourage violence and racism, who are corrupt, and who thrive on the failure of reform. And most of them, far, far too many, stand by in silence as men and women are murdered in that culture’s name. In that silence, they have failed us all.

If we want to change that culture, we need those who would stand for justice to stand up and speak. They are there, just as they are in Israel and Palestine, and in Pakistan and India and elsewhere: intimidated, ostracized, and struggling to be heard.

Of course, May 25th, 2020 wasn’t just any other day in America. It was Memorial Day. That is a cruel irony. Another is how little we do to honor that day. It was created to honor those who died for this country, to remember not only them but what they did and what they supposedly did it for. Instead, we grill meats and drink beer and forget our troubles for just one day.

Few deaths may have the lasting impact on this country that George Floyd’s has had and will have, and he died in no small part because he, too, had been forgotten. This coming Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember him and all of the others everywhere in this world who have died and deserve to be remembered.

- Daniel Ward

It was a good start. It is a good start.

That Derek Chauvin is going to jail is good. It is a good. Holding him accountable for what he did - not for what happened, but what he chose to do - was and is a necessary good for all of us.

Just as good, though, is knowing that he will never again walk the streets of Minneapolis or any other city wearing a uniform. That is what he conviction ultimately needs to come to mean, that officers like him will be removed from uniform and our streets, and that the culture that spawns and protects someone like him is removed from policing.

That needs to be the goal, and that greater good is still a long way off with a lot of work still needing to be done to achieve it.

For instance, the officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in front of his children is still on the job. So are just about every officer who shot and killed an unarmed Black or Brown man or woman in the past decade. The odds of getting rid of them is close to zero. “It was a good shoot,” they tell themselves, that or something like it, as if shooting an unarmed man, woman, or child could ever be considered “good”.

They call it “good” because they lived. They felt threatened, or tell themselves that they did, and that for them is the same thing. It justifies violence. It justifies death. Absent of video, that must be easy to believe.

That so many described their reaction to the conviction of a man caught on video suffocating another man as “relief” says just about everything. It is not that they have gotten used to disappointment, it is that they have gotten accustomed to a kind of betrayal.

People who have been entrusted with protecting the public from violent, life-threatening behavior, both prosecutors and juries, have time and time again seen the evidence of their own eyes and have acquitted police officers caught on video committing murder, or have chosen not to prosecute them at all.

That Floyd was suffocated may have had something to do with it. It took minutes for him to die, minutes of him begging for his life. Chauvin and the other officers couldn’t not have known. They shouldn’t not have known.

More than that, however, is that the jury and the rest of us had one less, very powerful excuse for ignoring the obvious: he wasn’t shot.

Even as the verdicts were about to be read in Minneapolis, a 16 year-old girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was shot to death by police in Columbus, Ohio.

The details are important. Someone called the police. It might have been her. Twelve minutes passed before police arrived. Twelve minutes is a long time when you’re waiting for the police. A lot can and did happen in that time. When they arrived, it was Bryant who had the knife and Bryant who appeared to be the aggressor.

Watching the body camera of the officer who killed her, it was only a matter of seconds from his arrival to his firing four shots into Bryant. It was far less time than it took her to die. She lived long enough to suffer the agony of being shot, to understand what had been done to her, and to understand that she was going to die.

She was 16. She was Black. The officer was White.

The reaction yesterday, right after the verdicts, right when so many wanted to celebrate and pray that it really was just the first step towards real progress, was a gut punch. No one had yet seen the video. All they knew was that a Black girl had been shot four times by a White police officer, and that it may have been she who had called them for help.

So, yes, betrayal.

That she was armed with a knife isn’t really as important as it might seem. There was no warning shot, no attempt to use their authority to seize control of the situation, or to calm her or restrain her. Sure, it all did happen so fast, just a few seconds, but the officer’s response was tragically predictable, and it is that predictability that makes it not only tragic but an injustice.

It isn’t just racism. We don’t know him. It would be nice to believe that he made his decision absent of racism, but even if he never owned a racist thought outside of his work, it would be impossible to believe that he could avoid it on the job.

Everywhere, racism is a means to the end of dehumanizing victims, one of many, but when it comes to policing specifically, it comes in service to the use of violence by officers, a way to reduce both the options they may choose from and, with them, the time it takes to make life and death decisions.

The officer in Columbus didn’t shoot Ma’Khia Bryant just because she was Black; her being Black allowed him to make a decision faster and to execute it, and her, faster.

“Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

We’ve all heard this far too many times, and, yes, it is factually true. Until somebody invents a sentient firearm capable of choosing and executing its own victims, it always will be. If that last sentence sounds ridiculous, and it should, it should only highlight the terrifying truth behind every gun death statistic, because there have been people responsible for every single one.

Ma’Khia Bryant was not one of them. Nor, tragically, was Daunte Wright.

The immense stupidity required on the part of the officer who fired her gun into Wright is almost impossible to believe. And yet, that her excuse is so overwhelmingly stupid is part of what actually makes it so possible to believe, because it follows an agonizing pattern common in killings of unarmed minorities by American police.

She is, demonstrably, stupid; she was, demonstrably, poorly trained; despite these obvious liabilities, she was hired and certified to roam the streets of a densely populated metropolitan area armed with deadly weapons; and, this cannot be stressed enough, she was accompanied by another officer whose reactions to Wright were identical to hers in every way with only one horrifying exception.

When we talk about systemic failure, this is it.

That racism is deeply embedded in the decisions made by these officers speaks to three core failures in how we approach policing: Officers who are armed and ensured of less accountability will become more likely to escalate to a violent interaction and to use their weapons; minorities are easy to cast as “the other” and are therefore easier to project as a threat requiring violence; and then there is the mythology that every encounter between the police and the communities they serve is necessarily adversarial.

In short: if you treat policing as if it is war, your officers will find enemies and kill them.

Daunte Wright and countless others like him are dead because police departments in this country believe this way of policing is right.

Which brings us back to Derek Chauvin and the murder of George Floyd and how he was killed and why it had such an impact on how we now view every killing like his.

The truth is that for every George Floyd or Eric Garner, choked to death by multiple officers who ignored pleas that they couldn’t breathe, there have been thousands of Daunte Wrights and Adam Toledos and Michael Browns, shot to death by men and women far too eager to fire a gun. That those guns are being fired overwhelmingly at Black or Brown people in situations Whites would have little or no reason to fear is easily the biggest problem, but right behind it is the thing that makes killing them so damned easy: the gun itself.

It’s easy to look away when it’s a gun. Or, it was. It all happens so fast. It’s the heat of the moment and the fog of war, a split second, and, where we get the expression, a bang-bang decision.

The speed and ease of killing a man or woman or, in the case of Adam Toledo, a child with a gun is, ironically, part of allows us to distance ourselves from the act of killing. Or, it did. After all, how many die each year on the wrong end of a gun?

We mustn’t forget that as horrifying as each case of police killing innocent, defenseless minorities is, gun violence is no less horrifying everywhere else in this country. In Indianapolis last week, a man “went postal” on his former coworkers at a Fedex warehouse, murdering 8 of them, four of whom were Sikhs. In the Bronx, a man who apparently couldn’t take rejection murdered Lizbeth Mass, a mother of two. He shot her six times in front of her boyfriend.

That we have an expression, and a comical one, at that, for what the killer in Indianapolis did should fill us with shame. People, mostly men, have been going into their former workplaces and slaughtering former co-workers even longer than we’ve had school shootings, and they follow very similar patterns. It can’t be enough to accept it, give it a nickname, and move on.

As for what was done in the Bronx, women have been punished for rejecting suitors for millennia. We hear stories of women and girls being disfigured, raped, and murdered all the time. In this case, the gun took something abstract or distant and made it easy, which made it possible.

Guns made those murders possible, just as they make police shooting first and then asking for forgiveness, or not, possible. They can be relied upon to shoot, which also makes “suicide by cop” an expression we all know. How many men - they are mostly men - who could not bring themselves to kill themselves have taken advantage of this reliability to end their lives? 

For them, getting someone else to do it provides a necessary distance from the act. In addition to having someone else pull the trigger, literally and figuratively, it makes it a story, one with a definitive end. In this case, the victim really is the instigator, threatening men and women in the hope of being attacked.

It’s all distance, on both sides. Guns distance us not only from our victims - we can kill from farther away - but also from the decision to use them. Killing with firearms is quick and easy, certainly more so than with sharp objects or with our bare hands. Having somebody else do it is just one more layer. 

Looking away is just one more layer on top of that. Until we can’t.

In watching Derek Chauvin take the life of George Floyd, we watched it in real time, an agonizing 9 minutes, 29 seconds. How could we not respond? How could we not see Floyd’s humanity?

His murder, committed that way, remains rare for good reason. It’s the others, committed so easily for so long, that we need to find a way to stop. They are the epidemic.

What do we do, then? We can’t get rid of guns. In addition to the fact that actual criminals and dangerous conspiracy theorists do have guns of their own, trying to get rid of them among the rest of the population would be like trying to get rid of cars. There are that many in this country, perhaps even more, and they are that entrenched in our culture.

We could treat firearms like we treat cars and other motor vehicles. We should. We should need to require proof of training in order to receive a license to use them. We should be punished for misuse by having that license and the firearms taken away, and, very important, being prevented from buying more. And we should punished for using them without a license.

And, as with motor vehicle licenses, police officers should not be exempt. Imagine a world in which police officers were held to same accountability as those they policed. Imagine a world in which the standards for using a firearm were even as high as those for a 16 year-old driving a car. Imagine how good that world would be.

That’s not going to happen anytime soon. The culture of guns ownership and usage is, like that of adversarial policing, deeply entrenched. Accountability in firearm ownership and use will come, as it did eventually with motor vehicles, but not without the same resistance and not without failing in the same ways motor vehicle safety still fails today. It is, nevertheless, a necessary part of ending the violence on the part of police in this country.

So, what else can we do?

Well, until recently, what these killings have all had in common has been our collective indifference. We have enabled them by distancing ourselves from them. The way that a gun distances us from the act of killing, we have kept the consequences of killing by police, with and without firearms, far from our view. Until we couldn’t.

That is what all of these videos have done, they’ve denied us the comfort of keeping what is being done at a distance and ignoring it. This is why mandatory police body cameras are so important, and why it’s so important to hold police departments accountable for keeping them and using them.

This is also why cameras on phones are so important. It’s no coincidence that our growing awareness of police killing defenseless men and women and attacking non-violent protesters and, hopefully, outrage at it have come in an age of cameras and the internet. These killings were being done just as much before, but now that they are being recorded and shared, it is being made impossible for those who have made them possible to distance themselves from it.

And that includes us. That’s a good start.

- Daniel Ward

Fun Fact #1: The Italian name for Easter, “Pasqua”, is derived from the Hebrew name for Passover, “Pesach”.

Fun Fact #2: The Italian name for Passover is “Pasqua ebraica”, which translates to “Jewish Easter”.

Truthfully, neither of those facts is especially fun, but they do illustrate beautifully the way we use language to place those with whom we share our world as others, as outside the land in which they live and the legal system that should protect them as equals.

In this case, which goes back to when the Roman Empire ruled all of the Mediterranean - “the center of the world” - early Christians sought to separate themselves from their religion’s Jewish roots by separating Jews from their own holiday. The Roman Christians married the Jewish celebration of survival and rebirth to their own celebration of the new year - what we now call “April Fool’s Day” - and the rest is actual history.

We do this kind of thing all the time. It isn’t just taking things from other cultures and making them our own, it is divorcing those people from our culture in order to deny them credit for their creations. It is a way to deny accountability to them. If they remain outside of us, we may value them and their contributions less.

Which, sadly, brings us to the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. This past Passover week, Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson, put on a full, despicable show, attempting not only to blame the victim for his own murder but the witnesses, too.

It’s how Nelson chose to portray the traumatized witnesses, two of them in particular, that reveals an unpleasant truth about how we continue to choose to separate certain people from us and how he hopes the jury will, too.

Genevieve Hansen is an EMT, someone not only trained to save lives but inclined to do so, as her choice of career should attest. Not only was she an eyewitness to a helpless man being suffocated on a city street, she attempted to help him and, arguably, the police officers harming him.

Hansen, however, is a woman, something Nelson sought to weaponize against her. He portrayed her not as a concerned citizen with training and expertise attempting to help, but as a nosy, pushy, busy-body forcing herself into a situation and interfering, exactly the kind of stereotype often used to attack many women’s credibility.

In using this attack, Nelson not only sought to separate Hansen from her skills, experience, and value as a medical professional, and with those her credibility as a witness, he sought to place blame on her for antagonizing the police into inaction.

Think about that. Nelson’s suggestion, his defense of his client, was that because Hansen was so insistent that they should stop, they instead became less likely to stop. If only she had kept her mouth shut…

This “double-down” defense isn’t something new. Small children use it all the time. And politicians. Remember when the Republicans in Congress complained about “hurt feelings” to justify not voting for President Biden’s cabinet pick despite, well, all of Trump’s presidency? And how Biden failing to come to them on his Covid-19 was used to justify voting against that? This was it in a courtroom.

What Nelson attempted to do to Donald Williams, who testified before Hansen, was even worse.

Williams is professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter seen in multiple videos of the murder trying to reason with the police officers to get them to stop. He could be seen in those videos growing more and more frustrated the longer Chauvin continued pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck, but notably he never lost his temper, and, just as important, only once, early on, did he even step off the sidewalk. He was never not aware of the limits of what he could do. He never not aware of what would be done to him should he defy those limits. He was, in more than one sense, restrained.

Nelson, however, sought to portray Williams as an angry, aggressive Black man, a loud mouthed, taunting troublemaker, a stereotype meant to remove all empathy we might have for him and anything he might have to say. He, too, was blamed for making the officers afraid and thus reinforcing their decision not to stop suffocating Floyd.

With each witness, Nelson’s hope was that his passive-aggressive questioning could draw out an aggressive response, because that could offer justification for a jury member to choose to side with his client. He failed completely with Williams, whose composure may well have been helped by his fight training, but who, like Hansen, also very likely came to his profession because of the value he had already placed on that discipline in his life.

Hansen, on the other hand, fell into a trap, first attempting to complete a sentence and then insisting, when told to stop talking by the judge, that that was all she was attempting to do. The judge seemingly fell into the same trap, speaking to her not as an inexperienced witness who spoke a few too many words attempting to clarify her response but as someone who was aggressively picking a fight, which she wasn’t. The video of their exchange shows as much.

The videos of both Hansen and Williams at the time of the murder likewise shows two visibly non-threatening people trying to draw police officers’ attention to the threat posed to a human life. Were they frustrated? Of course, they were. Were they increasingly agitated? Shouldn’t they have been given what was at stake? Were they angry at the end of it? Again, having attempted to save a life and having repeatedly been kept from doing that, shouldn’t they have been?

To ask those questions is to seek to remove empathy from their decision making. Those seen witnessing George Floyd’s murder clearly saw him as a man, someone with a right to life. To ask eyewitnesses in that situation to divorce themselves from that value should be impossible. At least, it should be if we want to have the society we keep telling ourselves we want to have.

For the Eric Nelsons of this world, it’s all a game. You do what you must to get your client to an acquittal or at least a hung jury. You blame the victim. You blame the witnesses. You prey on bigotry and seek to focus attention on what makes them different, what makes them others, and what makes them, sadly, disposable.

That, they would gladly tell you, is the way the game is played. That it is seen that way is yet another attempt to remove empathy from decision making and with it accountability.

The continued attempts to portray the officers merely as servants to a higher authority are no different. When they claim that there were rules that they had to follow and obey, they seek to separate themselves from accountability for what they did. They also seek to portray those challenging those actions as disrespecting the law and a threat regardless of their empathic intentions and lack of aggression.

That portrayal, of course, is a lie. The trial’s first witness, Jena Scurry, is a 911 dispatcher. She saw the murder through a live security camera feed, one the jury will have seen, and she was horrified. Nelson could not and would not attack her credibility. He wouldn’t dare. That he then went on to use racist and sexist stereotypes to attack Williams and Hansen is all the more offensive for it.

That Scurry, Chauvin’s former supervisor, and the Minneapolis Chief of Police, all working within a culture that actively casts anyone not in uniform as an “other”, will have testified against Chauvin to deny that portrayal says more than we could have believed just ten months ago.

Even more than that, it establishes a precedent, one that should be applied to departments everywhere. The idea that the police may be fallible and must be held to the highest standard of accountability for their behavior must be encouraged to take root and must be nurtured so that it may grow and flourish.

We hear the word “empathy” and think it means something soft and weak, that to be empathic is to be soft and weak. What those denigrating it and fighting against it want us to reject is not weakness but accountability, because without empathy there is no accountability. We cannot have one without the other.

Whatever our views on religion and the concept of a higher power or authority in our lives, when we look at holidays such as Passover and Easter, we should ask ourselves about what our ancestors, whether they observed one or the other or neither, thought about coming out of a cold, difficult winter. What values did they embrace and why?

These holidays tell us that they valued coming together and staying together and being able to rely on each other. They brought food to a common table and shared it. They reminded themselves to be grateful for what little they had as they shared it and because they shared it.

They made sure to recognize each other as equals, with an equal voice and an equal right to safety and shelter. They even left an extra place at the table, just in case.

The only ones who who rejected, if any were rejected at all, were those who sought to place others outside, those who sought to keep more for themselves, and those who sought to exploit others for their own profit. 

The spring is a time of building something new. As we struggle to remember and to hold onto these values, let us ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. Is it one in which we make a game of denying others a voice? Is it one in which we justify racism or sexism as a means to an end? Or is it one in which we hold ourselves accountable to others because that is what we ask of them in return?

- Daniel Ward