Society’s Crisis Goes Deeper than Bad Police
Society’s Crisis Goes Deeper than Bad Police
Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, June 15, 2020
Growing up in the small West Virginian city of Parkersburg was like living in peaceful times where everyone knew their neighbors. The police did not wear bullet proof vests, carry semi-automatic weapons and taser guns, or bring in armored vehicles when there were social disturbances. There were no SWAT teams breaking doors nor racial profiling through Stop and Frisk policies. People prided themselves in knowing there was a police officer living in their neighborhood. We all attended the same schools. The only segregated street historically for the Black community was called Sumner Street.
Yet all of that changed after the Second World War. In 1950, my best friend Tony Bartlett was an African American neighbor who lived down the street. If there was any racism, it was silent and hidden. However, I was just a kid, too young to appreciate the African American experience of systemic and repressive racism.
What I did know was that the police force could assure law and order without ever unholstering their guns. My godfather was Russell Mawry who was the police chief. He said that for the majority of non violent crimes there was no need for heavy-handed tactics. Rather these were misdemeanors due to poor judgment by neighbors and could be handled peacefully.
I recall a time when a particularly tough family with four children moved a few doors away from us. After hearing disturbances of violent behavior coming from their home, my mother and some neighbors invited the mother for a meeting at our home. I had a chance to eavesdrop on the conversations. My mother explained that we were a community. We were all different — Baptists, Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, Jews and other religious persuasions. Nevertheless we were also everyone’s neighbor. No child was ever abused, kidnapped or bullied without a reprimand. Break-ins were non-existent and no one had to lock their house doors.
The woman came from what one might call the “other side of the tracks.” She was poor, uneducated, and absent of social manners. But it was the belief we all grew up with that everyone deserved a second chance and nobody should judge her. At the same time, neighbors expected people to respect each other and live with some sense of harmony and grace.
So my mother and her friends invited this family to be part of the community neighborhood. Whatever help the family needed, mom and other neighbors would be there to assist. The woman was invited to our home on a daily basis, and in time we observed a remarkable difference in her children. This became an important lesson.
Jump forward to today. There are still thousands of neighborhoods across the US that care about their quality of life and respecting the lives and property of others. As Martin Luther King stated he dreamed of a day that his children would be judged on the quality of their character and not the color of their skin.
Yes, America today suffers from a problem of racism in local law enforcement. Of course, this does not refer to all police. The larger problem is the perversion of our justice system: three strikes you are out, lock ’em up and throw away the key. Imprisonment as punishment is not rehabilitation. The entire justice system from the death penalty to putting people in jail for minor drug offences, from private prison corporations to over-zealous judges, counties, and states determined to keep them full for greater profit and attorneys acting solely in their own self-interest rather than the greater interests of society, has become viruses that infect our entire judiciary.
The Clintons, Bush, Obama and now Trump have contributed to the creation of a judicial system that is thoroughly racial and class based for dispensing justice and verdicts. Our politicians should be accused of crimes against humanity for the rise of the incarceration state. The ghettoization of America, privatization of public services, including schools and the neoliberal agenda are not being addressed by either party. It is the hidden force we refuse to acknowledge, a discriminatory social order that has destroyed once thriving communities such as Camden, Baltimore and Detroit and turned them into impoverished wastelands. Except for the dark side of vulture capitalism that gentrifies neighborhoods for their own mobile professional class, the rest of the country is sinking. Now we a dual system, a gated and protected wealthy class and the remainder who are disposable.
Millions of dollars are handed out to militarize local law enforcement. Police officers can receive special training in Israel. All of this wasteful funding would be better served to bring jobs to communities, create micro-loans, and rehabilitate neighborhood blocks that can provide a sense of meaning and purpose to its’ residents. In effect, everything our government and federal agencies touches turns sour leading to high unemployment, the closing of factories and off-shoring of jobs. The criminalization of non-criminal behavior and the pharmaceutical industry’s predation on human weaknesses, such as indiscriminate peddling of opiates, are prescriptions for disaster that eventually leads to a bad, dysfunctional cop putting his knee on George Floyd’ head. With two other police present, a non-violent incident has become socially pathologized by men who in my opinion should have never been issued a badge and uniform.
The anger young people feel today is substantially different than that experienced by Boomers when we were growing up. First, we did not suffer the kinds of privations our parents did during the Great Depression and World War II. The average person was imbued with a sense of family values, community service and character development. There were also resilient support systems within society.
Today, woke Boomers and the remaining survivors of the Great Depression look upon our government, corporate elite, institutions and the media with sense of betrayal. We feel for the down-trodden and dispossessed, the millions of Americans who live pay check to pay check, and the one in five hungry homeless children. The planet has become so polluted and toxic that nothing we can feasibly do will put a complete halt to the encroaching consequences. The populations quality of health is worse than ever and suicides are endemic. Finally, the nation is broke but not the rich, the plutocrats and their sycophants. At a time of abject poverty and suffering, people are either giving up or as is the case of young adults it is time for outrage and change. And they are absolutely right.
Yet we must constantly remind ourselves, the crisis at hand is far larger than racism. It is also income and social inequality. Neoliberal vultures that feed on the suffering and ill-health of the masses is the real enemy, who exploit the trust of others to gain power and use that power against us.
Our entire social system and institutions are guilty as charged. Boycotts must begin against the mainstream media and all of our major financial institutions. Politicians and policy makers need to be held accountable at the polls. Remove all bastards from office. We need to legislators who are not beholden to any corporate interest that compromises their judgment. When we stop buying into the neoliberal lies, oligarchic control slips away.
If anyone wonders why the nation is so angry, screaming and protesting, it is because the failed neoliberal experiment, the culture of political nepotism, a captured and biased media, and a thoroughly corrupt judiciary have created this horror show.
