The Inelegance of Grief and Vulnerability in the Seismic Age of Trumpence

How is a person to act when the first rumblings of seismic shift begins and s/he realizes s/he is standing on shifting sand rather than bedrock?

Having lived in California or Washington for nearly thirty years of my life, I have experienced many earthquakes, most so small that I barely took a pause ("Meh, that's like a 3.0 and I've GOT to get this laundry done"). A few - the Loma Prieta and the Northridge quakes, in particular - were doozies ("Oh, Sweet Lord, is this the day and place where I die?"). 

My one comfort during those bigger - dare I say, "bigly" - earthquakes was that at least I was on solid, if rocking ground. If I made it to a strong doorway or under a solid desk that could withstand the weight of falling debris, I knew I would be okay.

But for folks whose homes and work and and schools and lives were built on landfill (the approximation of equity in property development and urban design) they found out quickly, brutally, and totally just how illusive the security for which they paid dearly truly was.

These days, I've been thinking a lot about earthquakes, given the preponderance of seismic imagery in analyses of the Trump Electoral College victory. And I can't think of a more apt metaphor for the pace and scale of the threats, and the importance of situatedness in determining one's perception and vulnerability to those threats.

I am reminded of this video by Brent Kooi, who was a missionary in Chiba City, Japan, a few hours away from Fukushima when the earthquake struck.

Elsewhere, Mr. Kooi has stated that he was able to stay calm in the crisis because he did not know the scope of the damage further north. What I find striking, however, is not his calm but rather the reactions of some of the others in the video: both the dog and the Japanese citizens at 0:40. While Mr. Kooi admits to feeling disoriented as he continues to meander towards the train station, while recording the liquefaction of the park, the people at 0:40 waste no time leaving and the dog sounds like s/he is having none of it. It's not until 2:26, after noting the rapid expansion of the fissures, the sprouting of lakes where there was once lawn, that Mr. Kooi admits to feeling "a little nervous" because, oh yeah, the park is built on landfill.

It's personally hard to reflect on the seismic nature of the coming age of Trumpence and not react like the people at 0:40 or holler like the dog. Over the last few years, I've noted regional insurgencies and wretched Supreme Court decisions that have made it very clear that core human and civil rights, necessary for a successful free and fair democracy, are not bedrock rights for anyone who isn't straight, white, wealthy, or evangelically Christian. And now, the candidate who campaigned peddling contempt, ridicule and hatred for The Other, is queuing up a Cabinet full of hateful True Believers determined to enshrine their white supremacist, heteronormative, Inquisition-style Christianity into every chamber of government and into the highest law of the land for at least a generation.

How am I to act when the first rumblings of seismic shift begin and I realize I am standing on shifting sand rather than bedrock?

I know there are many who believe that the best way to react is to follow Mr. Kooi's example: stay calm in the crisis; make note of the changing landscape; look to the reactions of others as guidance for how best and when to react; don't panic; and don't disturb others with your nervousness. 

That's a lot to ask these days when the fissures of injustice are undulating and threatening an era of constitutional and humanitarian liquefaction.

Not only does it ignore the messiness of grief and legitimate fear. It fails to create space for the very productivity that it requires. How does a vulnerable person create a plan to alleviate that vulnerability without engaging those who may be inconvenienced but who purport to "empathize"? That's not a rhetorical question. That's my dilemma. If I follow the example of the dog and loudly announce my concerns, I am histrionic in my personal life and unprofessional at work. If I follow the example of the people at 0:40, I am uncommitted. 

I and others more immediately vulnerable (e.g. Muslims, Hispanics and sexual minorities) are now profoundly inconvenienced by the need to create exit strategies that may pull us away from homes we love, communities we enjoy, and work that inspires us.

And resolving those two inconveniences -- the one for those adapting to the liquefaction of their human and civil rights; the other for those on higher, more stable ground who want to help but also need the vulnerable to function as if they too are on stable, unchanged ground -- is a conundrum that many communities and workplaces will need to resolve.

Survival strategies for vulnerable people in the Age of Trumpence are not something that can be gradually evolved in wonderment at the rapidly changing terrain. And their genuinely empathetic but inconvenienced neighbors and colleagues who are less vulnerable to Trumpence priorities have a right to try to maneuver through the transformation with calm. 

I wish I had the answer. I suspect it begins with authentic heart-to-hearts between the vulnerable and the inconvenienced, focused on discerning mutually beneficial pathways towards continuity where possible, and towards escape where necessary. But those heart-to-hearts must be predicated on a shared understanding that while there are always tremors with change, seismic tremors (like the rise of a President openly allied with white nationalists) are different. And the discovery that some principles once believed to be bedrock are in fact landfill in the early stages of liquefaction is a living nightmare.

I just can't - #TamirRice #AliveWhileBlack

On Monday, I binge-watched Netflix and finally watched The Butler. I found it to be a profoundly moving meditation on race, politics and family. The final scenes with Barack Obama's election captured the feelings of grief and release and hope that I fully admit I felt both on Election Night and when I went to DC for the inauguration. Grief for all of those who had to - truly had to - die to make it even possible for "someone like him" to ever be President of the United States. Release of the suspicion that maybe America would never fully become what it could be and should be because it was too beholden to the racist, sexist and brutal foundations of its own origins. Hope that We were finally, truly, on a path to healing, reconciliation and creation of an equitable, just and more perfect union.

The Butler ends with an elderly Mr. Gaines walking tall to meet President Obama. But it reminded me of a little boy I saw on Inauguration Monday.

1/22/09: I saw this kid several times during that afternoon: always playful, happy and radiating a sense of awe that was utterly contagious.

He's probably 12 or 13 years old by now, but back then he was just a little boy who stood a little extra-tall as he played. He was clearly awe-struck and though I never spoke to him, I remember observing that he seemed to play with purpose. He, even he, could be President some day. And as I turned off the credits for The Butler, I remembered that little boy and said a little prayer that he still believes he can grow up to be anything he wants to be.

And then I checked Facebook.

And I cried. No. I began crying because the fact is I have been crying for days now. Tamir Rice is not the little boy I observed in Washington, D.C. on January 22, 2009. But he could have been. They are ... or would be ... about the same age, after all. And I pray that the little boy has not been and never will be Tamir Rice. But he could be. 

He could be if he thinks that he can play with a friend's pellet gun in an open carry state.

Three boys playing Cops & Robbers in NY, 1948

He could be if the wrong scared, white cop sees him as a "demon" or as a grown man, instead of the adolescent boy he really is. The wages of the perpetual cruelty of vicious hate and cowardice are always paid by the most vulnerable.

Tamir was playing with his friend's pellet gun. He could have hurt someone, maybe even shot an eye out by accident. But it wasn't this potentiality that killed him. It was cowardice, cruelty and a latent racist hatred that killed him within two seconds of showing up on the scene. It is possible to empathize with the cop, not because his fears were reasonable (as the prosecutor suggests) but because those unreasonable fears have been so normalized. Racism does tend to show up more as fear than as pure hatred. As Morgan Guyton, has observed:

What we’re running up against is the inadequacy of the modern Western conception of justice. Because racism manifests itself as a collective sin that feels more like weakness than malevolence, even when a society’s racism commits murder through the “errors” of nervous individuals, it just doesn’t feel right to punish weakness and fear. So weakness and fear don’t get punished. 

Not only do they not get "punished," they get normalized by invocation of the objectively reasonable standard as judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene. 

It was reasonable for an officer who was found unfit for duty in his previous police gig to be hired without a thorough background check.

It was reasonable for the officer to jump out of a moving patrol car and shoot a 12 year old in the stomach from 4 - 9 feet away.

It was reasonable for the officer to claim on his police report that he gave numerous warnings, when the two seconds that transpired between his arrival and the shots make that impossible.

It was all reasonable because of fear. And we don't punish fear. No matter how unreasonable it is.

And yet, when I try to convey to my white friends, many of whom I love like family, that the only thing that scares me about moving to a beautiful small mountain town is my uncertainty about the white folks in it, they accuse me of being paranoid, or worse, a reverse racist. They don't understand ... and maybe don't want to understand ... that I am afraid of white fear. I am afraid for myself but more so I am afraid for my daughter, my nephews, my black friends and their children. 

I know what it looks and sounds like when people of color circle in and embrace each other as we grieve, yet again, for yet another unpunished murder of another one of our children who had the audacity to believe that s/he was free to be #AliveWhileBlack, in the presence of cops or white folks in general, without irony, subtext or shuffling. It sounds a lot like the silent wailing that chokes the throat and squeezes the heart until the ache, the ache, the ache just stops. It sounds like the gasp of disbelief, the not here, not now, not again, disbelief. It sounds ... exhausted ... weary ... hopeless ... trapped. How do I make a home for my child when the specter of that sound and soundless horror looms?

The last two nights, the last thing I saw on the bookshelf before I took off my glasses and turned off the light was Stephen Colbert's book, I am America (And So Can You!). It's a funny book. But the title reads like a taunt right now. 

Can I be America? Can my daughter or that little boy from the Inauguration? Tamir couldn't be. America didn't let him. White American fear didn't let him. We don't need to ride the tide of fear and demagoguery to make America "great" again (whatever the hell that means). We need America to become America because for too many of us, it never has been.