Judith Gayle: From Both Sides Now

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

But now old friends they’re acting strange
They shake their heads and
they tell me that I’ve changed
Well something’s lost,
and something’s gained
In living every day
— from Both Sides Now, lyrics and performance by Joni Mitchell

This was the week that the cops cuffed Frostpaw the polar bear on Wall Street, bewildering small children everywhere but advancing the cause of our time — climate change — by pointing out that capitalism, as practiced on the Street, is the enemy of alternative energy and environmental protection. At least they didn’t call him names. Hamid Karzai, the ever-sketchy former President of Afghanistan called the decade-plus American intervention a curse upon his country and Americans themselves demons, then thanked China and Iran (and just about every other country he could think of) for their support in his farewell address to the people, a harangue the U.S. ambassador called “ungracious and ungrateful.” Down the block and around the corner, ISIS blew a raspberry our way and called John Kerry an uncircumcised old geezer. I doubt that spit-in-yer-eye rudeness has much to do with why the U.S. hit Syrian airspace like a fiery comet raining death and dismemberment, but that business about “sticks and stones” breaking bones seems appropriate to contemplate just now.

We’re better informed than we used to be, aren’t we! We’re paying more attention to what goes on around us, as well as to what the nation does in our name. And I guess we’re out of practice with this kind of citizenship, because it all feels a bit clumsy and unwieldy, like we don’t know what to do with this glut of information except to re-think our self-definition and wonder what our part in all this is, now that we’re no longer asleep at the switch. Case in point, the police chief of Ferguson, Missouri released a video apologizing to Michael Brown’s parents for both the loss of their son and for letting his body lie in the street for hours. Chief Jackson also addressed the blowback by adding, “The right of the people to peacefully assemble is what the police are here to protect. If anyone who was peacefully exercising that right is upset and angry, I feel responsible and I’m sorry.”

Later in the day, Jackson met a rowdy group of protesters outside the cop shop who assessed his apology as too little, too late. One protester brought a large sign that said “Chief Jackass: Resign” — the ‘ass’ portion was underlined. A bit of shoving ensued, causing well-prepared officers in riot gear to rush out, push the demonstrators across the street in a typical stand-off, and make more arrests. While our Missouri governor has instituted an Office of Community Engagement by executive order, designed to focus on minority issues, it’s still clear that in case of resistance — anytime, anywhere — the state will default to breaking out the riot gear, the rubber bullets and the pepper spray. I trust the residents of St. Louis County are prepared for more of the same, then, as the crowd has pledged to continue their protest until Brown’s shooter, Darren Wilson, is charged with his murder, which will likely be … never.

The spotlight shining on law enforcement in recent weeks has finally given the public a sense of not just the inequality with which justice is served in this country, but its haste in protecting itself against all harm, real or imagined, rather than the public it supposedly serves. Every so often the press stumbles on a ratings bonanza, a thread of truth they don’t hesitate to tug despite its lack of political correctness. And after the coverage that captured the zeitgeist in Ferguson last month, it’s impossible to ignore a growing public awareness of law enforcements militarization, with its accompanying up-tick of police brutality and growing ability to search out daily examples like a heat-seeking missile.

Each new announcement proves the point of authoritarian overreach and, newly sensitized to the problems, there is some progress being made. Remember the Los Angeles woman who was walking on the freeway, stopped and repeatedly pummeled by a Highway Patrolman? She received a settlement of 1.5 million for her trouble, including a “special needs trust” to provide for her long-term care. Turns out she was both homeless and bi-polar. The patrolman has resigned his position, pending criminal charges. And in South Carolina, a black man on a routine traffic stop went for his drivers license too enthusiastically and got shot by a spooked state trooper. You need to watch this little clip because it defines the problem we’re dealing with. It seems likely that while race may have defined the original stop, what happened next would have happened no matter the color of the suspect. The cop was subsequently fired and arrested for shooting an unarmed citizen, and in this case, I can’t help but feel somewhat sorry for him. There’s no question that he’s been as authentically mind-crimed into paranoia about the public as the public has been about the cops.

Fear is at the base of the polarization between law and the public, and — to one degree or another — has ever been thus. Those in authority over us resonate our vulnerabilities, put us in defensive stance even as we try like hell to appear calm and guiltless. That’s why lie detectors are so successful, measuring sweat and heart rate as a factor most of us are unable to manipulate. Yet the more information we try to hide from authority, the more they believe we are hiding, and the circle of mistrust goes around, endlessly.

Think back to your youth, about the possibility of being sent to the principal’s office, and tell me your stomach doesn’t lurch a bit. Even the thought puts a shadow on the day, and this is so because authority is rightly equated with punishment, a legacy in our society from our Judeo/Christian underpinnings. We rarely seek to relate and rehabilitate. We’re more eager to “spare the rod and spoil the child,” and if you don’t think so, just ask the Viking’s Adrian Peterson. We learn violence young, and from those who tell us they love us more than anything.

Truth to tell, authority has the responsibility to be fair and even-handed, if it wants to be trusted. I was not a hitter (although my daughter delights in telling the world that I once chased her around the house waving a wooden spoon) and I’m quite sure that was because I was never hit. The lines of communication between people who have not betrayed one another by resorting to force is based on mutual respect, not fear. There are plenty of ways to respond to children without teaching them that those who love them can’t be trusted not to hurt them, while that old line about the beater being hurt more than the one getting beaten is a hollow defense in the name of self-righteousness but little else.

From an adult point of view, then, we’re locked and loaded from an early age, ready to explode into learned violence if and when the appropriate goad comes along. We’ve been programmed to lie to keep from being punished, and we’re unequipped to handle ourselves when the lies become too heavy to balance. That’s when the societal norms come along to push us back into place, starting with those bidden to keep “law and order,” but seriously, it’s a little too late for the National Crime Prevention Council’s mascot, Officer McGruff, to sweeten up our relationship with authority.  (In Texas — it HAD to be Texas, right? — one of the actors that played McGruff the Crime Dog in presentations to children has been sent up the river for the next 16 years for possession of 1,000 marijuana plants and 27 weapons, which included a grenade launcher and 9,000 rounds of ammo. Quite a “bite out of crime,” eh?)

But we’ve finally smartened up a bit, and even the most lily-white community isn’t naive, these days, about the tension that exists between the police department and the general public. The criminals are scary but the cops are too. If you can help it, don’t call them before hiding your kids behind you and locking your pets in the closet — maybe even then, and I’m as serious as a heart attack. Our old dependable “rule of law” has not only been rewritten while we were busy elsewhere but is quite comfortably ignored from most all quarters, these days.

In Louisiana, a citizen called the police after seeing a group of ‘armed’ teens enter an abandoned house in the neighborhood. The result of that call was a 14-year-old honor roll student shot four to five times in the back, and a weapon recovered “in close proximity,” although reports do not identify the weapon (which could have been anything, after the fact and in the hot glare of public scrutiny). The victim’s brother says that he and his buds were just hanging out, as they’d done before, and his little brother thought the pounding on the front door was someone punking them. When he opened the door to armed cops, he was startled, turned and was shot. And I suspect, if you asked among the ranks and could elicit an honest answer, you’d discover that because this child was black he was considered undeniably dangerous. Isn’t that why Mike Brown died? Isn’t that why the white folks overwhelmingly think Darren Wilson was justified in putting half a dozen bullets in him?

But all this talk of racial conflict, ancient and irrational, isn’t the only problem we face. We are no longer solely a white nation, and in the years ahead, our families will be even more blended than they are now. Race is a temporary wrinkle in the struggle against mindless authority while the multi-millions invested in training and equipment that have beefed up our law enforcement in the last decade have turned it into a war machine, with the public identified as the enemy. Soon enough, the enemy will be generic. And, like priests and doctors, cops have that “band of brothers” thing going on, where truth falls into a black hole when someone is grilled on a co-worker’s possible wrongdoing. There is nothing workable about a system that self-protects rather than serving the public they have sworn to serve — black, white or brown; priests, doctors OR cops.

It gets worse. In Texas, a 64-year-old Hispanic woman, trapped in her car, drowned in a drainage canal after onlookers who were trying to rescue her were threatened with arrest by police. Waved off for their own protection, the good Samaritans became frustrated onlookers, as police assessed the situation for approximately fifteen minutes, not even allowing rescue personnel access to the buffeted automobile. Said a bystander, “There were ambulances, there was the Fire Department, helicopters, airplanes, I said ‘Oh, my God, they’re not doing anything about it,’ so she passed away.” Another witness said that the woman would probably be alive if the cops hadn’t shown up. Naturally, none of those who commented to reporters wished to be identified because their daily wellbeing is in the hands of these same police personnel who simply stood and watched a woman die.

If we have come to that place where we can simply stand back and watch the residence burn, the bank robbed, the victim raped or killed, or the old lady drown in her car rather than get our hands dirty in the process, then the whole system has come to a standstill and authority has no ethical value to the society it has pledged to serve. And that’s where we come in, because law enforcement is a political animal, and politics — oh, you know what comes next! — politics is personal. What happens in our neighborhood is a direct result of our political advocacy and voting record. What happens in our community, our state, our nation and the world is directly influenced by us. And although we’d rather not carry the burden, what happens in the local jail, in our state’s attorney general’s office and the for-profit prison system: all up to you and me, and the collective known as we, the People.

All of this is not beyond us. It IS us, fleshed out and being experienced so we can change our mind and lift our consciousness. If we want to change things, we must make it our business, our intent, to do just that. Something similar happened not long ago, when too few of us were looking. A recent study found that the bias shown by our Supreme Court is a new phenomenon specific to the Robert’s court, which has its roots in business and federalism. Prior to the turn of this new century, decisions were not so polarized by a judge’s political party but spread more equally across the spectrum of political thought. It is the culmination of the conservative party plan that SCOTUS has America by the short hairs, creating law in its own image.

While he is unable to break the tie in the SCOTUS, Obama has done an excellent job of filling the court system with liberals. Once Harry Reid signed off on the nuclear option, bringing nominations to an up/down vote, the President has been very successful in placing judges. He has finally caught up with the disparity in progressive judges put in place by an eager G.W. Bush, who busied himself salting conservatives into every possible corner of Washington D.C. for the entirety of his final term.

This week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg, 81 years old and a cancer survivor, explained why she would not step down from the court, leading to an Obama nomination (while the Dems have the podium). “If I resign any time this year,” she replied, “he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court. Anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided.” And she’s right. She is champion for both the legacy she brought to the position from the ACLU and to a history of liberal decisions marked by the social consciousness that was our heritage from FDR, JFK and LBJ.

Here, at the dawn of a new era, I’m less interested in our divisions of opinion than I am in our potential shifts in consciousness. We humans tend to respond to most everything with herd consciousness, picking our side and sticking with it. That’s how we got in this mess to start with. When we look at any situation from both sides, carefully weighing the factors, we begin to get a full sense of the implications involved and a rounded view of not just our responsibility to one another, but our mutual humanity. Joni Mitchell nailed it when she told us that something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day.

When we open ourselves to the whole picture — factor in the fears that plague us, the group-think that attempts to capture us and overwhelm our clarity and enthusiasm — we can understand the cop who’s afraid of getting it wrong, the young kid who feels victimized by those in authority, and the ultimate clash that leads to the death of, usually, the most vulnerable of the two. That’s an emotional storm we can’t just sit and watch, like those cops sat and watched as a woman lost her life. I can understand fear. I just can’t allow myself to succumb to it.

We must discover our empathy as we deal not just with the position of those we favor, but those we oppose. We need to dive into whichever feelings seem the most abstract, the farthest from our own, until we’re saturated in the consciousness that we understand the least. We need to enter into the consciousness that we intuit is most like our own, feeling the fervor that drives desperation and distress. Finally, we must own that place that we know to be our own somewhere between those poles, shifting and changing day by day, growing and enlarging our humanity. That is the only way we will be able to escape our own bias to enter the slipstream of change.

That’s how we can look at life from both sides, understand the illusive quality of changing positions and ideas, forgiving one another our inflexibility and still finding the compassion to go on. Neale Donald Walsch tells us that the God he dialogues with tells him there are only three things to know, here in the maya of earth consciousness. He calls them the Triune Truths and says that if we lived them, we would change the world:

1.  We are all One.
2.  There’s enough.
3.  There’s no such thing as Right and Wrong.

What we experience, from moment to moment, is the collective possibilities of our group mind. Each of us is like a cell in that body, able to influence what we want to know, to see, to do with and for one another. The Hundredth Monkey is all about how many cells fill themselves with Light and shift the whole of the body upward into a larger expression of its divinity. That’s what I’d like to experience, willing myself to surrender to both sides now. And because Joni was right about that, I think she was speaking for you and me when she sang:

“‘We are stardust, we are golden and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”