The Sad Constant

I've just begun standing-on-my head lessons. I need lessons because as a child, I was even more hopeless at gymnastics than I was at traditional sports. Thankfully, this period of my life pre-dated popular use of the word “spazz”.

So, yeah. Lessons.

My instructor is a nicely-muscled Oriental woman named Lexi, who prefers to be called Flexi. I know, I know. Her choice, right? Anyway, she's adept at contorting her body into all sorts of unnatural poses. For her, inverting the carbon-based life form's upright posture is as easy as spending money.

Me? I may as well be attempting to nail pudding to a wall.

So. You may well be asking yourself why does he even want to stand on his head? Especially at his age!

I seek this to better understand the rapidly-shifting world around me. You see, in my eyes the world is off its nut, and the best strategy towards understanding this new normal is to invert my own.

Capisce?

Take our new litmus test: police shootings. Like the conflicts they stem from, they happen all over, all the time.

This being 2021 America, 49.5% of the population feels they are entirely justified, all the time. The other 49.5% of the population believes they are wanton acts of race-based brutality and are never, ever justified.

Which leaves me and a few others in the one-percent who feel police shooting don't fit into one-size-fits-all categorization. That they originate from a hugely diverse set of circumstances and are subject to an ocean of factors that by their nature, often demand lightning-like responses.

Before going any further, I want to say I think it is a good thing we are examining them so closely. The taking of a human life, especially by an entity ostensibly there to protect them, isn't anything to take lightly.

In Chicago, we have the shooting of a thirteen year-old gang-banger caught in the act of, well, gang-banging. While I rue the influences and choices that led Adam Toledo to be firing at cars at 2:30 AM on a Monday morning, I can't quite bring myself to feel this is an unspeakable loss of human life.

The media has taken a millisecond of film in between Toledo's covert disposal of his gun and his turning to face the pursuing officer with hands raised and the officer's firing of his gun and turned it into a poster of police brutality and murder. A moment frozen for all of eternity.

For the one-percent of us still in possession of our faculties, we understand that given the conditions of the event, there was no way the officer could have known Toledo had disposed of the gun and was in the act of complying before he was shot.

This because we are talking about a tiny, infinitesimal fragment of time. And let's not forget, Toledo was an active, legitimate threat to public (that's you and me) safety.

But to 49.5% of the population, the officer may as well have blindfolded Toledo, tied him to a post, popped a cigarette in his mouth and shouted “Fire!” before dispatching the entirety of CPD's arsenal into his body.

If you say so.

Then we have the sixteen year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, Ma'Khia Bryant.

Bryant, for unknown reasons, ended up a foster child. Despite this speed bump, she was liked and made her high school's honor roll. She posted videos about make-up and hair which were widely shared.

None of which explains how she ended up with a knife in her hands attempting to stab two co-residents of her foster home after an argument over house-cleaning. But she was. And did. The confrontation continued even after police showed up.

Again, my apologies for not belonging to either of the majority populations. But um, Bryant was in the act of murder. She was actively stabbing another person. Again, even after the police showed up. She showed no signs of abating.

Naturally, after the event ended bystanders (who, it should be pointed out, had done virtually nothing to sidetrack or end the confrontation) turned on the police. One of those assembled said “She's a (expletive) kid. Damn, are you stupid?”

Hmmm. Let's look at that real hard.

Granted the officer, after showing up, should have paused the confrontation long enough to make proper introductions and confirm the participant's ages. Then refreshments should have been served before the festivities were allowed to continue.

But the stupid cop, acting as stupid cops do, came upon what I'll call an active stabber. Bryant was in the act of stabbing someone, and after pushing them to the ground turned on another bystander and began assaulting them.

Bryant repeatedly ignored the cop's requests to cease and desist. She had a knife and was bent on using it.

Sadly, the thought-impaired bystander didn't offer an opinion as to what kind of response he would have preferred had Bryant been attacking him when the cop showed up. I'm going to take a crazy-ass, out of left field swing at this, but I'm guessing he wouldn't have wanted the cop to have first inquired as to Bryant's age before subduing her.

Am I right, bro?

Apparently, 49.5% of the population needs to hear this: a gun and a knife are dangerous, regardless of the age of the person wielding them. In fact, as Adolph Hitler himself learned through his infamous recruiting of the Hitler Youth, they are even more dangerous in the hands of someone given to black and white thinking.

Someone without a fully-developed sense of reason and consequence.

Predictably, the reaction to Bryant's death has been hysterical and extreme. Blind. Wildly inaccurate. She is innocent by virtue of her age—and nothing more. Her survivor's predictably rosy portrayals nonwithstanding, who was Ma'Khia Bryant? How did she end up in foster care? Why was a knife an acceptable response to an argument?

I pull back even further when I read the suggestions of Sheila Bedi (a civil right attorney) on how the Toledo foot chase should have unfolded. Her thought? The chase should have been abandoned. Yep. In essence, Toledo should have gone free since he is a victim of quote-unquote “society.”

Uh-huh. (It goes without saying that Bedi's was not one of the cars Toledo and his pal were shooting at that night.)

Jason Van Dyke and Derek Chauvin were clearly guilty of murder. The former should be serving a prison sentence commensurate with his crime. Hopefully, the latter will be.

But the cops who responded to the calls regarding Toledo and Bryant? Nope. By virtue of their profession, they were dropped into situations demanding immediate responses. I am confident neither is going to look back on their participation with the slightest sense of satisfaction.

Indeed, they will more-likely be haunted by them.

Can we simply mourn the tragedy of kids with no emotional center, be it a loving family or a strong parent or a true and good friend? Can we do that without shredding the people forced to respond to the worst in them?

Putting police into a position where they're all-guilty-all-the-time is as dangerous as anything a Republican could concoct. So is cloaking them in law enforcement's version of diplomatic immunity.

Police shootings need to be examined on an individual basis—not stuffed into all-or-nothing decisions that only serve a single—and highly politicized—demographic.

Oops! Gotta go. Lexi—I mean Flexi's—here. 

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

The End of an Error?

 As we collectively crave a return to normalcy, one indication we're nearing that ideal is—ironically—one we don't want to acknowledge: mass shootings. Unless you manufacture and/or sell guns, ammunition or are in the emergency medical supplies field, mass shooting are something most of us turn away from.

What we should keep in mind is that most of us is different from all of us.

Republicans and the National Rifle Association see mass shootings as an inevitable byproduct of their rigid and inflexible support of the Second Amendment. Their support is a black and white, all or nothing gambit.

To his credit, President Biden has taken the first step in what is sure to be the most contentious trip of his presidency. He has announced several executive orders which chip away at the iceberg which threatens our already fragile notion of safety.

If there's a twitchier band of people than those who constitute the NRA, I would love to see them. The mere rumor of even benign gun control measures inevitably lapse into the hysteria of “Clinton/Obama/Biden's gonna take away your guns!”  And the gun crowd falls for it every. Single. Time.

Democrat's biggest mistake has always been their attempts to mollify these un-mollify-able folk. Nay, it is impossible. The gun crowd are a car alarm set on maximum sensitivity in a crowded urban area.

Yes, it's going to go off a lot.

Yet as we quickly learn to ignore that car alarm, we rarely do so with the gun crowd. And we need to. Now. They have established themselves as people in strident and unwavering opposition of anything that doesn't facilitate a complete and unregulated torrent of guns into the United States.

They are the customer who is never happy. And as the sentient portion of our society Democrats need to understand that. We need to let them stew in their paranoia and cower in the dark recesses of their fear. It is what they want, and if I'm going to be brutally honest, likely all they're capable of.

As Democrats, we need to stop appeasing them, couching our legislation with wording like “common-sense” to avoid waking the sleeping dog. Trump never worried about offending Democrats. We should learn from that.

The unmitigated slaughter of U.S. citizens taking place before our eyes is the result of the NRA and Republicans dictating gun policy. They have single-handedly enabled a nation with more guns than people. It's certainly noteworthy how this condition undermines the gun crowd's number-one contention that the more guns we have, the safer we'll be.

Really? Is that what we're seeing?

However much I'd love to see the manufacture, sale and possession of assault weapons declared illegal (as they have been in more-civilized nations where public safety isn't determined by an industry trade association), this is unlikely to happen.

More effective would be to strip away the immunity gun manufacturers and gun sellers enjoy. In a nation driven by money, the loss of same provides a very powerful incentive.

Let's make them liable for the destruction and the trauma their products inflict on Americans in the same way cigarette manufacturers were made liable for the toxic effects of their products.

Let's face it: the gun trade and their Republican hand-maidens have won the gun battle and profited handsomely. Wildly. And exorbitantly. After decades of unfettered government-sponsored largesse, it is time for them to bear the weight of consequence.

Really? There's an App for That?

When they're not plowing their cars into counter-protestors at white supremacist rallies or mailing letter bombs to prominent Democrats, conservatives are chewing their nails to the quick wondering which businesses they can patronize without fear of being brutalized by thuggish progressives.

At least that's the theory behind 63red Safe, an app designed to keep conservatives out of harm's way.

Even more remarkable is that the app's creator, Scott Wallace, felt the need for this despite living in Oklahoma, a place no one would ever confuse with San Francisco. In fact, a January, 2017 Gallup poll identified Oklahoma as the nation's fourth most-conservative state, behind Wyoming, North Dakota and Mississippi.

After narrowly returning home unscathed from a visit to a local gun and ammo shop, Wallace and two co-conspirators developed the app around four questions designed to reveal whether a business was MAGA-friendly:

Does this business serve persons of every political belief?

Will this business protect its customers if they are attacked for their political beliefs?

Does this business allow legal concealed carry under this state's laws?

Does this business avoid politics in its ads and social media postings?

With the exception of question three, I have to confess to being puzzled at what any of the remaining questions reveal. I've never seen a business identified as conservative-only or liberal-only. I've never seen a business that would stand by while a physical confrontation developed between its customers.

And aside from the occasional 'Fuck Trump' spring clearance event or 'Let's Wipe That Pelosi Bitch off the Face of the Earth' tire sales, I rarely encounter businesses using politics in their advertising.

So. Not exactly a litmus test, is it?

Which brings us to question three.

Even in the conservative and heavily-Republican county in which I live, no guns stickers routinely appear in store windows. It is my belief these stem from liability concerns, and do not necessarily indicate whether a business owner is pro or anti-gun.

But as a tribe-building device, I'm sure the 63red Safe app will appeal greatly to the lizard-brained paranoids among us. To be perfectly honest, I can't blame them for having tired of being bludgeoned by sledgehammer-wielding liberals as they shop for milk and laundry detergent or dine at their favorite restaurant.

It's just not right.

For my part, I have issued myself a cease and desist order. It's true! I hereby abstain from shooting, stabbing, clubbing, punching, kicking, striking or otherwise harming my conservative countrymen.

Which is a pity, because no one could remain coiled behind a kale, black bean and avocado burrito bowl and cup of fair trade coffee, face obscured by the latest issue of Socialism, Now! and waiting until the time was just right, than I.

Good times.