May 28, 2020

Minneapolis on fire. We who were alive in the 60's thought we’d seen the end of the burning of cities by angry crowds. The burning cannot stop until the injustice does. I’ll not forget the look in the eyes of the cop kneeling on Mr Floyd’s neck– vacant, maniac murderousness, the eyes of a weasel in the hen house. The eyes of the woman in Central Park calling in a false report to the police: sharp, hard, malignant. They must have thought they would get away with it. I think without the cameras they would have. I do not have these feelings of blind hatred toward colored people, so I cannot explain them to myself. One Facebook post thanks awkward white allies, but suggests we get out of the way and let the black community handle this. That would be a relief, for I honestly don’t know what to do. I can try to interfere with some unfolding injustice, but I must see it to help it. I often thought I’d be a failure as superman because evil so seldom unfolds in front of me– the sort of evil, I mean, which is amenable to pure and immediate intervention. Amy from Central Park is more explicable: we are turning out generations of her kind in our classrooms. Students received from high school firmly believe that they need endure no reality check to curb their emotional attachment to a cause or a situation. Their feelings are to be considered above context, above truth, above actual fact. We get students who are not prepared, but who have been “accommodated” into a high school degree and expect that to happen again in college. And in this they are right: it will. To suggest that a teenager’s immediate reaction might somehow need to be better informed is looked at as a kind of oppression. I might be wrong, but to indict my sovereign selfhood by saying so is a brutality This is current (or at least recent) educational dogma. It reaches a level of absurdity pretty quickly, and in the people on their cell phones reporting innocent activities of people who should automatically defer to them I see the acting-out of spoiled brats who are not getting their way, a tantrum with far direr consequences.  But, what else should they do? This is what we teach them. The girls who harassed me two years ago assumed– insofar as it was anything other than malice that waited until later to find its reasons– that their declaration of ineffable hurt would triumph over any revelation of the facts. Fat Karen said as much in the interview–it didn’t matter what happened; it mattered how the complainants felt about it. The surreal posting on my Wikipedia page was the call to the cops. Anyway, we created the privileged white women on their cell phones, and we did it on purpose, if ignorant of the unintended consequences . Maybe we have left off that. Maybe not.  In any case, it will be a long struggle. I have always been an ally of civil rights, but even now I learn things about the depths of oppression that had been theoretical through most of my life. When I see cop brutality on the videos I define what I’m seeing as illogical and berserk. I do not automatically see racism–because I’m white, of course, and never had to trace racism through its forms in order to survive. Breach of reason is not the same as blind hatred. Late times teach me, and the lesson is appalling.

Restless, went to Tractor Supply and bought tomatoes and eggplants. Planted them. Trellised them. I had not dripped with sweat since All This began. Zoom rehearsal for AGMC.