Look at what we allow
This piece appears in my forthcoming book We Had It Coming.
They said he threw his jacket. Kept saying that over and over. The man was agitated on the subway and he threw his jacket. I don't know what that means. I understand the basic physics of the action being described mind you and I understand why they would immediately start printing something like that in the newspapers because I guess in theory it suggests aggression that begged for a response. Not the one it got but still.
He threw his jacket they said. Kept saying. I don't know what that means.
Try throwing a jacket right now. What have you done? Nothing. Tom Brady could not throw a jacket especially hard. You couldn't hurt a person by throwing a jacket. You couldn't even hurt a small animal. Throwing your jacket on top of one is what you would do to specifically not hurt a bird that has gotten into your house. So you could carry it gently back outside. So that it could go on living.
The man’s killer was a marine which triggered the media to use the same exonerative tense that they always use for cops. The most lethal among us always also the most blameless.
How people make excuses for certain breeds of dogs.
That hierarchical framing shows up a lot in bicyclist vs. driver stories and in the common use of homeowner as an honorific in a crime story and most especially in any normal citizen vs. homeless person story which is what this was.
Not just one specific group of normal citizens vs. one specific homeless person but all of them vs. all of them.
And it's a Thursday in May and a man is dead. Do you feel any safer?
I guess this one isn’t fiction. You and I are just talking here.
I told you before that I know it can be uncomfortable to encounter an unhoused person in distress but that is because it is an up close and personal look at How It Actually Is. A peek under the hood of this country. The churning gears and foul combustion. It's no wonder then that so many of us want these humans simply disappeared. And they are humans in case you need reminding.
They aren't a threat so much as they are an indictment.
Look at what we allow.
It's the hideous beating of the tell-tale heart.
Much like with the existence of any billionaire the inverse here is that so many systemic mechanisms that should have been in operation had to have failed for any individual unhoused person to exist in the first place. It’s shameful to see and so of course we all feel uneasy about it.
It's not so much seeing how the sausage is made it's seeing the sausage after it’s been digested.
You told me about something you learned in school. A professor said that one of the things that helped people accept their work as concentration camp guards was that the terrible conditions of the camps themselves made the prisoners’ literal filth synonymous with their inherent filthiness. If they weren’t dirty then they wouldn’t be this dirty.
It applies to modern prison guards and the ICE kidnappers as well. Look at this worm living in the wormhole. Writhing in its own muck.
Doing it to offend my sense of decency come to think of it. A personal insult to me.
Will no one rid me of these insects?
Let me ask you something. Take a quick inventory of your life. Like mine it's currently a mostly comfortable and safe one right? But be honest with yourself. Do you feel closer to the chasm of poverty with perhaps a devastating medical bill or an eviction or a ruinous encounter with the police or a worsening struggle with addiction or closer to the attainment of wealth and power?
Which end of the see-saw are you actually sitting on?
