By: Ben
Johnson
 |
| Are Baltimore gang members more reasonable and compassionate than you are? |
I couldn’t tell you for certain what’s
happening in Baltimore right now. I have guesses. I guess that the organized,
reasonable protests among blighted and forgotten segments of the population on
the just and righteous and undeniably shitty end of the nightstick of history
are a big deal. I guess that whatever elements of violence that are happening
have been overblown, and are not a big deal, and are certainly not anywhere near
as big of a deal as the other thing, the reason for it. Those are my own
personal guesses.
I also guess that people are taking government
paychecks from taxpayer money, and from all of the things sold from one person
to another money, and from poor people court fee money, and from do you know
why I pulled you over yes I have at least one guess traffic ticket money, and
from lottery money and cigarette and liquor and please god let it stop for a
blessed minute tax money, and also from property tax money begrudgingly handed
over by the big money boys with a whole gravitational field of strings attached,
the big grubby pool of money the collection and expenditure of which represents
any city’s priority structure; and these employees are out there, tasked with an
impossibly diverse portion of our competing collective responsibilities and
trained only to wield blunt inherited tools of right and wrong, and also
sometimes, as if by honest accident, killing people. Ending lives. And treating
it very much like a cost of doing business, which of course it is. Those are
some of my guesses about Baltimore.
I’m guessing also that we are all, by birth or
by choice I will be so diplomatic as to call inadvertent, complicit in it. I’m
guessing we know this. I’m guessing we all feel the silent, long-expired eyes
of a stern native staring us down every time we look out a window and see a
tree, or feel the shockingly recent heat bloom of 400 summers of forced blood harvest
every time we put on cotton socks, or ride along with the ghost of an expended
Chinese laborer on every morning train commute to work, or in a general sense toast
to immense and unending and unendable suffering every time we raise a glass to
life itself. I’m guessing this knowledge stings like hell, and I guess we have
no choice but to ignore it to a certain extent just to stay upright and breathe
the air and appreciate the divine luck of having lived. I’m guessing this for
all of us, with varying depths of hidey holes in the sand for ostrich heads of
varying neck length, some down to the lonely bedrock of pathology.
I’m guessing also that all of this started the
instant some prehistoric ape thought I am me and you are not, and smashed some
other ape over the head with a rock and took its dinner, and this weird ape glitch
perpetuated itself because it turns out dinner wins. Dinner, then rock, and paper,
and scissors, and a sincere apology in a very distant last place. The only
question with the apology is whether or not it will finish, though it makes no
difference in the record books. I’m guessing.
Those are all the guesses I have about
Baltimore. The tragedy there is the one larger human tragedy. The one that says
help us you’re killing us and taking our dinner, and worse you’re locking your
own personal avarice into the genetic record, and there’s not a damn thing
anybody is ever going to do about it past a certain point, because we all have
I am me and you are not ape brains. This tragedy is an echo of all that we have
gotten wrong and will continue to get wrong, and a further definition of the
shape of our wrongness and the degree of burn and the stench of it, the
willfulness and complicity of it, the absolute obvious needlessness of it, and
the nagging sense that it is worsening, that hardwired into our basic wrongness
is an uncomfortable maxim that when times get toughest we are induced to turn
on each other with increasing viciousness, even while the opposite is our single
favorite bedtime story.
But just as surely the triumph is the larger
human triumph, the one that says that people together are worth more than
people apart, and can cooperate to get the dinner flowing back out the other
direction, and that it eventually won’t matter that the dinner hoarders and
rock magnates and their unwitting sycophant business associates are running
like terrified ninnies from the plain fact of their complicity to willfully
shovel a portion of their dinners back into the mouth of whoever is buying ad
time on CNN, a tidal clamoring to swallow the most ignorable I am good and they
are not version of every story as a temporary ameliorant, hopefully with enough
refills to last until death or doomsday. The triumph happening in Baltimore is
another in a series of desperately needed reminders that the ape brain can extend
to we are us and so are you, and there need not ever be a “them” if we can all
just agree on a few very basic things like for instance not killing each other
to protect another man’s dinner.
A further triumph in Baltimore is a propagation
of knowledge. There is one rich gift, more precious than dinner, that life
bestows but sparingly, and apportions independently of the struggle for
survival that every living thing faces, and that gift is the truth. I couldn’t
tell you for certain what truth is, just as I couldn’t tell you for certain
what’s happening in Baltimore right now, but I do know that nobody gets any truth
unless they look for it, diligently, in all directions.
