Race riots in the inner cities. Stores looted. Police cruisers in flames.
White people gathered around their television sets in the suburbs to watch the protesting and rioting…and the launch of American astronauts into space.
All the while, a pandemic respiratory virus sweeps the old and infirm from this mortal coil.
Is it 1968? Or 2020? Could be either one (the mostly ignored Hong Kong flu that ran its course in 1968/69 took as many lives as coronavirus, but didn’t have the advantage of a good publicist).
Oh, yeah. And both are election years. But don’t expect the incumbent to bow out of the race like Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.
What does it mean, that 2020 is practically a repeat of 1968? History’s supposed to rhyme, not repeat. Save having Vietnam to fan the protest flames (Afghanistan not being remotely as deadly or unpopular, probably because no one’s being drafted to serve), 2020 is practically a carbon copy of 1968.
Is this some sort of dire omen? Or is 2020 like 1968 because a new generation is coming of age? That’d be hard to argue. There’s nothing like the post-WWII baby boom generation coming of age in 2020 like happened in 1968. 2020’s young adults, the pampered millennials, are the grandchildren of the Boomers. Perhaps that’s it–the grandkids are trying show up their parents by acting like their grandparents. It’s nothing new for grandparents and grandchildren to conspire to squeeze the parents in the middle. But that can’t be all this is.
Might information technologies explain some of it? Televisions in 1968 transmitted scenes of rioters and body bags and the Apollo launches. Cellphones in 2020 transmitted images of police brutality, protests, rioting, looting and another space launch. Television was no longer novel in 1968, but its capacity to transmit information, especially images, was just coming into full flower. It wasn’t until 1972 that color TV’s outsold black and whites. Cellphones are in roughly the same stage of development, just coming into their own.
The difference with cellphones is editing and oversight. Whereas in 1968 there were three networks (four, it you count PBS), all being carefully watched by the FCC, cellphones turn everyone into a mini broadcast studio and literally anything goes. Televisions united us. We had no choice but to watch what was on offer from the big three and PBS. Cellphones isolate. It’s an individual choice, what to consume from a cornucopia of choices. What to believe. With whom to associate. Cellphone mediated social media subjectivizes truth. Makes it a matter of personal experience. It’s solipsism run amok.
Smart cellphones, the apogee of consumer-driven technological development, augers the death of the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment is over. We’re all Roussean Romantics now, engaging the world through feelings modulated by a smart phone, believing that the more deeply a thing is felt, the more true it is. Ironic isn’t it? Turns out the whole point behind the rational investigation of the world that was restarted in spurts and phases by the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment ultimately resulted in the applied science of cellphone technology that allowed us to abandon reason so that we might wallow in our emotions.
Aside from the fun of marching in outraged protest, and the even greater fun of abandoning all sense of civility to loot and vandalize, it’s not clear what the point is to all the protests. What might be accomplished? The Minneapolis incident was an anecdote. A bad cop did a bad thing. As Heather MacDonald at the Wall Street Journal pointed out, using statistics and not feelings, there is no evidence of racial bias in the use of deadly force by police (The Myth of Systemic Police Racism), basing her conclusion on a study conducted by the National Academy of Science. So what are the protesters after? Expressing pent-up emotions in which their social media and quarantining isolation has them wallowing?
Engaging the world with emotion rather than reason is how one comes to believe the narrative that cops are all racists (even black ones, and against their own race). The world is a very prickly place when one wears one’s emotions as one’s skin. And an utterly indecipherable place when trying to think.
People who abandon reason in order that they might indulge emotion are easily manipulated. The progressive movement depends on infantile people always credulously accepting whatever is their progressive leader’s program of the moment. Woke is just another word for lobotomized.
My daughter, at 23, is skirting membership in the millennial generation. She’s a cliche. A privileged young white woman raised on social media who believes feelings matter more than anything and feels that the police brutality caught on a cellphone camera in Minneapolis reflects a deep-seated problem with the way blacks are treated by police. She doesn’t know much of anything more than her feelings. She’s not studied the problem to know any of the actual statistics. She feels that cops are racially biased (presumably even non-white cops) against blacks, maybe Latinos, too (but let’s stick to blacks to keep it simple), and that her feelings are enough to justify her conclusions.
When I asked her what she thought the protests were attempting to achieve, she mumbled things like the ‘end of racism and police brutality’ and ‘racial equality’. How did she think those things might be achieved through the protests? Anger, at me for having asked the question, was her answer.
A few days later, I was up at the farm, slowly clearing a path through a jungle of vines, brush and small trees that had overtaken a neglected fence line. I aim to replace the old fence and put some cows on the newly-enclosed pasture. Next time coronavirus or something like it comes, which may be the last time we have anything resembling a civilization in which to deal with such a calamity, I intend to be already quarantined, able to produce my own food without need of interacting with a plague-filled world gone mad. I’m sitting the next pandemic out.
I heard a text notification on the phone in the pocket of my sweaty, grimy jeans. Taking off my gloves to dig the phone from my pocket and put my reading glasses to my face, I saw it was from the wife. Someone at the summer camp for kids where the daughter was a counselor supervisor had tested positive for coronavirus. The daughter would be quarantined for the next ten days at camp, and needed us to bring her some clothes and snacks. I cut my clearing efforts short and headed home to gather up the stuff to carry to her, as the wife was still at work (sitting at our dining room table).
The daughter met us at the gate when we arrived a few hours later (the wife decided to take off work early). She was furious. Not at us, but at being held captive by the camp for a coronavirus quarantine. That’s when I realized how it must have felt to be one of the millions of young people like her who’d been confined to their tiny apartments in the quarantined, locked-down cities, an experience that well-off suburbanites like our family had not had. The urban young’s anger at all things government after a few weeks of quarantine was like the detonator on a land mine, the slightest pressure bound to set it off. The protests had more to do with the coronavirus lock downs than anything else. (The riots, looting and lawlessness were just advantage-taking of the chaos for some opportunistic mayhem).
The government (at all levels) had asked the governed to voluntarily forfeit their civil liberties to fight the virus. In return, the governed got the same old government as before, with brutalizing police officers killing black men at their whim (anecdotal, to be sure, but that was enough). Government broke the social contract in dealing with the virus without offering any improvements in return. It infuriated people. They spilled into the streets in protest.
Later on that evening, the son and I got into a spirited discussion about the police brutality leading to the riots. He said his black friend, let’s call him Adam, always felt afraid of the police–that he might be stopped at any time. Adam, only just barely dark enough to be considered not-white, lives in Atlanta, the black capital of the world. I told my son that I could understand Adam’s feelings, but that they were illegitimate. That Adam had no more to worry about from the police than anyone else in Atlanta. He argued that feelings can’t be illegitimate. I asked, what sort of policy measures could be undertaken that might make Adam less fearful? Gibberish, was his answer, because there’s no policy measure to ameliorate an irrational fear.
One can’t control what one feels. The heart feels what it wants to feel. But the head is the handmaiden of the heart. Its purpose for being is to test what the heart feels against its more objective perception of reality. The head is the handmaiden, not the enabler, of an emotional heart run amok, just as a good handmaiden to a mistress offers objective insights as to the validity of what she’s feeling. If it were actually the case that Adam was in danger of death by cop every time, for instance, he sets off on a trip in his automobile, his head would confirm his heart’s fears. There is no way a clear thinking head could make such a conclusion in the case of a law-abiding black man in the city of Atlanta. So his emotion is illegitimate. That’s not to say the emotion is not real, but that it’s irrational. And there’s no public policy measures can be taken that might fix one’s irrational fears.
I personally have a fear that I can’t control. I fear flying. Is my fear irrational? Of course. Flying is the safest form of travel there is. But the human heart has evolved to fear tight spaces that restrict free movement and to fear close contact with strangers, i.e., exactly the conditions of airplane travel. Most people have no problem overcoming the innate impulses, thinking of the experience as an aggravation and inconvenience more than as a potentially deadly threat to their existence. I know my fear is irrational, so I deploy my reasoning faculties (and a few Bloody Mary’s) to overcome it. Adam can too.
But the point is, there’s no policy that airlines could adopt to assuage my irrational fears, nor should they. There’s no point to me marching in protest against the airlines because I fear getting into an aluminum tube with a couple hundred other people I don’t know (the wife usually being the lone exception, which isn’t any help). There’s nothing to do to make things better, save me working on my own heart.
Protesting because one irrationally fears the police is just as pointless as if I’d protested because I get claustrophobic in an airliner. The people who need legitimately fear the police are criminals. There’s no evidence whatsoever of systemic racism in policing. Adam’s feeling is illegitimate. Just because he can get on Facebook and find others who feel the same as him doesn’t legitimate it.
I told my son that one outcome of all this is that the police will likely withdraw (psychologically, if not physically) from the black neighborhoods that need their presence most, leaving the law-abiding citizens that remain at the mercy of the thugs and gangbangers that run riot in them every time the police turn their heads. I told him that the law-abiding people in the ghettos will be pleading for the police to return because they save far more black lives than any rogues of their number brutalize or kill. In the last 365 days (as of May 26, 2020), Chicago saw 300 murders of blacks by blacks. That would be a bad year for an Army division deployed to Afghanistan. Where are the protests against the loss of those black lives?
Cops have the hardest jobs in the world. They are expected to protect us all from each other, while not displacing a hair of civil liberties from anyone’s head. In these civil disturbances they have been spit on, cussed at, had bricks and Molotov cocktails thrown at them, fired upon, stabbed, etc, and through it all been expected to endure it with the stoicism of a Spartan warrior. The guys toeing the thin blue line between anarchy and civilization are my heroes.
Blue Lives Matter. They’re the only thing preventing the delicate fabric of civilization from unraveling.