Conflict

Boulder’s Assault Weapons Ban

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I never associate 4/20 with pot.  For me the day’s anthem has always been the dirge of Columbine, and not coincidentally, the birthday of Adolf Hitler.  The subterranean bells of Antichristmas.

So my heart beat for the kids who marched on Friday, demanding freedom — not to light up, but simply to live.  Parkland survivor David Hogg nailed it: “We’re children.  You guys are the adults.  You need to come up with a solution.” As our velocirapturous news cycle sprints off to devour its next victims, the moral challenge from his generation to ours remains.  How will we meet it?

In Boulder, our City Council took up the flag of gun control while the klieg lights were hot, drafting an assault weapons ban and passing it on first reading.  In doing so, we invited the issue, and many gun-rights activists, to town.  Having listened to their case at a marathon public hearing, Sam Weaver briefly considered taking the ordinance off the docket and putting the question to voters, but has now reversed course.  He’s right to change his mind.

He’s right because gun control is one of today’s most glaring failures of our representative government; therefore, gun control is among the most obvious places to start fixing it, in any way possible.  Since we live in the United States, it’s useful to go back to a seminal text of American democratic theory, Federalist Paper No. 10.  Authored by James Madison (sorry, Hamilton fans), this tract acknowledges that democratic governments fail when overcome by the narrow, interest-driven power of “faction”.  Allowing the people to govern directly permits this interest-driven impulse to take over, resulting in tyranny of the majority and collapse of freedom.  Modern examples of failed direct democracy, especially in societies riven by sharp ethnic tensions, are too numerous and tragic to recite.  As one observer put it after an African election and its bloody aftermath, “This was not an election.  It was a census.”

Madison argued that democracy can succeed only by two means.  First, the passions of self-interest must pass through the filter of representation by elected leaders, “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”  This ideal of public service, essential to the American form of government, was common in Madison’s day but is rare in ours — an absence we’re quick to condemn in our adversaries and overlook in our friends.

Second, Madison urged that the sphere of democracy be enlarged, so that the passions of one group could be offset by the passions of another, enabling representatives to balance and reconcile interests for the benefit of the whole.  Only in a large enough arena, governed by few enough representatives, could coherent and democratic decisions be reached.  A federal system, framed by our Constitution, achieved this balance.

It’s worked, more or less, for two hundred years.  But lately?  Rather less than more.  On gun control, not at all.  At the federal and state levels, “faction” has taken hold of the representatives, whose powers of wisdom and discernment have been replaced by ruthless advocacy, bought and goaded by supporters who brook no compromise and punish disloyalty.  What passes for debate has deafened us all.   And tearing at everything, a rising wind of fear: of neo-Nazis, of the government, of psychopaths, of godlessness.  Of each other.

Into this hurricane, council has launched its little boat.  In Madison’s terms, city government is too small a sphere for this action.  But since all the bigger ships have foundered, it’s obvious why we decided to venture out.  Our council members now have the chance to act like the legislators they were elected to be, and that by taking up this issue, they’ve chosen to become.  If, having heard from gun owners, there are interests to be balanced, then balance them.  If you have to face down a few of your own supporters in the process, welcome to elected office.  You could even seek a creative solution that reaches beyond the simple confines of an assault weapons ban, perhaps drawing upon the resources of sister municipalities less liberal than Boulder, to find a path towards saner regulation of weapons which many abhor and others champion.

Councilwoman Jill Grano called this a “no-brainer.”  It is anything but.  Still, you guys decided to pick up this flag.  It’s time to carry it.

After Charlottesville

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I spent last Sunday reading condemnations of others’ racism after Charlottesville.  I read few investigations of self.

I’ve just returned from a road trip through Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – country I’ve traversed, and loved, for years.  Impassable red rock craters and spires.  Rigid fields of irrigated potatoes.  Windy plains evoking Mongolian steppes, dotted with antelope.

And every fifty miles or so, a town – sickening, dying, or dead.  I’ve watched these little towns over the years, stopped in their gas stations and eaten in their cafes.  I’ve seen how the movie house closed because it couldn’t afford a digital projector.  How the musty old hotel restaurant, where you could get a steak under the stare of a stuffed buffalo head, has become a Denny’s.  How a grocery store’s converted to an antique shop, as the keepsakes of a rural community bleed out through its last open orifice.  How the diner we used to stop at because of the row of pickups out front is now empty, its windows painted over with dust-covered bald eagles and American flags.  How it doesn’t take long, once the last business goes, for the buildings to bleach like bones.

Of course this is hardcore Trump country.  Businesses are festooned with “Make America Great” signs.  People’s country courtesy comes edged with resentment.  I’ve always been an outsider, and I’m still a customer.  But I’ve felt increasingly like an enemy.  This trip, a motorcyclist passing the other direction flipped us off – I guess just for our Colorado plates.

Still, even after Charlottesville, I carry these people in my heart.

It goes deeper.  My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery.  Its people faced a terrifying future.  My great-aunt wrote, in a memoir depicting our family’s struggle out of that awful shadow: “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  My great-uncle beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man refused to call him “mister.”

Outwardly, I am none of these things.  A professional, progressive Boulderite, I harbor no ideologies of racial separation or superiority. I have no trouble condemning the KKK.  But we do not live in the world of Indiana Jones, where good guys punch out cartoon Nazis.  The racism we must confront is not merely the tiki-torch variety.  It’s our own in-group out-group hard wiring, overlaid with the history, power structures and acculturation of our regional, familial, and personal roots.  By this standard, of course Donald Trump is racist.  But so am I.  When I meet a person, among the first things I notice is their race.  Also, a quick flash of wariness.  It has always been there.

The great damage wrought by Bannon and Trump is that they align such deep-rooted racism with our often legitimate sense of economic loss and cultural fear, and meld them into tribal resentment.  People thus incited do not experience themselves as haters.  What they feel is allegiance and safety.  So they deny being – or at least feeling — racist.  But the hatred and violence engendered are no less real.

Humans as a species are universally vulnerable to race-baiting like Bannon’s.  Democracy’s defenders should condemn and confront it.  But we — especially people of privilege — should also be honest about ourselves.  The therapy for racism is not righteousness.  It is understanding: of other, of self.

One morning last week we set out before dawn on Highway 50.  The Great Basin opened up ahead, a carpet of black sage stopping at silhouetted cliffs, thrusting to indistinct peaks and ridgelines and tumbling bruises of cloud, dark grey, burgundy, pink — then suddenly breaking into orange fire.  What had been a wash of soulful gloom abruptly turned every color, green, yellow, lavender, each proclaiming its particular self.  Oncoming headlights faded to twinkles, like morning stars.  Mary Chapin Carpenter crooned:

Oh my darling, oh my love,
The things that we are made of.

Ferguson and my Great-Aunt Blanche

~ John ~ Leave a comment

After days of mourning the latest events in Ferguson, I can’t help thinking about two distant things: my great-aunt Blanche’s manuscript, and something that happened the summer I was six.

This will get a little personal (I hear a collective groan: John’s now apologizing for being PERSONAL?!), but to me no contribution to this wrenching topic can be worth its pixels if it’s not an honest effort to examine one’s own soul.  So here’s my story.

My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by human slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The next day he returned home, the sole surviving white male of three families.   The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery, and its people facing a terrifying future.  My great-aunt Blanche wrote a memoir depicting her family’s struggle out of that awful shadow, at a time nearer to the Civil War than Vietnam is to us today.  She writes, “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  At fourteen, Blanche was cornered in a shed by a black boy two years older and was nearly raped, but she screamed herself to safety.  Her mother tried to keep the incident secret and urged Blanche to “forget it ever happened.”  But word in the town got out, and a lynch mob began to form.  My great-grandfather intervened, knocking down the ringleader with his fists, not to save a young man’s life but to protect the reputation of his daughter.  Blanche’s older brother beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man had refused to call him “mister.”  My great-grandmother again turned her face away (she witnessed the fight) but her husband remarked, “Good for him.  If they don’t know their place, we must show them.”  The family loved each other and worked hard to succeed, but they seethed with anger at the strain of poverty, the breaking of obsolete social codes, and the insistence on denial.  “We will never speak of it,” my great-grandmother would command, while insisting on the pieties of “polite society.”  Her daughter, the unflinching Blanche, witnessed and remembered it all, in a style reminiscent of Jane Austen, even though the bones of the story were pure Faulkner.

My mother inherited her grandparents’ anger.  When I was a kid, she wrestled with emotions  she could neither control nor even name, except that they arose from the conflict and abuse of her own childhood.   Unpredictably explosive towards me and my siblings in moments of privacy, Mom carefully upheld social appearances.  We had an African-American nanny named Essie who did most of the work of raising me.  I loved and trusted her, as I loved and distrusted Mom, with her recurrent triggers of rage.

Then when I was six, a man my parents employed as a gardener lured me into a shed beside our house, threw me onto a table, and raped me.   Afterwards, he demanded I tell no one.  But I had to tell Essie.  No doubt fearful for her job, afraid of my mother, and perhaps afraid of the white perpetrator still on the premises, Essie told me she would keep it secret.  And secret it remained, tearing like buried shrapnel in my psyche, until my late 20s.  In retrospect, I had three choices.  I could have become a perpetrator myself, wrestled myself to exhaustion or suicide, or resolved to heal.  At the time, I only knew that I would lose my fresh marriage to the love of my life — and probably every love after that — if I did not somehow change.  So I spent the next year aiming straight at the nameless thing I dreaded most, determined to beat down the locked door behind which it lay.  The effort at times seemed suicidal, but once I open the door to find only my damaged self, I felt a profound and lasting change.  Because I changed, I am still married, am a father, and have both a career and a creative practice not streaked with shame.

As part of my recovery, I catalogued the concentric emotions I had been carrying for a quarter century.  The pain of the assault lay at the core.  Next, the shame that led Essie — and me — to conceal it, a choice causing greater lasting harm than the rape itself.  Next was fear, mine and Essie’s, of what lay beneath.  Next crusted a thick shell of anger, which I came to understand as healthy and a source of power.  Finally, a topcoat of sanctimonious politics that allowed me to disavow any of the emotions that lay beneath.  It was a classic map of unhealed trauma, sealed and preserved in denial.

Years later I read Blanche’s memoir, and I began to question whether my traumatic geography might resemble my what my family went through, both in the unknown era before the Civil War and in the aftermath Blanche recounted.  I noticed that, in the 225 pages of her manuscript, the word “slavery” never appears.   If slavery was indeed the primary moral trauma, the pain and shame of it remained hidden, and all Blanche could perceive in 1900 was fear, anger, a fierce desire to forget, and a vain hope that obsolete social codes could help them avoid the triggers of what lay unnamed, beneath.

Recently, I saw “12 Years a Slave.”  After the culminating whipping scene, all I could feel was the different layers of pain in that primal moment, for both slaveholder and slave, perpetrator and victim.  In the lobby afterwards, I simply wept.  Ten feet away stood an African-American woman my age, her face opaque.   She had walked out of the film during that scene and was waiting for her husband.  Neither of us spoke.

I cannot speak for others, and the story above is mine alone.  But I believe there is such a thing as a collective psyche that clusters and persist around a collective trauma, which persists across generations, and which does not heal unless active efforts are made to work through the emotions around it.  Part of the difficulty of such work is that we experience this collective trauma from many different angles.  Slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath remain the deepest traumas of our nation’s history.  As I observe the emotions that events in Ferguson have awakened, it appears to me that many of us are caught in the swirl of that collective trauma.  Some of us cling to the denial of an amnesiac present, while others seem caged in a perpetual past.  I don’t believe the political sanctimony justifying either of these choices will do us any good.  Nor are we likely to progress by focusing solely on each other’s anger, which to some is righteous and to others is simply destructive, but in either case is likely the crust of some deeper core.  I fear that, until we find and feel our respective pieces of that core, we will remain like Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, struggling for our lives to gain control over a trigger that was cocked in the distant past.