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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.

The Rapists Among Us

~ John ~ Leave a comment

“Were you ever raped?”

It was a terrible thing to shout from the back of the middle-school auditorium to the beleaguered spokeswoman trying to calm a frightened and angry crowd, assembled in response to the notification that “sexually violent predator” Christopher Lawyer has been released back into Boulder.  But the question touched on an emotional reality missing from the various official efforts to reassure us that his current residence at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless is the least bad option available.  Under the fear, dancing like electricity down the crowded aisles, breathed something heavier: some members of the audience themselves survived sexual assault.

I’m one of them.  One summer afternoon in 1966, I was raped by a man who worked for my family.  Hurt, scared, and ashamed, I never told my parents. The man quickly disappeared and was never confronted or caught.  I can only assume he assaulted other kids.  I was five.

That day privately but profoundly configured parts of my life, as the experience of rape at any age will do.

Thus, the label “sexually violent predator” gets my attention.  But the work I’ve done to reconstruct my own history and heal my own trauma makes me especially aware that Mr. Lawyer is not simply a “predator”. He is a human being. Certainly complex — probably damaged, probably ill, hopefully struggling with remorse for a crime beyond cruelty. Assuming the best of him, he is no longer a rapist-in-waiting, but a man wanting a chance to begin anew.  Assuming the worst, he will always be, as his label declares, a violent predator.  The State of Colorado has put him through a process indicating the former.  The community fears the latter.  Like many, I do not understand his release.

Where do we go from here?  The hard choice is the right one: we should accept him.  By accept, I do not mean to forgive, or condone, or consider him “OK”.  I do mean that we should realize, or remember, a few things.

First, beyond the danger he may individually pose, Mr. Lawyer’s presence among us symbolizes a more diffuse monstrosity that no public meeting can expel.  The urge to rape blights the souls of men in many stations of society.  It may stem from their own victimization, from mental illness, or from something else we helplessly call “evil’.  Some rapists are sociopaths and perpetrate without qualm or remorse.  Others battle against their secret selves with outward achievement and selflessness.  Some rapists are homeless.  Others are Ralphie-handlers, choirboys, star athletes, teachers or priests, whose cases we find “inexplicable.”  Almost none announce in advance that they are “predators.”  We can try to cast Mr. Lawyer and his label from our midst.  But the rapists among us – and the sicknesses they carry — remain.

Second, the presenters at the community meeting were right: it is better to have Mr. Lawyer in a known location, with his ankle-monitor charged and his check-in bed established, than it is to have him calling in every night from a payphone at an intersection, only to vanish.  That’s what one of Boulder’s two other sexually violent predators currently does.  Yes, we do have two others, and one of them is homeless, location unknown.  I find that scarier than Mr. Lawyer’s situation, and yet there’s no uproar about it at all.

Third, he is a human being, and he has a legal right to exist. Each of us has the right to decide, based on our own history, how we feel about him today.  But personal feelings should not dictate whom we include within our legal community.  Christopher Lawyer is from here, and the law decrees that upon his release from custody he be returned here.  A person whom the state has granted liberty has the right to exercise it, and a community that respects human rights should respect the rights of all.  All means all.

I consider how I will feel, having published this, if Mr. Lawyer rapes again.  The thought sickens me.  I think of people who work in law enforcement and criminal justice, who face such prospects every day.  In Mr. Lawyer’s mugshot, he is smiling.  Perhaps it’s the vacant grin of a sociopath.  Perhaps he’s hoping that a smile will persuade us that he’s committed to no longer being the person his label proclaims.  Either way, he’s embarked on a journey back into the world.  For all our sakes, I wish him success.

The Art of Storytelling

~ John ~ Leave a comment

For Boulder filmmakers, last Monday was New Years’ Day — the day after the biggest and best celebration of the year, hosted by impresarios extraordinaires Robin and Kathy Beeck.  This year’s Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) was their latest annual triumph, turning Boulder into an ever-enlarging red dot on the world filmmaking map (disclosure: I edited one of the documentaries screened).  BIFF’s roster served a delicious elixir of cosmopolitan entertainment and social awareness. We all got smashed.

Hopefully it’s not amiss, as we nurse our happy hangovers, to reflect on the stories we tell and consume at such festivals.  We believe, as makers and watchers, that film is an agent for social change.  Films flagged as “call2action” at BIFF featured talkbacks at which local activists brainstormed with the audience to translate message into movement.  At several such gatherings, a participant would ask: how can we get Trump to watch this film?  As if the simple act of watching would change his mind.

Of course, we know it wouldn’t.  But beyond a little healthy reality-check, it’s appropriate to ask: what is the power of our craft?  Is there a trade-off between telling stories that open others’ eyes and ones that simply make ourselves feel more righteous?  Are the objectives of persuasion and entertainment aligned or in tension?  I worry that it’s the latter – that if our narratives entertain by congratulating us and preaching to others, instead of challenging us and connecting with others, we end up diminishing our power to accomplish the social change to which our projects aspire.

Take for example the festival’s runaway favorite film, “Chasing Coral” — a vitally important movie that won the Audience Award at Sundance as well as three awards at BIFF.  It follows a team of filmmakers racing to document, through time-lapse videography, a cataclysmic “mass bleaching” event in 2016 that killed 22% of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef due to rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change.  The images they took, shown in the last fifteen minutes of the film, devastate the viewer.  The scope of this silent catastrophe is beyond words, and the “Chasing Coral” team has done an inestimable service in capturing it.

Yet the 75 preceding minutes focus heavily on the exploits of attractive, white Boulderites building gadgets, making witty repartee, jetting to exotic locales and strapping on adventure gear.  It’s “The Amazing Race” for the Patagonia set.  Of course Sundancers and BIFFers love it, because it’s all about us, or who we fancy ourselves to be.

And we, almost to a person, already understand and agree with the film’s central thesis that climate change is killing corals worldwide.  Indeed, the film pretty much assumes this viewer knowledge and orientation from the opening frame.  The first character it introduces is a former advertising executive who has been a scuba diver for many years (i.e., a very wealthy person) and who has decided to leave corporate advertising and dedicate himself to publicizing the plight of climate-caused coral death. The film assumes viewers will cheer this choice without question or exploration.

It is only at the end of the film, after the devastating time-lapse images, that the film lays out the science of CO2 loading of the atmosphere that causes warming of the oceans, and makes the connection to fossil fuels.  And it does so through a montage of talking-head scientists who lecture nearly to the point of scolding.

Let’s rewind for a minute.  Place yourself in the shoes of a person who is not from Boulder and does not particularly like Boulderites or Sundancers.  A person, more importantly, who thinks the theory of fossil fuel-induced climate change may be a hoax, and that ocean warming may be the result of natural cycles.  Does “Chasing Coral” change your mind?  My worry is that you are so alienated by the assumed politics and liberal cultural markers of the first half-hour that you will never get to the denouement.   You will turn away, just as I do when I try to watch a documentary by Dinesh D’Souza or a debate on Fox News.  If I were watching a documentary on abortion that opened on a group of filmmakers on a mission to “expose abortionists”, I’d have a hard time not immediately turning the channel, even if the film had more nuanced content later on.   I can’t abide the cover, so I never read the book.

It’s not just a problem for filmmakers.  We all struggle to persuade others across political and cultural divides.  We often try to do so by pointing at ourselves – our superior style, education, numerosity, power.   In bygone days, we could efface ourselves and “let the facts speak for themselves” – that is, back when facts were, well, facts.  Now, it’s undeniably harder.  I still believe in the power of an honestly-told story – but sometimes the teller needs to get out of the way.