Escalation/De-Escalation

 

I escaped my hometown of Evanston IL for a few days, with two adult children and four small dogs in tow.  My thoughts and emotions have been escalating dangerously in the past few weeks.  On the personal front, my sister-in-law died, leaving my infirm brother broken-hearted and bereft.  One of my adult kids spent a week in the hospital to get major depression under control (it seems to have worked, thank goodness).  I am disconnected from my gang of friends and acquaintences due to the on-going pandemic.  I am facing a minor surgical procedure that it is causing me a bit of anxiety.  But hey - I am a very lucky guy overall.  I have a safe home, plenty of resources and a loving family.  Lots of people would love to swap their problems for my problems.

Outside of my personal circle, things have been much worse.  Jacob Blake was shot in Kenosha - weird location for this violence; we used to call it "Kenoplace." Jacob has deep ties to Evanston.  His family includes  prominent local civil rights activists and he went to Evanston Township High School (he graduated one year before my middle kid, Andy).  The unrest in Kenosha is heart-breaking and predictable.  It is an added agony, hard on the heels of another outbreak of anger and looting on Michigan Avenue in Chicago a couple of weeks ago and the George Floyd protests earler in the summer.  So yeah, I have bailed to Galena IL to run away from all of it, to hopefully calm down a little and clear my head.  I might be a coward, but here I am.

Escalation is happening every day on almost every level.  Something awful happens, people take action (i.e. demonstrate, break things, etc.), there is a disproportionate response, which leads to more escalation, and the cycle is launched.  The noise attracts other actors (counter-demonstrators, armed civilians, multiple groups of security forces, allies of the original demonstrators, etc.) and soon we have chaos.  What is remarkable to me is that our illegitimate president is totally unwilling to defuse things.  He throws gas on any fire that he think will help him get re-elected.  

If a guy cuts me off in traffic these days, I might get irritated but I let it go.  Not long ago, I would have laid on my horn, flipped the bird, rolled down the window to cuss the guy out at the next stoplight and generally acted like an asshole.  The guy that cut me off might have responded in kind.  If we had firearms, one of us might have pulled them and someone could be dead.  It took me way too long to realize that my reactions made things worse.  By refusing to escalate, everyone is safe.  I can't control someone from cutting me off in traffic, but I can control how I react.

This is not the same as reacting to yet another criminal shooting by a police officer, but the underlying theory applies.  If the authorities want to preserve calm, they have to be calm.  This seems to be impossible for most police organizations to pull off.  And Trump loves the conflict and yells "Law and Order" while escalating at every opportunity.

I have no idea where current events might be taking us, but I have a feeling that we won't get to a more peaceful place by more escalation.  De-escalation does not mean surrender!! I think that the most effective form of resistance is voting and removing the elected officials that want to divide us - no matter where they reside in the political landscape.

N.K. Jemisin - I am late to realize her greatness

 

I am a SciFi/Fantasy nerd.  Star Trek, Star Wars, Ursula K. LeGuin, Heinlien, Asimov, Dune, Lord of the Rings - I love all that shit.  My son knows this about me.  About six weeks go, he said, "Hey have you read N.K Jemison?"  I had not.  Shame, shame shame on me.

I bought The Broken Earth trilogy.  It sat on my kitchen table for a couple of weeks. I am a linear reader - I focus on one book at a time.  I was wading through a light-weight beach book that was occassionally funny but insubstantial.  NKJ had to wait until I was done with that trifle.  I picked up the first book of the trilogy, "The Fifth Season," three days ago.  I just finished it.  I inhaled the 468 page quickly; I could have binged it in a day but I had a life to live, unfortuately.

I am late to realize N.K. Jemison's greatness. I won't talk about the book - if you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and get it today!  What I will say is that this author has constructed an alternative reality that is incredibly rich with detail and emotional weight.  Her life shapes how she thinks about science fiction and fantasy.  That world is still dominated by one demographic (yup, white males). She has pumped out the best work in this genre that I have read in years because she is outside of that demographic.  

Many others recognized her towering creativity years ago (three Hugo Awards in a row, for each book in the Broken Earth Trilogy!!!).  I add my puny voice to the chorus of priaise.  I know how I will be spending the next few weeks - reading her entire bibliography.

My Home Town

 

There is a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is a paragon of diversity.  According to the 2010 census, the town is 23.3% White, 10.7% Black, 27.3% Hispanic/Latinx, 34.5% Asian and 6.6% multi-racial. I suspect that it will be even more mixed when the 2020 census is tallied up.  The name of the town is San Leandro; it is just south of Oakland in the East Bay.

It was once a paragon of racism.  I know, because I grew up there during that phase of San Leandro’s existence.

Historians estimate that the first humans arrived in the San Leandro area about 5,000 years ago.  It was a hospitable environment, on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay.  There were lots of food sources – the bay was full of seafood and marine mammals; the mild climate was friendly to edible plants and edible wildlife.  The Ohlone people lived in the East Bay Area – peaceful hunter-gatherers.  They were oppressed when the Spanish colonists arrived and were slaughtered by state government authorities when California entered the Union in 1850.  This was another chapter in the genocide of Native peoples in North America.  Prior to the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in the late 18^th  Century, there were about 300,000 Native people in California.  By 1900, the number had dropped to 16,000.

I grew up in San Leandro from the mid-50’s to the early ‘70’s.  During that timeframe, only White people lived there (with a smattering of Asians and Hispanics).  It was about 99% White.  Of course, this wasn’t an accident.  The city to the north, Oakland, was about 50% Black and the city of San Leandro did everything possible to keep the Black folks out.  The city had restrictive covenants for decades, which made it illegal to sell or rent housing to Black people.  When those restrictions were declared unconstitutional, the system became informal – red-lining/steering by realtors, “gentlemen’s agreements,” collusion on the part of the 10 homeowner associations in the town, etc.  There was one Black person at Pacific High School when I was there from 1969 through 1972.  I felt sorry for that girl.

In the Bay Area, San Leandro was well-known for its in-your-face racism.  The Black folks in Oakland called it “Klan Leandro,” and they were afraid to go there.  When a Black family moved to the town in 1980, someone actually burned a cross on their front lawn. San Leandro was the Alabama of the liberal Bay Area.  Brian Copeland wrote an excellent one-man play and a book about being one of the few Black kids in San Leandro in the early 1970’s – he arrived as I was leaving.

Not surprisingly, San Leandro attracted a certain type of resident when I was a kid.  Most folks were lower middle class.  There were many transplants from the American South.  One of these folks was my father, a Tennessee native who worked as a payroll clerk at a food warehouse.  My dad was a stone-cold bigot.  He was quiet about it, but it was part of his heart and soul.  He was raised to see Black people as inferior and he never let go of that twisted worldview.  There were many things I disliked about my father, but his racism was at the top of the list. He has been dead for almost 30 years, and I understand now that he did the best he could given his upbringing and mental health issues.

I was a 1960’s hippie kid, a “peace and love” knucklehead.  I didn’t know any Black people, but I loved their music.  I figured they must be superior people if they could produce jazz and R&B. I moved to Berkeley to attend college and ultimately ended up in Evanston IL. Evanston has also struggled with racism but has a history of diversity. Black people have lived in the town since the early 19^th century.

So what’s my point?  I look at San Leandro today and realize that the old system of oppression has broken down, but aspects of it are alive and well.  The police killed a Black man in the town recently – six weeks before the murder of George Floyd, San Leandro police shot and killed Steven Taylor, a Black man in the middle of a mental health crisis at a Walmart.  There is more -  San Leandro also had some of the worst looting in the nation during the unrest over the George Floyd murder.   San Leandro has its problems, but red-lining isn’t one of them anymore. 

There is still tons of work to do all over our country, but remembering some of this local history can be a source of hope.  It is bad now, but it has been worse.  Things can get better. Someday we might even recognize that we are all human beings and make amends for past injustices.