Summer Parker County Fair Moon
Dallas. Sniper shootings of police officers. With definite links to Minnesota. A downward spiral, a non-virtuous circle. Shootings begetting shootings. In effect now open warfare. I feel sad, mad. Guns, damn it. Guns. I’ve cited the statistics. They’re easily available and they show the peculiar American fascination with violence and firearms. We are outliers from a norm we should yearn to embrace.
A fragile link exists between public support and government sanctioned coercion. We give our military the right to blow things up and kill people. We give our legal system the right to imprison law breakers. We define the laws, through our legislators and city council members. We give our police guns and allow them to take people out of the common life to incarceration. But when the use of these coercive powers becomes suspect to the people at large then a social upheaval can result.
The American Revolution and the Civil War were both fought by combatants convinced that the current regime’s coercive powers had slipped well beyond the legitimate. In China the Emperor ruled by the mandate of heaven. If the people lost faith in their emperor, he lost the mandate of heaven and rebellion ensued.
The compact between US police forces and the communities they’re sworn to protect has become frayed. The use of coercive force, especially deadly force, against members of African-American communities has become a steady drumbeat, a staccato loud enough to chip away faith in police powers. When the tactical use of violence continues without cease, and when the proportion of minority American prisoners continues to increase, then the criminal justice system may lose, may have already lost among the minority communities, the mandate of heaven. When that happens, rebellion will follow.
And, to add a match to the gasoline, the shooter in Dallas died at the pincers of a robot, pincers holding a bomb. This is too much like a domestic drone attack. Too impersonal. Too callous. It is the very opposite of the kind of response required. The fear, justified in my opinion, is that the police no longer view African-Americans as citizens, perhaps not even as people. Using robots reinforces both the depersonalization of citizen/police encounters and the fear of that depersonalization already so evident in our country.
