The View from My Window

    I quit Facebook in part because I hoped it would help turn down my political temperature, which had been on the verge of reaching a boil. And then the guns began to fire — guns fired by cops, a gun fired at cops. I suppose, in one respect, it worked, because I have been able to follow the events without the need intensely to discuss them; I know what happened, I know what I think, and I suspect I know what’s being said by a certain set of American society, but I’ve prevented myself from being subjected to it, for the most part. I’m vaguely aware that there are some who are declaring that a race war has begun. I’m sure that some believe that the violence between police and the policed — especially the black policed — has become a war, too. But I haven’t seen the words on the page, and somehow the imagination makes me less angry than the fact.

    What worries me, though, is even though I’ve disengaged with the online discussion of the week’s events, my head is still populated with the voices of people that I’ve come to think of, in no uncertain terms, as enemies. They’re angry at me, for being a coastal elite, for being a neoliberal sellout, for being an avatar of white guilt, for trying to take their guns away, for looking down my nose when we speak, for not giving a shit what happens between the Snake and the Allegheny? It’s nothing to how angry I can become at them. I fantasize about committing violence against a faceless other who sometimes seems to blame for society’s ills. That this other is, to me, a bunch of white people who voted for tax cutters and police pushers, rather than a bunch of Mexican immigrants or urban black people, doesn’t change the fact that I default to the same thinking that I find so objectionable in others, just with the symbols changed. If we substituted something racially neutral for the words white and black, something politically neutral for the words conservative and liberal, then you can see that the logical operations I’m performing are no different. It disturbs me that my instincts run in such recognizably dangerous patterns.

    Look, if you’ve read this blog, you know what I think, though I suppose I should lay it out.

(1) First and foremost, that the Dallas shooter was an insane person whose motivations were dressed in the clothing of race war but were not caused by the actions of Black Lives Matter or other social justice movements.

(2) That the problem of gun violence is a problem of guns far more than it is a problem of violence.

(3) That there is and should be no war between races, or between any specific race and the police.

(4) That if such a war were to exist, the police and the people who empowered them to kill fired the first shots.

(5) But that “who fired the first shots” is a natural but destructive worry that only perpetuates violence and makes it feel infinite and inevitable — cf Israel & Palestine, Ireland & the United Kingdom, Pakistan & India.

(6) That these problems are soluble. France and Germany had war for hundreds of years, including two wars far more destructive than almost anybody alive today can truly fathom.

(7) That openness and space-sharing is as close as we have to a solution.

(8) That acclimation, rather than assimilation, should be the goal.

    And I can write these things, and they sound good, upstanding, right, and (let’s face it) nice; but still I have my tribe — the tribe of the urban, the left, the multiculty, the socialist, the skeptical, etc — and when my tribe is threatened I am reduced to just another slavering example of homo sapiens sapiens, troubled by difference, angry, potentially dangerous if threatened. I am, after all, a person, and sometimes that’s not such a good thing.

    This has been a hard few years. I think I know where the blame lies. But so what if I do, if all I do with blame is turn friends into enemies, humans into nonhumans, strangers into targets?