murder Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Charleston

It is difficult to acknowledge that racism still exists in the “post-racial” United States,

Once and future blogger New York Erratic asked a timely question:

Was the attack at the South Carolina church terrorism?

OK, I guess I should answer that. But I have to work through the whole incident, because, save for the school shootings in Newtown, CT in December 2012, the story of nine people murdered in their CHURCH for being BLACK has overwhelmed me more than any other story not involving me personally in over a decade.

Actually, I tried greatly not to write about it at all, but here’s the thing: I spent the first 72 hours after hearing about the event alternating between tears and rage. While putting down my thoughts doesn’t solve the problem, it helps ME try to make sense of the senselessness.

I grew up in an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Zion Church, an offshoot of the AME church that was targeted. There might not have been an AME church at all had it not been for the racism of the Methodist church back in the 1780s – a trait no doubt shared by other churches.

I belonged to a United Methodist (UM) church in the 1980s and 1990s when there was a desire on the part of the shrinking Methodist connection to create a Pan Methodist union. After all, if Sunday morning was the “most segregated time of the week,” ought the church be a reconciling agent? The AME and AMEZ are members of the connection, but the merger that some UM members wanted at the time I don’t think is the cards. The black church has quite often been at the forefront of social change, and its white allies more than occasionally were slow off the mark.

Those folks in Charleston, at the Emanuel AME Church, I knew them. I don’t mean personally. But I understood how they operated. The church community surely celebrated their recent college graduate, Tywanza Sanders, 26. They had pride in their professionals, such as high school coach/teacher Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, and librarian Cynthia Hurd, 54, whose name will appear on a local library branch. But they also respected the hard-working folks such as custodian Ethel Lance, 70. They honored the wisdom of their older members, such as Susie Jackson, 87.

DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, was a minister at the church, while Daniel Simmons, 74, was a retired pastor. Myra Thompson, 59, received her license to the ministry the VERY NIGHT SHE WAS KILLED. And lead pastor Clementa Pinckney, 41, was not only preaching since he was 13, but was also the youngest African American state legislator in South Carolina’s history, elected to the S.C. House of Representatives in 1996, at the age of 23, and to the state senate four years later.

Once the story goes from “nine people murdered in a church” – the headline partially blocked in the Charleston paper by a gun ad – to those particular individuals killed, there’s a new wave of grief. Watching the relatives of the family members forgive Dylann Roof was extraordinary, and it brought me to tears yet again.

Thus, when certain people started saying what I can only describe as stupid stuff regarding their deaths, I became infuriated.

Probably most toxic: NRA board member Charles Cotton blamed Clementa Pinckney, a victim of the shooting, for his own death and the deaths of the others, because “as a state senator, Pinckney supported tougher gun regulations and opposed a bill that would have allowed people to carry concealed guns in churches.”

Another thread is that the nine people shot multiple times was NOT about racism, despite a wealth of evidence, from Roof himself to the contrary. Dylann Roof wrote in what appears to be his manifesto, filled with pictures of him with the Confederate battle flag:

“I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

The resistance to acknowledging that this is racism – hey, Roof has at least one black friend! – is, I suspect, because it is difficult to acknowledge that racism still exists in the “post-racial” United States, especially in one so young, 21. Many had comforted themselves to think the old segregationists would eventually die off, and that equality would be achieved. Frankly, I never quite believed that, though I don’t know if that was a function of cynicism or realism.

Speaking of that Confederate flag, I’ve listened, REALLY listened to the argument that the flag symbolizes “Southern heritage” and “tradition,” and I even believe that some of the people spouting this really mean it. But whose heritage? It does not, and will never, represent black Americans. It is a reminder of an oppressive system designed to maintain wealth by owning human beings. And subsequent to the Civil War, it’s been used as a symbol to incite terror, mostly on black people.

Yes, I support removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, from the design of the Mississippi state flag, and from other government functions. Obviously, I am pleased that South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has reversed her position and called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the grounds of the state Capitol.

As Ta-Nahisi Coates put it, “Take down the flag. Take it down now. Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.”

This is interesting: in June 2015, in the case of Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., black conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas provided the decisive vote to allow the state of Texas to refuse to print a specialty license plate bearing the much-loved and hated Confederate battle flag.

Yet, I don’t have confidence that banishing the symbol to museums will rectify the racism that, for so many, it represents. The Wall Street Journal says institutionalized racism no longer exists in Charleston, a dubious claim to say the least, given the death of Walter Scott in April 2015; filmed evidence suggests he was unarmed and shot in the back by a policeman.

My great fear is that all the talking points will be rebutted and nothing will change. President Obama talks about “someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” and it becomes “Obama’s trying to take our guns.”

If the massacre in Charleston – or any number of similar events in recent U.S. history- had been committed by a foreign invader, we would practically go to war. “How many billions will we spend fighting the terrorist organization known as institutionalized racism? How many American lives are we willing to risk to protect America?”

So yes, NYE, it was a terrorist act. Per the FBI, the definition of “domestic terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law [CHECK];
Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; [CHECK] and
Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. [CHECK]

Americans, on American soil, are being radicalized by ISIS to carry out threats against police and other domestic targets. Likewise, Dylann Roof, who had to repeat the ninth grade, had been radicalized by right-wing, white supremacist rhetoric, probably online as well.

It’s also possible that he is crazy or evil or the Manchurian Candidate. Truth is, I don’t much care what they label it. BTW, if you haven’t seen it, watch ‘I got nothin’ for you’: An emotional Jon Stewart puts the jokes aside to discuss racism in America.

One last thing: I tend to agree with Larry Wilmore about the religious aspect of this. “Four black girls were murdered in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Back then, no one pretended to wonder what the motivation was. If you tried to say it was about religion, even the perpetrators back then would have corrected you.”

If anyone would like to help the families of the shooting victims, the City of Charleston has set up the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund to help the families pay for funerals for their loved ones, counseling services, and other needs as they continue to heal from the tragedy.

You can give to the fund at its website, http://www.motheremanuelhopefund.com.

Or by mailing a donation to:
Mother Emanuel Hope Fund
c/o City of Charleston
P.O. Box 304
Charleston, SC 29402

Reality hits hard (with apologies to fillyjonk)

One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined.

The blogger fillyjonk wrote on December 15: ” I dunno. Locally and globally, sad and difficult stuff.” She was SO right.

*Her post began: “Someone took hostages in Sydney. In a Lindt chocolate shop.” Unfortunately, that ended with two of the hostages being killed, along with the gunman.

*About the same time, I’m listening to this story of a guy killing his ex-wife and five of his ex-in-laws at three different places in Montgomery County, PA, just north of Philadelphia, before turning the gun on himself. Worst of all, I awaken the next morning to the news of 140+ people murdered by the Taliban in western Pakistan, most of them children.

*Locally, and more recently, there was an Amber alert for a five-year-old boy near around here, then canceled 10 hours later when the boy’s body was discovered. The abduction story was a crock; his 19 y.o. cousin has been arrested. Meanwhile, eight children were slaughtered in Cairns, Australia.

*The Daughter complained of sharp pain on her left side, and we went to the ER at Albany Med on Saturday night, December 13. We were there from 8:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., and bed after 3 a.m. I SO don’t do 3 a.m. well anymore. Then I went to church in the morning. I’ve been on fumes all week.

*She has some infection in or around her kidneys, and she has to take an antibiotic. But halfway through the regimen, the hospital calls to say that the type of infection she has is resistant to the antibiotic she has been taking, so she needs to take a DIFFERENT one and start the regimen all over.

*The illness meant that I missed two days of work, one full day, and two half days, which feels actually worse than two full days because my work rhythm is off. I was going to go to a luncheon to honor people at SUNY Central who had reached milestone anniversaries. (Because we were switched to SUNY Albany for a time, both a colleague and I missed both our 15th and 20th-anniversary luncheons.) But I missed it, seeing my boss, a former colleague, and two long-time friends get awarded. Worse, the ticket I bought ($30) went to waste because we were so shorthanded. Because…

*Our office secretary left on November 5, so we – well mostly a library colleague and I – have been answering the main phones. One of our library colleagues, Amelia, had a baby at the end of November, which is lovely, of course, but she’s out on maternity leave until late February. So when one (OR MORE) of the five, currently four, librarians is out, it becomes a strain on the system. There were just two of us two Thursdays ago (snow and the flu kept the other two at home), and two on the day of the luncheon.

We usually have a week’s turnaround on the reference queue but, currently, it’s about 10 days. This will EVENTUALLY rectify itself as the demand slackens during the holidays, but looking at the list of questions undone is depressing and frustrating. And one of the librarians will be away for a week around Christmas.

*One of our choir members has been away much of the year getting treatment for cancer in Arizona. My mother’s first cousin Robert is now on dialysis. And while I didn’t know them, I mourn the loss of my friend Steve Bissette’s parents, his father in late October, and his mother in mid-December.

*We have lost our custodian at church a few weeks ago. The Wife chairs the Administration Committee until the end of the year, so this is a task that involves meetings, et al.

*All this busyness has made it difficult to concentrate on Christmas shopping. One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined; what I didn’t notice in the pile of mail unread is that the bank had pulled one card as compromised and replaced it with another.

*Of course, it’s been havoc on blogging. I have a daily blog and write one post every two days. It’s not a lack of topics, it’s a lack of time. This will explain, in part, an increase in typos.

*I’ve had a deficit in not only sleep but good dietary habits and housecleaning effort. The house is messier than even my relatively low standards can bear. Where IS my cellphone? It’s in the bedroom, SOMEWHERE.

So, happy holidays, everyone. I’m told it gets better; sure hope so.

A declaration of gun independence

It’s really hard to be a good guy with a gun.

In my annual (at least) reading of the Declaration of Independence, I have been thinking a lot about this section:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

There’s a movement of people in the United States that seem to think the law, the government is SO oppressive that it does not apply to them. Notably of late, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy has been grazing his cattle on federal lands for the last twenty years while refusing to pay grazing fees, because he doesn’t recognize the federal government. “The feds ordered Bundy to pay the fees he owed, ordered him to get his cattle off the publicly-owned property and let him know when they would be coming to enforce these orders in person… Between the end of March and April 10th, Bundy supporters whipped each other into a frenzy on social media, grabbed their AR-15s and AK-47s, and swooped down on the Bundy ranch to defend their newest freeloading patriot hero from the federal usurpers of the Bureau of Land Management.”

It appeared that at least some of the Bundy supporters were looking for the federal government to shoot, so they could shoot back and claim it was another Ruby Ridge or Waco. Instead, the feds walked away. FOX News embraced Bundy’s criminal activity, Because Freedom, until Bundy’s racist rants, and I’m STILL at a loss to understand their justification. Then again, I may be looking for the rational when it is not to be found.

I would not be surprised if some of the Bundy supporters were part of the Sovereign Citizens Movement, people who “believe that they — not judges, juries, law enforcement or elected officials — get to decide which laws to obey and which to ignore.”

Also, you have your folks who believe that the Second Amendment of the Constitution means that one has the right to terrorize others by carrying their large weapons around with them. In a climate of regular school shootings – though some of them apparently don’t count – this seems ill-advised. Even the National Rifle Association said this behavior was “downright weird” until the backlash forced them to retreat from that position.

The cartoon How to Tell the Difference Between an Open-Carry Patriot and a Deranged Killer was so good I reposted it on Facebook, to great response. If you were someone with mayhem on your mind, wouldn’t you shoot the Open Carry people first?

The spokesman for NRA, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, (in)famously said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” This was in response to the Newtown, CT tragedy when 20 children and six adults died in December 2012.

But a recent article in Gawker put factors about the use of even a concealed gun succinctly: It’s Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun. The guy who tried to stop Jerad Miller, one of the murderers of two Las Vegas police officers was instead killed by that murderer’s wife, Amanda. The Millers’ actions were fueled by anti-government rage.

One of the Gawker commenters added:

What are the chances of [a] situation being one in which you can safely draw your weapon (as defined by a decreased likelihood of hitting an uninvolved civilian, or drawing attention to the uninvolved civilians around you while drawing your gun, or mistaking another “good guy with a gun” for the perpetrator, or being mistaken by the cops as perpetrator)?

The Las Vegas murderers, not incidentally, were supporters of rancher Bundy.

I certainly have my issues with the government overreach – and that is probably its own post – but the behaviors described here, couched in patriotic language, make me feel most unsettled, and not particularly free.

Here’s a great response, though: Texas musicians are planning to answer… Open Carry Texas… These music lovers plan to exercise their right to openly carry guitars on July 4th.

Well, maybe not ALL people, but…

How is it that rape and sexual assault is so common on college campuses and in the nation’s military?

Ken Screven was, according to the Times Union newspaper’s Chris Churchill, “the most recognizable black person here in one of the nation’s whitest metropolitan areas,” i.e., Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY, for most of his 34 years as a now-retired television reporter. Having lived here for most of this period, I daresay Churchill was right. Screven even covered a couple of stories I was involved with, notably the January 1985 Rock for Raoul benefit, honoring the late Albany cartoonist/FantaCo employee/my friend Raoul Vezina.

I had this, literally, a nodding acquaintance with Screven when I’d see him in Albany’s Center Square, sort of the curse someone who has met a LOT of people (Ken) go through. We’ve more recently become Facebook friends, sometime after he became a blogger for the Times Union website, as I am.

Churchill reported: “Cellphone footage of the [Arbor Hill street brawl among black teens]… has circulated widely by now. Screven saw it shortly after it happened — on Facebook — and decided it would be provocative material for [his] blog… So he posted it, along with his reaction.”

Part of the narrative was that Screven found “the fight troubling — and, as an African-American, embarrassing.” And I totally GOT that, because I tend to feel that way. My late father most assuredly did.

Churchill noted that he doesn’t feel embarrassed by the stupid things white people do – such as the Kegs and Eggs riot of 2011 in Albany – and I’m sure that is true. Screven noted, “It just takes one black person to do one bad thing and the whole culture is demonized… The white culture is going to say, ‘There they go again.'”

Churchill is technically correct when he suggests that “not the entire white culture” reacts that way. It happens often enough, though, that this cartoon by Keith Knight feels very true, particularly the comparison between a misguided youth and a thug.

I remember reading a black columnist back in December 1993 – William Raspberry, perhaps? – talking about how much he, and black people he knew, hoped that the Long Island Railroad massacre shooter was not black. Of course, he was.

In an interesting variation, I’m now seeing this narrative, after the recent shootings near Santa Barbara, California, about some men feeling a sense of entitlement when it comes to access to women’s bodies. #NotAllMen, the Twitter hashtag reads; some guys are decent, sensitive souls who fight sexism with every fiber of their being, and surely that is true. We should not castigate an entire gender, because isn’t that prejudiced?

Yet #YesAllWomen resonates as true. I know a strong, independent, accomplished, married woman who has recently noted: “an innate instinct of self-protection around, yes, most men learned very early.” Women give out wrong phone numbers, tell guys they have a boyfriend (this piece notwithstanding), avoid eye contact with men lest they think you’re “interested.” You don’t even have to be in conversation with a guy; the drive-by schmucks are alive and well.

How is it that rape and sexual assault are so common on college campuses and in the nation’s military? Why are women demanding the same access to contraceptives as men do to Viagra met with slut-shaming? How is it that “gun extremists” target women with spitting, stalking, and threats of rape?

What has prompted someone to initiate a petition to stop sexual harassment at the San Diego Comic-Con and to create a formal anti-harassment policy, a document I signed, BTW? Maybe it’s Yes, All Men? Or as Louis CK put it, “There is no greater threat to women than men.”

No, most men are not rapists, or deadbeat dads, or mass murders. But almost all mass murders are men, and, in the United States, white men at that. Maybe that’s a good thing, because, perhaps, the situation will spark enough concern and outrage to aid in dealing with mental health issues, and controlling the sale of guns to people who are deranged. Nah, I’m just messing with you; we’ll have the same damn conversation after the next massacre.

The Kitty Genovese narrative largely debunked

Read the New Yorker article about the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder, and you will recognize that the New York Times story of the time had done a grand disservice to our views of the cities, especially NYC.

If you were old enough – and I was – the name of Kitty Genovese was a name you knew. Not just that she was a murder victim in Queens, NYC, stabbed to death on March 13, 1964, “one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year,” but that the apparent indifference to her plight by over three dozen “witnesses” spoke volumes about the apathetic nature of a segment of American life:

…the gist of the [New York Times] piece lent itself perfectly to Sunday sermons about a malaise encompassing all of us. It was a way of processing anxieties about the anonymity of urban life, about the breakdown of the restrictive but reassuring social conventions of the fifties, and, less directly, about racial unrest, the Kennedy assassination, and even the Holocaust, which was only beginning to be widely discussed, and which seemed to represent on a grand scale the phenomenon that one expert on the Genovese case calls Bad Samaritanism.

Except that the narrative was largely untrue. Not that her murder was not horrific, but read the New Yorker article, and you will recognize that the story had done a grand disservice to our views of the cities, especially The City.

The Kitty Genovese narrative – I was 11 at the time – terrified me. It fit into a narrative of black people, and their white supporters – disappearing in the South and ended up dead. But that was far away, down “there”. This story, not just the murder but the indifference, 180 miles from my home at the time, made my world just a bit of a scarier place.

I remember that after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, one pundit noted that one would not expect that sort of thing in “the heartland” – my, I HATE that word – though you would EXPECT that sort of thing in NYC, and he used the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an example. The people in what the NY/LA folks sometimes call “flyover country” are supposed to be immune to that sort of thing, because, it seems, they care more about each other. The one oddly beneficial thing about 9/11 was that, for a time, EVERYONE was a New Yorker, and that kind of divisive thinking went away, if only for a while.