Did you know that I have sound days? I believe this is also monthly cycle-related, but I discovered several years ago that on one or two days of a given month, I will be driven crazy by sound. The slightest unpleasant noise that normally will make me mildly notice it will, on a sound day, drive me freaking insane.
Once I was in Ste Genevieve with Carl and Lynn and we went into an ice cream parlor. The workers, many of them, were wearing rubber soled shoes that continually squeaked loudly and unpleasantly as they stopped and started on the ceramic floor. I was a crazy person wanting to get out of there. The sound was slicing thru my nervous system like a laser beam thru Jello.
Don't, on a sound day, let me be around a crying baby. I'll strangle the little shit. And rap music . . . OMG!!!
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
Kirkwood Tragedy
The news out of Kirkwood, MO is very sad. An enraged citizen stormed Kirkwood City Hall last night and killed five people before police returned fire, killing him.
The local news was all over it last night. One intrepid reporter, the cute and blond Laurie Waters was under great pressure because she was trying so hard to report without actually reporting. On the immediate heels of this tragedy, she WANTED to say that Mr. Thornton was enraged because the Kirkwood city council tends to mistreat everyone in Meacham Park (the black community of Kirkwood), and that he was among an entire neighborhood that had been disenfranchised by tax money-driven aldermen who have legislated in favor of businesses and not these residents.
In a story she reported last year, she learned some rather esoteric facts about this community which were apparently reinforced with this incident. Those facts speak to how a community of black people can be collectively enraged at their government.
But she couldn't say that because a) there is no excuse for slaughtering five people, and b) the community had just finished last week with the trial of the (black) man who shot and killed a (white) police sargent in Meacham Park in a senseless revenge shooting. The assailant was sentenced to death after a second trial.
I got the strong impression that Laurie felt a wave of understanding and sympathy for what Thornton and many other residents had endured at the hands of the city council, but was struggling with words that could express that without sounding like she was siding with a mass murderer.
It's a sad day here.
This whole thing reminds me of a social phenomenon I have come to think of as "the terrorist scapegoat." I first noticed it in the 80s when I was studying Northern Ireland and reaching out with my heart to the disenfranchised, disrespected, disallowed, dissed people there. It goes like this:
Your government or some other authority continuously acts unfairly toward you. You try to redress your grievances. You point out how unfair it is. You catalog all the ways that the system is set up to disable you from helping yourself and your family--from even surviving. You file papers and law suits and you write letters. You try to get the community to join you. You go on petition drives. You try to behave like someone who lives in a democracy (even though you don't).
Your complaints fall on deaf ears. The system is set up as it is on purpose, and if the set up is not deliberately designed to hurt and/or kill you, it is at least true that those in charge don't care about you. You are part of a second class citizenry and your concerns and grief will never, ever be important to those in charge.
So, you protest. You use every small bit of resources to defend your life you can find. In Northern Ireland in the early 70s, those dismissed people even resorted to peaceful protests carrying placards and singing "We Shall Overcome," taking their queue from Dr. Martin Luther King.
They were shot at by police. Fourteen unarmed men and boys were killed when they were struck in their backs as they ran away. This happened on Bloody Sunday. You may recall the U2 song of the same name about that tragedy.
So you then learn, sometimes after years of acute frustration that you cannot get anywhere by legal means.
It was once said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and over and expect a different result.
So, since you are not insane, you do something different. In your frustration you feel forced to do something violent. You do something unforgivably ghastly. You act against your own nature and the sensibilities of the entire society.
And it works! The outcome has changed! Now, not only are you ineffectual in your quest to live and prosper, you are also a societal pariah. In the case of Cookie Thornton, you are a nutball, a kook, a madman. In the case of the Northern Irish Catholics, you're a terrorist.
And all you're trying to do is survive.
Disclaimer: I don't agree with Thornton storming into a city council meeting and killing people. Certainly not. I don't justify it, but I do understand it. He is coming from a disenfranchised community that has banged it's head on a brick wall for a long time with no efficacy.
This tragedy is a microcosm of race relations in this entire country. But will we learn from it? I doubt it. We don't learn from much as a society if we can find a way to assign blame to someone and keep it off of ourselves.
The local news was all over it last night. One intrepid reporter, the cute and blond Laurie Waters was under great pressure because she was trying so hard to report without actually reporting. On the immediate heels of this tragedy, she WANTED to say that Mr. Thornton was enraged because the Kirkwood city council tends to mistreat everyone in Meacham Park (the black community of Kirkwood), and that he was among an entire neighborhood that had been disenfranchised by tax money-driven aldermen who have legislated in favor of businesses and not these residents.
In a story she reported last year, she learned some rather esoteric facts about this community which were apparently reinforced with this incident. Those facts speak to how a community of black people can be collectively enraged at their government.
But she couldn't say that because a) there is no excuse for slaughtering five people, and b) the community had just finished last week with the trial of the (black) man who shot and killed a (white) police sargent in Meacham Park in a senseless revenge shooting. The assailant was sentenced to death after a second trial.
I got the strong impression that Laurie felt a wave of understanding and sympathy for what Thornton and many other residents had endured at the hands of the city council, but was struggling with words that could express that without sounding like she was siding with a mass murderer.
It's a sad day here.
This whole thing reminds me of a social phenomenon I have come to think of as "the terrorist scapegoat." I first noticed it in the 80s when I was studying Northern Ireland and reaching out with my heart to the disenfranchised, disrespected, disallowed, dissed people there. It goes like this:
Your government or some other authority continuously acts unfairly toward you. You try to redress your grievances. You point out how unfair it is. You catalog all the ways that the system is set up to disable you from helping yourself and your family--from even surviving. You file papers and law suits and you write letters. You try to get the community to join you. You go on petition drives. You try to behave like someone who lives in a democracy (even though you don't).
Your complaints fall on deaf ears. The system is set up as it is on purpose, and if the set up is not deliberately designed to hurt and/or kill you, it is at least true that those in charge don't care about you. You are part of a second class citizenry and your concerns and grief will never, ever be important to those in charge.
So, you protest. You use every small bit of resources to defend your life you can find. In Northern Ireland in the early 70s, those dismissed people even resorted to peaceful protests carrying placards and singing "We Shall Overcome," taking their queue from Dr. Martin Luther King.
They were shot at by police. Fourteen unarmed men and boys were killed when they were struck in their backs as they ran away. This happened on Bloody Sunday. You may recall the U2 song of the same name about that tragedy.
So you then learn, sometimes after years of acute frustration that you cannot get anywhere by legal means.
It was once said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and over and expect a different result.
So, since you are not insane, you do something different. In your frustration you feel forced to do something violent. You do something unforgivably ghastly. You act against your own nature and the sensibilities of the entire society.
And it works! The outcome has changed! Now, not only are you ineffectual in your quest to live and prosper, you are also a societal pariah. In the case of Cookie Thornton, you are a nutball, a kook, a madman. In the case of the Northern Irish Catholics, you're a terrorist.
And all you're trying to do is survive.
Disclaimer: I don't agree with Thornton storming into a city council meeting and killing people. Certainly not. I don't justify it, but I do understand it. He is coming from a disenfranchised community that has banged it's head on a brick wall for a long time with no efficacy.
This tragedy is a microcosm of race relations in this entire country. But will we learn from it? I doubt it. We don't learn from much as a society if we can find a way to assign blame to someone and keep it off of ourselves.
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