 | | Harry T. Cook |
By Harry T. Cook
12/5/14
What happened over the weeks and months of this year in Ferguson, Missouri, is at base a triumph of fear. We Homo sapiens, as evolved a species as we are, still tend to operate instinctively upon fear. Fear of both the known and the unknown gives us goose bumps. If we can't run away from what threatens, we try to appease or attack it before it attacks us. Survival is the instinct. On the old television series "Hill Street Blues," a regular line delivered by the fictional Sgt. Phil Esterhaus before sending his officers out on routine patrol was, "Hey, let's be careful out there." No definition of what it meant to "be careful" was ever given. Sgt. Stan Jablonski's counsel was more to the point: "Let's do it to them before they do it to us." Do what? You know what. Shoot or get shot. Every cop in the episode was armed. Was required to be armed. Message No. 1 was: Be careful by letting your fear -- perhaps masquerading as machismo -- distrust every face, every shadow, everything. Message No. 2: Be the one to shoot first. The sergeants were only putting into words -- Esterhaus in a more veiled way, Jablonski as blunt as could be -- what was already at work in the synapses of the officers under their command. Not because they'd been to the police academy, but because their ancestors far up along the evolutionary path had learned that survival depended on responding to the alarums of perceived danger. Those ancestors figured out how to fashion spears from tree limbs and primitive knives from stone as weapons of both offense and defense. The secretion of their glands prompted them to action when desirable or necessary. Those who developed skill with spear and knife lived to procreate and pass on to their children and their children's children the sense of what it meant to "be careful out there" and to "do it to them" before it was done to themselves. All from the instinct of fear. When the tools of battle were hands, arms and legs, conflict was intensely personal, depending entirely on bodily contact. Weapons -- first the stone and blade, then the firearm, grenade, bomb and guided missile -- put space between disputants. In that respect, the drone in our day is the evil genius of weaponry. In great part it was fear of the other that led to the development of such weapons. Certainly some of them in earlier millennia were employed in the killing of animals for food out of fear of starvation. You could have observed in real time the power of what's left of that urge had you been here in Michigan over the past several weeks as men flocked to hunting camps in hopes of killing deer for sport as well as for food. It is not game, however, that prompts police agencies to issue side arms to their recruits. Those guns are openly carried not only as defensive weapons but as signs that their bearers will certainly try to do it to you if you try to do it to them. How did the unarmed "Bobbies" of Britain survive? That said, Rodney King might have spoken the clearest word on this subject as anybody ever has: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?"
Can we? I guess you could ask the people of Ferguson King's question -- which was by no means rhetorical. King had every reason to think that such a hope was in vain, having been cruelly beaten by white police officers. Certainly the late Michael Brown's family must be convinced that the likes of Officer Darren Wilson, Prosecutor Robert McCulloch and they would be unable to get along.
It does not take the know-how of a rocket scientist to see what the barrier is. It is the color of skin. The Browns' is black, that of Wilson and McCulloch white. What erects the barrier is fear -- fear produced by incipient racism on the part of all concerned. For going on 400 years, black has seldom been seen as beautiful to many Caucasians. Oppression, segregation and rebellion have been the result.
Communities and neighborhoods were "protected" by real estate covenants until laws prohibited the practice. The abandonment of major cities by whites followed. That exodus took with it businesses, industries and the tax dollars they generated. Thus was the economic ground pulled out from under those condemned to remain in areas that quickly began to deteriorate due, among other things, to the diminishment of city services brought about by declining tax revenues.
The Detroit area in which I live has what I learned in a sociology course many years ago are called "interstitial barriers" -- meaning entities that by their very existence affect, usually for the worse, life on either side of them. Detroit's notorious interstitial barrier is its Eight Mile Road -- the city's northern limit. Another is the famed Alter Road that divides the east side of Detroit from the Grosse Pointes.
Above Eight Mile, it is the fear of African-Americans who live below it. Below Eight Mile Road is the fear that the people living above it not only do not have the best interest of Detroit residents at heart but would seek to do them harm on the slightest whim or provocation. The same can be said for Alter Road.
Add to that cauldron of resentment the massive prevalence of handguns carried by people on both sides of those barriers, and the answer to Rodney King's question is, "No. We can't just get along." And that's because we are afraid of each other.
Officer Wilson was afraid, he said, of Michael Brown. Michael Brown, some witnesses said, seemed to be afraid of Officer Wilson. Prosecutor McCulloch is obviously afraid of his white constituency.
What can blunt, if not banish altogether, the hard edge of fear? The Bible in which very many gun advocates say they believe so fervently has the answer. It can be found in the First Epistle of John, chapter 4, verse 18: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." Sounds kind of mushy, doesn't it?
However, the word "love" is the best English extractable from the Greek text. There the word is αγαπη. It means "love," all right. But, as the lexicon at my desk reads, "trust or care received affectionately by men."
"Affectionately"??? "By men"??? Yep. How is such a thing to be established? By doing away with those interstitial barriers we have erected to separate us from one another. By investing ourselves, our resources and our honor in the lives of those whom the capitalist economy has left behind so that one reaches not for a gun -- real or imagined -- but for the other's hand.
Martin Luther King Jr. died for just such a thing as that. So, it is said, did Jesus Christ. Gandhi, too.
At my ordination to the priesthood now so long ago, the bishop said to me that my job as a priest was to "cast out fear." Next day, I looked up the verb "to cast" in that same lexicon. The book was fairly new 46 years ago. It is now dog-eared. Therein I found that the words translated into English as "cast out" are εζω βαλλει. The latter is a derivative form of the verb βαλλω -- "to thrust." Our word "ballistic" comes from it; εζω means "out" or "outward."
Thrust fear out of human relations, and there arises the possibility that one may reach out to accept trust and care proffered by the other. It must be said that fear would be reduced greatly by the disappearance of the ubiquitous handgun, the trigger of which is too easily pulled, or which is suspected -- often with fatal consequences -- of being hidden away on the person of one who is feared.
The aforementioned Jesus Christ is said to have imparted a piece of wisdom the sorry truth of which has been demonstrated far, far too many times: "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword."Surely he would say the same of guns.
I invite Christian believers to dispute that finding and to explain how one who believes that Jesus Christ was God's personal representative to life on Earth can possibly support the ideology of the National Rifle Association and its myriad supporters on the subject of guns. It can't be done.
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