The Camera Doesn't Lie

I-phone camera technology has finally opened our eyes to the reality of what it means to see our first amendment rights disappear.  If you are watching the myriad of moments captured over the past 11 days you can’t help but be horrified by the instances of police brutality and simple cruelty that are on display in the locations where citizens have the courage to record what law enforcement is perpetrating on their fellow citizens.  From Buffalo to Washington to Lousiville to Los Angeles, what we are witnessing are examples of what blacks have been telling us has been happening for decades.  But now it is happening to a mixed crowd of whites, blacks, latinos, Asians, and of all ages, including children!

As each of these recorded instances are rebutted by the authorities, law enforcement agencies and police unions, we see how they have tried to ‘gaslight’ us into believing alternative explanations that they concoct. 

The camera does not lie.

That’s why the demonstrations are only getting larger, not smaller.  We are all seeing the duplicity.  When that 75 year-old man was pushed to the pavement in Buffalo and seriously injured, and we watched the uniformed police simply walk by him and not offer aid, it brought it all home, didn’t it?  The Mayor of Buffalo was on TV the next night to answer to the incident and the best he could do was utter a flaccid response that it was disturbing and unfortunate.  He is clearly under the thumb of the police union.  The net result of that action was that the two officers were suspended without pay.  Really?  They should be fired and charged with criminal action.  And as far as the 57 officers in that unit that resigned in sympathy to the two officers from the unit—they should be summarily fired and their union abolished….good riddance!  Get new humans that have empathy.  What we witnessed there was simply an exercise of naked power with cruelty and without humanity from people who have Napoleonic complexes.

The recorded moments are telling the story of where we have landed as a society being led by an autocrat.  But even more than that we now see how imperative it is for citizens to rise up and change the equation at the local level.  The local law enforcement paradigm needs to shift.  Police unions need to be de-fanged and abolished.  Communities need to come together and restructure their police forces, establishing new training protocols and ridding the departments of any officers that have complaints against them for unlawful use of force or questionable tactics.

To be sure, the police in these demonstration situations are only human, and probably fear the actions of those who criminally assault them, but for the most part those criminals are few while mostly all these demonstrations are peaceful; and the police are the ones that take the initial unprovoked action.  They are the ones swinging the billy clubs and batons; the ones firing tear gas and flash-bang devices; the ones firing rubber bullets at unarmed citizens; the ones pushing old men, women, children out of the way with cruel intent.  It is sickening, and we are seeing it for the first time in a way that could only happen as a result of the ubiquitous presence of the I-phone camera.

But there is something else happening in our country that has not happened before.  The Baby Boomer generation is giving way to the Millenial and Gen-Z generations who will finally perhaps be able to salvage our future.  It is clear that our leaders, who are almost all white men from the Baby Boomer generation, have lost their way.  They have forgotten what the American Experiment is all about.  It is time to purge the Congress of members of their generation who are mute at the rise of autocracy and dictatorship.   It is the younger generations who are the reformers; who are filled with an energy for renewal of our American ideals.  We saw the first wave of that action in the 2018 midterm elections and hopefully we will see a subsequent, more powerful wave this year.

With the increasing public outcry over the dictator-like tactics of the Trump administration and the gathering awareness of just how perilously vulnerable our democracy is becoming, the momentum for change is increasing.  The façade of support provided to Trump by mute Republicans and most especially by our military leaders is slowly cracking apart.  The fracturing of the compact between our apolitical military and American society is the first tell-tale indicator that change is coming.  Our most revered and honorable military leaders want no part of what Trump/Barr et al. are attempting to do to our country.  They see the threat to our democracy and the undermining of our Constitution by these people and are calling them out….finally!  Let’s hope their clarion call comes soon enough to matter.

Before I end this blog, let me just offer a word of thanks to all of you who witnessed and participated in the last blog.  What we saw here over the past several days was an example of the single-minded rejection of evidence and the twisting of events and facts to support something that, frankly, is unsupportable.  Being able to see other’s points of view is essential if we are to find common ground.  But claiming that plainly visible evidence of actions and attitudes by the Trump Administration are ‘lies’ without any substantive proof cannot be tolerated.   Institutional racism is present in America, and it has been here for a long, long time.  Those who want to turn a blind eye to it by blaming the victims are perpetrators of the worst kind.