#16 / The Good Old Days
Hey everyone,
Bad news on the caterpillar front. Well, it’s news, anyway—I’m practicing not ascribing value judgments.
Our last caterpillar has left home. He crawled away sometime during the night on Monday. Ashley’s theory is that he needed a sturdier branch for his chrysalis than anything he would find in our herb garden.
I’ll miss the cater-babies, but I’m glad we were able to keep them extremely well-fed while they were here. Perhaps they will return as black swallowtails!
We've also now been gifted some milkweed, and are advertising ourselves as a safe home for all cater-babies.
Listening
This week I wanted to share some of the ideas I heard on Ezra Klein’s podcast, where he was in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates. If you’re not familiar, Coates is one of the foremost writers anywhere, but especially on topics of race, history, and culture. He got really famous for writing “The Case For Reparations” for the Atlantic in 2014, which is obviously as relevant as ever.
I’m amazed at how these two are able to think at such a high level, while still sounding understandable, approachable, down-to-earth, and in command of details and anecdotes. No ivory-tower philosophizing here.
They had their conversation on the first weekend after George Floyd was killed, so there’s your jumping-off point, but they also broaden out to talk about the nature of non-violence and the purpose of the state.
Without further ado, and in no particular order:
- The people who are most concerned about leaving a void in the absence or reduction of our current police forces are almost always people for whom this is already the reality. There are already plenty of neighborhoods, mostly with white supermajorities, where the police don’t spend much time. Are these areas really safe because of police? Would they really slide into chaos without police?
- The argument that police are necessary to solve crimes in neighborhoods where there are higher levels of violence would be much easier to make if the police had a sterling record of solving such cases. It turns out they don’t.
- Calls for nonviolence are almost always directed by people who are not themselves engaging in nonviolence. And these calls always occur in the moment, rather than beforehand. Did the people who called for non-violence during the George Floyd protests praise Colin Kaepernick for his peaceful protest while he was doing it? Or did they drive him out of his job and prevent him from performing at the career for which he had trained since he was a young child?
- Nonviolence itself is better seen as a personal exertion of will that requires a great deal of self-control, rather than something one asks of others; reading Martin Luther King confirms this.
- Calls for nonviolence assume that the violence we see is strategic, when more likely it is simply exhaustion and rage, and, as much as we’d rather not see it, it is natural; expecting people who have been deeply oppressed and silenced for generations to be nonviolent can be a lot to ask. It’s as if you see a person who has eaten poorly all their life and never exercised suffering a heart attack, and you say to the person’s heart, “Heart! Stop having a heart attack!” If the state, as the body in this analogy, has mistreated and neglected its heart for so long, it is inevitable that the heart would fight back.
- If the police didn’t show up to protests in riot gear and with SWAT tanks, would people still throw bottles at them? Or is that itself a provocation? Ezra tells the story of a bar owner friend who used to hire the biggest, baddest-looking dudes as bouncers. Invariably some drunk person would see this as a personal challenge and get violent. Once the bar owner started hiring less physically intimidating people, the violence subsided.
- One definition of “the state” is that entity which monopolizes the use of force in a society. But what would it look like to have a state that is explicitly non-violent? What if we started from that basis?
- What if instead of (or in addition to) a trained force of people who show up to situations with guns, we had a force of people who were extremely skilled in treating mental illness and handling situations where a person is in distress? And what if from the age of 5 we all knew the three-digit number we could call to deploy them?
- The two presidents since 1968 who most forcefully championed “law and order” were also the two least lawful presidents we’ve had during that time. Which begs the question: “order” for whom?
There’s a ton more in here (this page has an edited transcript). I highly recommended checking out the whole thing.
Mood
The Libertines — “The Good Old Days”
I’m always looking for new British rock music, and here’s a band I never got into when they were big. And really I’m not sure I like them all that much, but this song is fantastic.
It's apparently about the band itself, but I have often thought about this idea that if you could go back to the seemingly idyllic past, it wouldn’t be so idyllic because people then didn’t know what was going to happen:
I've tried so hard to keep myself from falling
Back into my bad old ways
And it chars my heart to always hear you calling
Calling for the good old days
Because there were no 'good old days'
These are the good old days
https://open.spotify.com/track/4ifE4zMKKtKXIbZIHtnAMU?si=kLLEPwBKTiaGjyjg5ZctAQ
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron