Face it Charlap, you're never getting out of Baltimore alive, the neuro shit is going to keep you here for the rest of your life and if you leave, you'll be dead in less than six months....
But that doesn't change that you're desperate to get out by any means necessary, and who're you kidding, you've been desperate since you were 15; but facts are facts, and your fact is you're stuck, trapped, entrapped, cornered, confined, snared, webbed, netted, noosed, shut in, penned off. The only way you're leaving Baltimore is a two way ticket with a hearse booked to take you back.
So few things are simple and so many things are complicated, but there are two binary states in political life for which there's no ambiguity at all. Here's the first:
1. A person is alive.
2. A person is dead.
So long as a person's still alive, there's still a chance to rewrite a life-story. But when a person's dead, that's it. Their story's only further written in the minds of people who knew them because there is no bringing them back.
Many people in Baltimore were up in arms about Bloomberg's 'stop and frisk' policy. I was never ever a supporter of stop and frisk, but long as I'm being honest, I'm not such a saint that my objections were moral. So before I write anything else, this is my objection to policies like it: It's obviously a temporary solution and a generation later causes an inevitable counterreaction, the one we're having now, which could lead to things so very much worse than stop and frisk.
My moral objections are to the deplorable lack of urban education funding. The other binary of political life that is that a functional society needs two basic elements; neither more than the other -
1. Rule of Law
2. Educational Opportunities.
Education, not activism, is the solution. And we have to face another uncomfortable fact, the defunded money from police departments won't go to education, it's going to retraining social workers to go out with police forces, and now we'll worry that our social worker friends will get shot.
I don't know if the 'abolish police' meme started with Russian or Chinese operatives, but I'd put the likelihood at about 1-in-3. And even if they didn't come up with something so disastrous to the prospects of anyone but Donald Trump, hostile world powers employed thousands of twitter handles to amplify it.
If people didn't think you were out of your goddamn minds before now, 'abolish police' can be the final straw that delivers Americans to Republicans for yet another fucking generation. The solution may have to do with banning police departments from certain types of weapons, but to abolish the police or even to significantly defund them is literally inviting a failed state, mass murder, and genocide. You can lighten their load with social work, but there's no substitute for policing.
The obvious solution is to create institutions alongside law enforcement: community colleges, mandatory after school programs, mass scholarships for four-year universities and graduate programs, programs to learn trades, a national service volunteer corps alongside the army that helps pay for student loans, a non-profit civic sector as large as the public and private sectors to which both government and business contribute huge amounts of money, and, of course, taxes that go through the fucking roof to pay for it all. We're all in this together or we're all going to die.
Global warming will put a giant, unprecedented wave of immigration on America's doorstep, and the number of poor in America will be exponentially larger than now - the only solution is to say to the poor: 'there's nothing fair about how we treat you, but we will help you if and only if you get an education.' And we have to mean it, because the rest of the USA has its own behavioral carrots and sticks - if we do not solve the problems of our cities, we will all die along with them.
Before the pandemic, murders in Baltimore were up 45% over the same time the year before, which was already the second deadliest year on record. So if you haven't heard that statistic yet, you need to let that figure sink in before you wag your finger at anyone who would dare defend policies like stop-and-frisk. That meant that Baltimore was at a trajectory to roughly 450 murders in 2020. The people who could argue most eloquently for 'stop and frisk' are all dead, and there may be tens of thousands whose protests from beyond the grave are silent.
Of its efficacy, there's little doubt, the statistics in New York speak for themselves and anyone can look up raw numbers more easily than they can a woke thinkpiece explanation of why all statistics are structural lies - and there are hundreds of those. You could at least make an argument that Roe v. Wade and access to abortion caused the decline at least as much as brutal policing - but be honest with yourself, which argument is more insulting to the dignity of disadvantaged demographics?
So no, my primary objections to stop-and-frisk and zero tolerance are practical, not moral. It was a deal with the devil and the ultimate beneficiaries of it is the people who are most against the policy: relatively affluent, progressive urbanites who only flocked to cities because streets were safe, and now protest the policing responsible for their prosperity. They may cause crime take its place alongside global warming as the great problem of our children's generation, but they don't care. Just like Baby Boomers didn't care that debt and Republican authoritarianism existed and made them our generation's biggest problems. The sins of the parents are visited on the children; there is no democracy without rule of law first, and are no civil liberties when you're already dead.
There are better reasons to write someone like me off as morally lacking, but if you dare to do it because people like me feel at least momentarily tempted to defend the policy, you have to consider one thing: until Baltimore's murder rate is cut in half, WE HAVE NO FUTURE. NONE. NO GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS ARE COMING TO SAVE US. NO ONE WILL DO BUSINESS WITH US. NO NON-PROFIT EITHER HAS A SOLUTION FOR US OR THE MEANS TO ENACT A SOLUTION IF THEY DID. AND $1.8 BILLION FROM MICHAEL BLOOMBERG IS ALL THAT MIGHT CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT THAT SO A FULL HALF WHAT'S HOLDING BACK A SOLUTION IS YOUR BULLSHIT.
There, I feel better now...
I surely have friends who experience violent police harassment, and believe it or not, the DC police put me up against the back of a car with a threat of violence made VERY clear. I was pretty sure I'd do a couple months in prison for someone else's weed (and it was my birthday btw...) and a knightstick to the ribs was't out of the question. I wouldn't for a moment think I've had it nearly as bad as all kinds of friends from every demographic minority except American Jews, but the problem of policing is so large that it does affect us all. On the other hand, I also know what it's like to have large numbers of your family murdered. There is nothing in life more harrowing than death.
Every time I hear about authoritarian law enforcement happening to another friend, I'm aghast at their ordeal as any friend would be, and whether you believe it or not, my heart really does break for them, but it breaks as a friend who resigned himself to the fact that life is tragic, not as an activist. Just as real friends want to be protective of you, they also have to do their best to not shield you from the sobering realities. And reality is this:
We all would much rather have a hundred friends get bruised with their emotional peace of mind disturbed than bury another dead friend. At least when their peace of mind is disturbed, there might be a 1% chance we can help them, but the living can't help the dead. That is your reality as well as mine.
So to all the intersectionalists, socialists, anarchists, Bernie-bros, lib-cons and lib-socs and ingsocs, I hope there's a hell to which your shit is all going, and if there's a hell, I'm sure as hell I'll see you there. Until stop-and-frisk and zero tolerance, you had as much blood on your hands as any Republican, and it looks like it may happen again. If I've been at all tolerant so far of this intellectual newspeak, I fear whatever infinitesimal tolerance I have left for either online or in person is disappearing.
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What were the sixties for?
This was a movement from children who grew up in the first affluent society in all of human history, and it wasn't enough, so in the midst of the biggest revolutions of civil rights and civil programs ever made, a whole generation of youth rose up to declare 'we need more progress.'
And then came '68 riots, advanced in part by Vietnam and the assassination of MLK and RFK, but also advanced by a whole generation of youth who threw red meat to the poor with the message: 'if you rise up, we will stand with you, we will defend you, we will give you what you need!'
And did they? Did all those Baby Boomers who stood up to Nixon and the draft not vote Reagan, Bush, Trump, all of whom gutted LBJ's social programs and kowtowed to all the social conservatives the sixties fought against? Maybe some stuck to their principles, but even the principled ones promised that their generation would be the one to stand behind social justice and social change when a hundred generations before them failed just as spectacularly.
Because of the sixties rebellions, America embraced the conservative ideology which created Trump. Spiro Agnew and Milton Friedman already claimed that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was a failure when it had barely been tried. And now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and company, the very urban activists who should be focusing 99% of their efforts on education, are dismissing education as just a c-list tool while the Robin DeAngelos claim education itself is just a structural tool of the privileged overclass meant to keep minorities in squalor. These are not liberals, and they're insulted when we call them that - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Judith Butler are our Reagans and Arthur Laffers, a whole new generation of snake-oil salespeople, 'equalitarians' who simplify in as much bad faith as the reactionary libertarians of our grandparents' generation, and all they'll do is cause violent right-wing insurrections - and people of the right still have most of our country's guns, though that may soon change... We saw the beginnings of the new reality on January 6th, and they'll only get more real from here on out.
So yes, I really, really, REALLY want to leave Baltimore, I really want to leave the US. I don't know if there will be a full decline and fall, but if there is, I don't want to be here for it, and even if it never threatens me, I don't want to watch it threaten people I love up close and helplessly; and yet I can't leave, because I have lifelong neurological conditions on which formal education is absolutely wasted, and meanwhile, there are tens of millions on whom education is no waste at all, and every minute you spend on issues other than education denies them the one tool guaranteed to improve their lives.
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