Blimix

[Content notes: Self harm. Likely drug use and/or mental illness. Medical treatment.]

Friday featured an unusual encounter.

After walking in a preserve with one of the people I support, we came upon a man sitting in the weeds by the parking area.

He called out as we passed, "I'm sitting in poison ivy!" His voice was soft, gentle, and giddy.

I stopped. His shoes were off. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm messed up." He grinned. "So I'm sitting in poison ivy."

"That's not poison ivy. That's garlic mustard."

"No shit? This is mustard?"

"No, garlic mustard. It's different. But it's edible."

He looked at the weeds in wonder. "You can eat this?"

"Well, you wouldn't make a meal of it, but you could put the leaves in your salad."

"Well, how about that."

"So... What's wrong?"

"Aah, I can't tell you. You'll understand later."

I looked around more closely. "Oh wait, there is poison ivy here." I pointed.

"This?" He grabbed the vine with his bare hands. With a peaceful, contented smile, he mashed it around on his forehead.

My eyebrows shot up, but I did nothing. Maybe because it was too late to stop him. Maybe because even if he was messed up, he understood his situation better than I did. Or maybe because I was just too confused to act. I'm pretty sure a deadpan "Seriously?" went through my head, but did not pass my lips.

He told me, "I need to go to the hospital. But I'm afraid they'll kill me."

"They'll kill you?"

"Yeah. The doctors might try to kill me. I'm afraid of the needles."

"Well... I don't know whether you'll get good quality medical care or not. But I'm pretty sure they won't try to kill you."

"Huh." He paused in thought. "Okay, you've convinced me. I wasn't gonna go to the hospital, but now I'll go."

I couldn't give him a ride while I had my companion with me. "Can you get yourself there?" The hospital was a ten minute walk away.

"Yeah, I can." He smiled. "Hey, thanks, buddy. Everyone else just walks right by me. You're the first person who's stopped, and the first person who's been kind to me."

"Any time. You're sure you can get there?"

"Yeah. No problem."

"Okay, good luck." We parted ways.

---

The person I supported buckled in and commented, "Hopefully that guy will be okay."

I said, "I hope so. Later on, I'll swing by and see if he's still there. Just to check on him."

"I wonder what's wrong with him."

"I don't know. He mentioned he's messed up, which could mean that he's on drugs, but it could mean that he's mentally ill."

"Yeah."

"He just took some poison ivy and rubbed it on himself, which I think means that he wants to develop a rash and get treated at the hospital. Maybe so that he can get some painkillers. That's a common thing that happens, where people go to the hospital for painkillers because they're addicted to them." I had only read about it happening here in the context of public funding: In retrospect, I'm not sure how justified the word "common" really was. Perhaps he needed the hospital for some other purpose, and the poison ivy felt like a foot in the door. Perhaps the two were unrelated, and the poison ivy was just for self harm. I suspect I'll never know.

We drove in silence for a while before I continued. "If it were safe, I would have been happy to call 911 for him. The thing is, if you call 911, they might send the police. And the police are not safe for a Black guy who's acting weird, and possibly on drugs."

"Yeah."

"The police are run by the KKK, basically. They might kill him. So I can't call the police to come check him out. That's why I decided I could come back and check on him. 'Cause while I have you here, I can't give him a ride."

"No."

"But if I drop you off later and go check on him, and he's still there, I could drive him over to the hospital."

A minute later, my companion added, "Like they say, Black Lives Matter."

Little hearts popped up in my eyes. "Yes! Exactly! That's what I'm talking about."

---

Once we had admired the tulips in the park, I suggested that we head back to the preserve, to check on the guy. My companion agreed. I'd imagined the poor guy being wrong about getting himself to the hospital. I came up with a plan to allow me to bring him there without compromising my duties, though the urushiol would need cleaning up later. What if he were unconscious or dead? I tried to remember what I could of my NARCAN training. It almost certainly wasn't needed, but I would have hated to be unprepared. I also had a number for the mobile crisis unit somewhere in my laptop. I cursed my slowness for not thinking of all of this earlier.

When we arrived, the only trace of our encounter was the crushed patch of garlic mustard. His shoes were gone, so I reasoned that he had probably left under his own power. My companion needed a convenience store, so we picked one that would take us along the route to the hospital. We had been gone more than long enough for that walk, and he wasn't to be seen. I was left reflecting on "next time," because that was all that was left to do.

In 2014, I wrote a post explaining why it is problematic to silence the people who complain about police murdering Black people. A random commenter took great offense at my defense of "criminals".

We all know what this is code for, but let me say it out loud: If you learned of the killing of Eric Garner and decided that you have a problem with someone selling cigarettes outside of the packs, but not with someone committing murder, then you don't have a problem with criminals. You have a problem with Black people.

My lefty friends: I love you. And when you have a problem with the Israeli government's war crimes but not with Hamas' war crimes, do you know what that sounds like you do and do not have a problem with? Yeah, that.

It's tiring. But in this case, I know it's not your fault. What's happening here is an engineered Dunning–Kruger effect.

Hear me out. I'm not pretending to be an expert. I merely know enough to be aware of how much I don't know, because I've at least had the privilege of listening to experts, and I'm awfully good at recognizing patterns. (Just like nobody but a Black American is an expert on the experience of being Black in America, and nobody who isn't Autistic is an expert on autism, nobody who hasn't lived in the Middle East is an expert on the situation there.)

The biggest thing that you're missing is that you're hearing less than half of the story. This article explains it:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/

In short, international reporters in the area, and their editors, are aware that they are in danger of being murdered by Hamas. So they can print anti-Israel stories with impunity, but they have to leave Hamas alone. "Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff — and the AP wouldn’t report it." "Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying."

There is much more that I could quote, but my purpose isn't to turn you against Hamas or the reporters. I merely want to let you know *that* you aren't seeing the whole picture, and *why* you aren't seeing it. You're good folks, and most of you are willing to open your mind to the idea that you have been systematically lied to.

We're used to that. From the whitewashing of American history to the erasure of women in STEM, we keep learning that we have been indoctrinated since childhood with unnecessary prejudices. We do what we can to counter and unlearn those. A friend created a video (no longer available) detailing various antisemitic tropes, and I was stunned by how many of these I had internalized as harmless. I still enjoy the loving self-mockery of 2 Live Jews, "As Kosher As They Wanna Be," but it's good for me to be aware of how the tropes they use for humor can also be problematic. Just as Black people here are raised with internalized systemic racism, I (named Levy) was raised with some amount of internalized antisemitism.

I'm glad I know more about that now, and am no longer perpetuating those stereotypes, to the extent possible. I'm glad I know more about Israel and Gaza now, and have stopped accidentally emboldening anti-Semites by being complicit in the telling of a one-sided narrative: A narrative which decries brutality by the IDF against Palestinians while ignoring systemic brutality by Hamas against not only Israelis but also their own citizens.

And... If I'm being honest, my complicity was not just caused by ignorance and perhaps unconscious antisemitism. It was caused by Islamophobia, too. I figured that I could write to people who share my culture, who look and talk like I do, and ask them to curb their violence. These Jews might be reasonable, and I could appeal to their empathy. What good would it do to ask Arabs to not be violent?

Yeah. It's shameful. I don't think I ever consciously thought those words, but the sentiment was there, in the background. If asked, I would have cited the lack of common language and common culture. Why would they listen to me, an outsider? Indeed, there is little reason. Having since read many empathic, caring, and very human essays in fluent English from Gazans, I now know that there were only two reasons that my pleas couldn't have moved the citizens of Gaza — and they were the same reasons that my essays of the time never moved any citizens of Israel. First, I had fundamentally misunderstood their situation. Second, most of them already desperately wanted peace, but those were not the people in power.

As an American, I cried when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq. All of us who were paying attention knew that it was a going to be a humanitarian disaster, accomplishing nothing but to enrich Halliburton and Saudi oil barons. Our protesting had been powerless to prevent it. How much more powerless must the people of Gaza feel, watching Hamas fire rockets from their schools at Israeli schools? How terrified and traumatized, when the IDF fires back?

I'm glad now that I hadn't tried to beseech them for peace. Imagine how insulting that would have been: How utterly invalidating of their lived experiences, and of their basic humanity.

And how insulting — how utterly, ignorantly blind — is it now, to write of the terrified, traumatized people of Israel, who have been fleeing at sirens and feeling the blasts from the bomb shelters built into their homes, and to condemn them for violence? They don't want war! Nobody good wants war. Are there Israelis who do want war? Sure. There were also Americans with "Freedom isn't free" bumper stickers when Bush invaded Iraq, but you wouldn't paint us all with the "fascist" brush, so why do it to the citizens of Israel? When you pretend that killing is their aim, you are calling them evil. And then yes, whether or not it is your intention, you are engaging in antisemitism.

Learn. Do better. You're lefties; that's what you do. You got this.

---

p.s. I've noticed an issue with the word "Zionist". It tends to be associated with the militant, xenophobic right wing. But Israelis will also defend against criticism of the word, explaining that it simply refers to the belief that Israel has a right to exist, or to the belief that Jews have a right to live where they will not suffer systemic oppression and murder. What's a person to think of Zionists, then? Consider that we have a word that enjoys a similar double use here in the U.S.: "Patriot". If someone here describes themselves first and foremost as a "patriot," I'll conclude with 98% certainty that they are a cowardly, treasonous Nazi with homicidal fantasies and a subservience to power that would make Stanley Milgram facepalm. Those of us who care to protect and uplift our fellow Americans? We are patriots. We don't crow about it, because being decent toward each other is not something to be proud of: It's simply the bare minimum, that we should all be doing anyway, and we don't expect a cookie just for not being a douchebag. Of course I'm a patriot: No big deal. If someone calls themselves a "Zionist," you may have to read their meaning from context.

p.p.s. If someone explains the causes of the Middle East conflict and doesn't mention British imperialism, they're not informing you. They're just trying to sway you. Also, racial problems there are very different from racial problems here. Comparison of Israeli/Palestinian relations and violence to BLM is a fantasy. If you've followed me for any time, you know I fully support the Black Lives Matter movement. The organization of the same name, like many of my beloved American progressives, espouses a mistaken official line regarding race in Israel.

p.p.p.s. Again, I'm not an expert. If you are one, feel free to correct or clarify anything here. I'm always ready to learn and do better.

The difference between a typical conservative and a Nazi isn't whether you condone white supremacist violence. It's whether you're too embarrassed to admit that you condone white supremacist violence.

...

If you see yourself in this post, and think that I'm mischaracterizing you, then prove me wrong:

1. Assert in public that the police need to stop murdering Black people.

2. Speak out in public against the genocidal neo-Nazi, and ask your friends not to vote for him.

Bonus point. If you're not a complete coward, try speaking out against the genocidal neo-Nazi and the attempted coup before you know that they're on the losing side.

If you can't do these things, then you do in fact condone white supremacist violence.

My dentist's receptionist searched the computer. "Your last name again?" Yes, she had spelled it correctly. Neither I nor my appointment, for which I had taken half the day off, was in the system. I calmly explained what little I could of the circumstances of the previous time that this had happened to me, at the same practice. She asked me to wait.

I read for fifteen minutes, while she and her colleagues investigated and checked in other patients.

She summoned me back. It appeared that there was a note in the system about my having switched practices. There was nothing attached to it to indicate that I had switched back. That note was popping its head up, eight years after the fact, to tell the practice that I was no longer a patient and that they should cancel my appointments. I was glad to know what had caused the problem.

"We'll have to reschedule you. Thank you for being so happy about this, and not... You know... Shouting at me."

I gave a sympatheic smile. "You don't deserve to be shouted at for this."

"Thank you."

I thought about her job for a moment. "In fact, you don't deserve to be shouted at for anything that people shout at you for."

She melted. "Awwww! I guess you're right. Most of the time..."

I shook my head. "No. Everybody screws up sometimes. Nobody deserves to be abused for it."

"Wow. You're really nice. I'm going to get you an appointment for tomorrow, because I like you, and I want to see you again."

---

Reflections:

I appreciated the offer, though I couldn't request that time off with so little notice.

A recurring theme in life is that people often do not recognize verbal and emotional abuse as abuse. My referring to shouting as "abuse" may help her to recognize it as such, when reflecting on past and future encounters with the inconsiderate, entitled pricks who have caused her to expect such behavior.

I wonder how much of her appreciation comes from having a black woman's experiences of unjust treatment predicted and validated -- and the treatment repudiated -- by a white man. (I'll spell out what some of my readers already know: Abuse of strangers correlates with privilege. A white man is the least likely person to offer sympathy and validation. Conversely, when that sympathy does happen, it is very powerful. People listen more to white males, so any support that we provide, especially in public, carries a lot of weight. White males are literally the only people who can criticize other white males and be heard by most people.) Not that I want, with a discussion of race and sex, to derail a charming little anecdote about how I got to look nice thanks to other people setting the bar so low, but I would be remiss to not take the opportunity.

This is adapted from a letter I wrote. It was more trouble than I wanted to go to, but I think that privilege makes it primarily the job of white allies to try to get through to other white folks, so I wrote it anyway. Before posting this, I gave the recipient more than ample opportunity for counter-arguments, but he merely changed the subject to try to impugn BLM in even less credible ways. There are certain lessons in the letter that can be applied to more recent protests, and I won't insult you by editing it to point them out.

( Not that long, but cut for length anyway. )

Links: How To Be A White Ally. Also, How To Be A White Ally.

(I also wanted to link to, but cannot find, the webcomic (maybe XKCD?) in which someone explains that they double the development time estimate every time someone asks, "Why don't you just...?")

[I wrote this just before the Dallas shootings hit the news. With what little we know, I cannot comment on that beyond the obvious: The shooters opened fire on police in the middle of a Black Lives Matter protest, jeopardizing everybody present and causing a potential setback to the movement. They could not possibly have been affiliated with the movement or the protest, which was described by the Dallas police as peaceful. I expect racists to use this tragedy, no matter how illogically, as ammunition in their continuing support of the oppressive and murderous status quo. Please don't let them get away with it. Now, back to your irregularly scheduled dose of perspective.]

It seems to me that there is a complication in the issues (hitting the spotlight once again) of police accountability, brutality, and racism. To turn back the clock to a telling example of the confusion: I was initially astonished at the gall of New York City's biggest police union when they vilified Mayor Bill de Blasio for speaking against police brutality, claiming that he had thereby attacked the police. In so doing, the union appeared to have equated the police with police brutality: A much stronger and more damning statement than anything that de Blasio himself had said. Where were the good cops in this? Or, hell, even the neutral ones? What sort of officers could possibly condone the statement that decrying police brutality is an attack on the police?

The horrifying, systemic violence by police in the U.S. is already established fact, and we know that something needs to be done about it. That's not what this essay is about. The mystifying issue here is how strongly police in general defend a system that continues to allow and encourage this. Police departments shun body cameras, despite their proven effectiveness in sharply reducing violence both by and against police. The officer who reported the torture of a suspect at the hands of two other officers was harassed out of his job, and had to move from Baltimore to a small town in Florida just to find a department willing to hire him.

It seems to me that the majority of police, who do not commit but still accept police brutality, are protecting the brutalizers and murderers in every way they can not because they like brutality, nor from a sense of brotherhood, but because accountability both makes them personally uncomfortable and clashes with the dominance that they enjoy over the public (especially oppressed minorities).

On comfort: Accountability is a trade-off. Most people enjoy a certain right to privacy most of the time. Officers interacting with the public have no such right: Regular recording of these interactions results in good behavior, where privacy results in abuse, torture, and killing. But this argument only appeals to people who are concerned with what brings the greatest good. An officer who is unconcerned with the greatest good will only be swayed by their personal convenience and comfort. Doing your job with someone looking over your shoulder (or a camera monitoring your behavior) the whole time is annoying, even if you're not planning on doing anything wrong. There's an extra cognitive load in every decision you make, considering whether the observer would approve. In this case, that's a wildly good thing, equivalent to "using your brain to be a good person". But to the 85% of officers who are otherwise unmotivated to be a good person (see the first link above), it's a pointless way to make their job more annoying.

On dominance: In Siderea's essay on the two moral modes, she explains that many people (such as Trump's supporters) enjoy and defend the privilege of people in their in-group to do whatever they want to people not in their in-group, with no fear of repurcussions. Just having that privilege, that status, is important to them, even if they never wind up exercising it: Just like 99% of white southerners didn't own slaves, but were still willing to fight and die for the right of white people to own black people. (Don't try to tell me it was about states' rights. The leaders of the Confederacy were explicitly clear that defending slavery was their motivation.)

U.S. police have, and enjoy, that privilege, to a degree not found elsewhere in the civilized world. Even if you're an old, white male, asking them to tone down their abuse of a black person will get you clubbed in the head. (This was a recent incident, so similar to hoards of other blatant uses of excessive force that I can no longer find a link.) They are the dominant party in every interaction with the public. They can and will enforce that dominance in whatever way they wish, regardless of legalities, because they are the only ones with enforcement capacity: Their victims typically have no legal recourse. Herein lies the fundamental misunderstanding committed by anyone who thinks that knowing the law will do them any good. When an officer pulls you over illegally, to ask, "Am I being detained?" is to challenge their dominance. It asserts, "I know you have no legal right to hold me here, so you have to let me go." They will not let that challenge stand. Any dog, or socially aware junior high school student, knows that you don't challenge the dominance of someone who can break you.

Police officers' dominance is enforced by their guns and by their lack of accountability. This is why violating the "blue wall" of silence is such a crime: Even if a good cop only does it in order to protect someone from a bad cop, all of the other officers are keenly aware that a bastion of their dominance has just been weakened.

The saving grace here is that police resistance to reform is not an insurmountable obstacle. Some juristictions have succeeded in introducing body cameras, so obviously it can be done. Once accountability measures are implemented, officers will gradually get used to them. A few will resist and subvert these measures, but as soon as escaping scrutiny is not trivial, the vast majority will find it easier to just not wantonly abuse and kill people. A generation of enforced improved behavior will be a great start for changing police culture.