This is an essay about rage and compassion through the lens of pain.  Now THAT’S an ambitious sentence!  I mentioned last time that lately I’ve been struggling with what to write about for this blog, but that I’ve been writing furiously elsewhere about what’s been swirling in our topsy turvy world.  I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago entitled Rage in the Age of COVID 19.  I didn’t publish it because, first, it was just too long and, second, it was entirely too raw.  I, myself, was raging and that was even before the name George Floyd became known worldwide.  Now, however, pain has laid its blanket over the rage and that has let more compassion seep in.  It just breaks my heart to see how much pain there is in our world.

I am not trying to solve any big hairy problems in 1500 words (ok, closer to 2000 this time).  I promise.  What I want to do is try to understand, hence the title of this essay.  I am not going to excuse anyone’s behavior, be they looters or police or white supremacists or antifacists or just angry everyday people who end up doing unexpected things.  I want to try to understand them.  I’ve written before about the importance of making sure you know what the real problem is that you’re trying to solve.  Well, striving to understand is the first step toward identifying the right problem.  In fact, it’s a prerequisite.  And a little compassion along the way makes the whole process possible. 

I am not, by the way, going to discuss peaceful protesters.  They require no explanation nor excuse.  They are exercising their First Amendment rights.  (Even that has its limits, though.  You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, meaning you can’t hide behind the First Amendment to incite a riot and violence.)  That doesn’t mean you need to agree with them.  It just means they have a right to protest peacefully in public places without fear of the government limiting what they say.  That’s why the neo-Nazis and KKK can march peacefully and legally, if they are able to keep their rhetoric in check.  “I may not agree with a word you say,” paraphrasing Evelyn Beatrice Hall in Friends of Voltaire, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  The First Amendment also does not say you can say anything you want without consequence.  Private companies can set up their own rules and do.  Twitter can take down a tweet or flag it if it violates their policies.  That is not a violation of the First Amendment.  It does remind us all, though, of the need to accept the consequences of our actions—be it speech or otherwise.

Understanding my own rage  As I noted above, I’ve been raging a lot lately about COVID 19.  Injustice Rage.  In the beginning of this pandemic, we were all scared to death because of the rapidly changing situation and lack of knowledge.  We all felt vulnerable.  We all (mostly) obeyed stay at home orders.  We all got judgey on people who disobeyed those orders.  We were in it together.  Then more data started to come out regarding the disproportionate impact of the virus on the elderly and on certain minority communities.  Especially for the latter, the issue was a combination of lack of access to good healthcare (which can lead to compromised immune systems), poorly funded education systems (which can lead to poverty), densely populated communities with few basic services and often the need to continue putting themselves out there as minimum wage service workers.  Immediately we began to see how little financial cushion people in service roles had, many of whom lost their jobs and swelled the unemployment ranks along with food lines.  My heart broke, but my rage built.  How many blows do people have to take?  How can you be expected to succeed with a metaphorical knee on your neck?

My Injustice Rage morphed into COVID Rage, though, when I began to see the protests to reopen (after a couple of measly weeks of being asked to stay home to break the chain of contagion).  Look, I didn’t like not being able to get my haircut or go to the gym, either, but what really got to me was the Entitlement Rage.  I saw small business owners who were really suffering and I understand their rage.  But the camouflage wearing, gun toting angry men who also were waving Confederate flags and sporting swastikas?  What THAT said to me was, “The virus is not affecting me.  I’m not elderly and I’m not black or latino.  This is America which means I should be able to do what I want.”  That lack of caring for community really got to me.  It also pissed me off because the defining characteristic of these hard hit communities is not race:  it’s poverty and systemic disenfranchisement that happens to be overly pushed on people of color.  You know what?  These same systemic issues are keeping lots of white people living paycheck to paycheck as well. Yet much of the time these white communities blame and victimize immigrants and communities of color who are suffering the same problems instead of blaming the people and systems that do the victimizing!  In fact, they tend to vote for them! The debates over reopening continued and tensions and my rage rose.  And then George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman.

The Rage of the Rioters and Looters  Let me first say that the rioters and looters are not by any means a homogeneous group.  Some are just bad people looking to take advantage of a situation to blow off steam and steal.  Some are there specifically to incite because the riots advance some ideological aim.  Some are peaceful protesters laboring under strain that I can’t even begin to imagine. 

I was just a little girl when the Stonewall Riots happened in New York in 1969 but I can understand how a bunch of gay and trans people who just wanted to have a night out with people like them got damn tired of getting raided and thrown in jail for just being themselves.  “I’m just being a normal person and having a good time that isn’t hurting anyone!  You wouldn’t be doing this to a straight person doing exactly the same thing!  WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!”  At some point, you can’t hold the rage in anymore and you fight back. 

Have you never just had ENOUGH and lost your cool?  Imagine that stressor not being focused and short term but being with you and your kind for generations.  Imagine it happening day after day after day, year after year after year.  Imagine it happening to you and everyone like you but NOT happening to others, who looked different than you, doing the exact same thing.  Imagine all that rage of the injustice mixing with the exhaustion.  “If the color of my skin is seen as a weapon,” read a sign I saw at a protest, “I will never be considered unarmed.” If police see dark skin and immediately think “bad person,” harassment (or worse) is going to happen.   My parents taught me to respect authority but they never had to sit me down and have The Talk that said, “Even if you do everything right, you still have a high probability of being mistreated.”  If I’m a black teen and I’m sitting in my car doing whatever stupid stuff teenagers do in their car and I’m hauled out and harassed by police when my white friends aren’t, I just might get so tired of it and so frustrated that I start mouthing off.  You just. Get. ENRAGED. You don’t want to lose your cool but when something snaps, it snaps. 

And if you are in the midst of a crowd sharing and amplifying your emotion, you might end up busting the window of a police car, or a storefront, or going into a busted store and grabbing something just because you can, or setting something on fire.  Just to feel some power; some control.  Explanation is not excuse, but it’s the first step to identifying the real problem and solving it.

The Rage of the Police  Just as looters and rioters are not a homogeneous group, neither are police.  Some are frankly racist and corrupt and they are not routinely rooted out because of longstanding cultural and systemic issues that lead other police to be complicit.  And sometimes extreme force is warranted.  And cops do indeed get shot and killed on duty. 

I want to focus on your average cop, though.  Imagine that you have a job that requires you to regularly go into unknown and volatile situations.  Your training has taught you that you are an officer of the peace and you’ve been trained to deescalate tense situations, but you’ve also been armed with military grade gear and been conditioned to consider yourself a warrior.  You’ve been shot at or know colleagues who have been.  You take a serious risk every day you go to work and you never know if the next call you go on is going to be your last.  Add to this the fact that consistent defunding of a range of social services has placed a very broad array of response needs on your shoulders—everything from dealing with mentally ill homeless to rounding up stray dogs.  Any situation can turn deadly dangerous in seconds.  Your fear can heighten your sensitivity.  And when you are being taunted, that fear can combine with anger and become rage that makes you react.  You shoot someone who you thought was threatening you.  Or you push back on a taunting protester.  Or you use the defining characteristic of race because that’s what you can see.  You do whatever you feel you have to do to ensure your own safety.  “Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6” said an officer I heard interviewed recently.  And these are people who have been trained to control their emotions and deescalate!  Explanation is not excuse, but it’s the first step to identifying the real problem and solving it.

I must say, though, that what disturbed me most about George Floyd’s death was that the officer with his knee on Floyd’s neck was not raging.  The casualness, the hand in the pocket, the lack of concern about being filmed, the utter calmness on his face.  THAT is not rage.  THAT has neither explanation nor excuse.  That is criminal.

I have been accused in the past of being wishy washy or oppositional by countering people’s arguments with what I see as the perspective of the other side.  I don’t do that to be argumentative.  I do it because no one is 100% right nor 100% wrong.  We need to learn to understand, truly understand, someone else’s position because we must do that to find common ground.  Remember, YOUR world is not THE world.  So, in these difficult days, start by understanding the source of your own rage.  Then, find the compassion to understand the source of others’ rage.  There is always pain behind it.  Explanation is not excuse.  But the solution comes with alleviating pain, not causing more of it.