The arc of history bends toward justice - but not nearly fast enough

As it happens, the current uprisings i the US over police murdering black people comes as I'm taking part in a contemporary history course, the most recent section of which had to do with "1968," aka, The Sixties.

I was reminded about how the various memories and ideological constructions of The Sixties come immediately to many people's minds in a situation like this. Rick Perlstein wrote 12 years ago about the centrality of that period in the way Americans understand current conflicts (Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen. History News Network 02/03/2008):

I realize it anew just about every day of this presidential campaign -- most recently when a bevy of Kennedys stood behind Obama last week and spoke of reviving the spirit of Camelot, and when the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks responded by making fine distinctions between "the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties" -- the "early-60s," which he took Obama to represent -- and the "late-60s," defined "by drug use and self-indulgence," of which the Clintons are the supposed avatars.

The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close....

Robert Self wrote of the period in "Bodies Count: The Sixties Body in American Politics" in  The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives (2013):

Innocent black bodies enduring violence became a hallmark of civil rights politics for the next de cade, an inescapable trope embraced by activists and visual media alike. ...

... the black freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s turned the violence of white supremacy against the southern racial order by making the oppression of actual bodies visible, especially through the tactical use of visual media. The civil rights generation would deploy black bodies to absorb and dramatize white violence. Then, in the late 1960s Black Power and black nationalism again transformed black bodies, this time into symbols of resistance and self-determination. Black freedom activists made their bodies into emblems of peaceful moral righteousness and, barely a generation later, transformed them into stunning symbols of personal and communal power and political projection. [my emphasis]

I confess that I've never felt like I've ever gotten an adequate conceptual grip on the use of the concepts of "bodies" in the way Self uses it here. He refers to it as “body politics,” which has become a standard academic term, as this article elaborates: Body Politics Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics 2013) But Self's point is a good way to understand part of how the memory of The Sixties, which is still very much a living memory for many, shapes contemporary understandings of politics.

But time obviously didn't stand still since the 1960s. And when we look at today's police violence, there are 50 years of developments since 1970 that shaped today's situation. (Bob Brigham, ‘They just fired on us’: Horrifying videos of cops ‘using journalists for target practice’ in Minneapolis Raw Story 05/30/2020)

There was the much-discussed-but-superficially-understood rise in violent crime that peaked in the early 1990s. There was the bipartisan response to it, which heavily featured laws and accompanying prison sentences that "treated" drug use and possession as felony crimes, when an actual paradigm of treating addiction as a medical condition was what was then and is now needed. There was the infamous federal crime bill of the 1990s and its many state-level imitators. There was the War on Terror that had a notable precursor in the federal reation to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, not all of which was well-conceived. The shift in policing to a even more militarized and counter-insurgency model that resulted has further encouraged the police to see the citizens as an enemy to be feared and fought.

I'm not in a mood at this moment to say anything that might sound remotely sympathetical to murderous psychopaths who happen to be wearing a police uniform. At the same time, part of the real background of the current situation is that the desperate condition among the substantial portion of the American public living in poverty creates conditions in which crime and violence thrive. (Current mainstream political realities would dictate that right here I should insert some qualifications to show I don't want to be seen as a frivolous hippie. But I'm really not in the mood right now.)

As all kind of advocates for the police will quickly point out, there are real violent criminals and real violent gangs who do antisocial things that have to be policed. And, yes, that creates an atmosphere where cops have to be fearful for their lives in even routine traffic stops. And none of that, none of that, justifies four cops choking a black guy to death just because they felt like murdering him.

Treating drug problems first and foremost as medical problems rather than a criminal problem and reducing the flood of small arms that flood American cities would make a huge difference for the better. Anyone who's legitimately worried about having arms for self-defense can deal with any such valid needs with shotguns. The Weimar-1920s-style Patriot Militia type groups can only function to the extent that they do because the police and prosecutors in the US and in European countries are too often "blind in the right eye." Without the willing toleration of at least some police, those groups couldn't function as they do. They can function as goon squads for authoritarian governments and movements. Their rhetoric about using their arsenals to fight for democracy against a tyrannical government is a sick joke.

That's not to say that violent far-right groups aren't a danger to cops and public officials. They very clearly are. That's why their sympathizers need to be kept out of law enforcement because they aren't actually on the side of the rule of law. That's not a matter of censoring opinion. It means that we need cops that both enforce and obey the law and don't kill people of any race unless it's absolutely necessary. White supremacists and their sympathizers and collaborators don't meet that qualification.

It may seem a bit incongrous. But I'll end this with a quote from Jerry Brown, responding to a question about how he was able to be elected as Governor of California in 1974 after St. Reagan's two terms in that position. It's a reflection on social progress that is both thoughtful and jaded. To adapt Obama's quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history may bend toward justice - but people have to decide to do the bending. From Jerry Brown: A Life in California Politics (Bancroft Library Oral History Center, 2020):

But I would say the fact that I was around, I could understand the value of being somewhat of an outsider. I mean I did have a pilot test. It’s called the 1966 campaign. We have Reagan, we have [Edmund] Brown [Sr., Jerry father who ran against Reagan for a third term as Governor in 1966], and then we see what happens. So unless you’re dense -- and as I said, I think most people are pretty dense, because they believe what should happen, based on their desires, is what must happen. But no, life doesn’t work that way. You know, the fact that we had a Civil War and 400,000 people died - it shouldn’t have been that way. We should have had a nice resolution, ended slavery, and kumbaya - gone on from there. But life doesn’t work that way. That’s why some people write about the tragic sense. That’s something we - I certainly had a familiarity with in my education. [my emphasis in bold]