Brad Ayala was just standing there, and a cop shot him in the head.
We've been so angry for so long we've forgotten about why we're angry.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’ve got a real one this week, including an excerpt from Loriana Hernandez-Aldama’s self-help memoir Becoming the Story, the conclusion of Stefan Hankin’s three-part series Dems are the f*cking worst, and the latest chapter in Frank A. Spring’s debut novel, Regulator.
As always, we recommend things to do (make the Barefoot Contessa’s seafood chowder), read (Ryan Holiday’s denunciation of banning books), watch (HBO Max’s Somebody Somewhere), and listen to (Reveena’s “Kathy Left 4 Kathmandu”).
And before we get started, I need your help: Please nominate Forget the Alamo for Best New Book by an Austin Writer in the Austin Chronicle’s “Best of Austin 2021” (even though, yes, technically it was written not by an Austin author but three of us).
But first, have you ever heard of Brad Ayala?
Brad Ayala was a 16-year-old kid just getting off work at a sandwich shop, so he thought he would go check out the protests. The uprising following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, had spread across the country, first to Memphis (where the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery got included), Los Angeles, and St. Louis. There was some looting. Some fires got started, and protestors temporarily shut down the 101 in LA, but mostly the protests against police violence were peaceful, except when they were met with police violence. By the time the protests reached Austin, President Trump had tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” People were on edge, angry about the police violence, angry about the fires and looting, angry at the president.
By the time Ayala got there, protestors had shut down the freeway that divides east Austin from downtown. A line of police were trying to clear the road, using tear gas and what became often referred to as “less lethal” armaments, such as rubber bullets and flexible baton rounds, which are small fabric bags filled with led shot. Later, in the news they were often referred to as beanbags, but that undersells how much damage they can do.
It was a nasty scene, so Ayala stayed well away from the action. In the picture above you can see the line of police at the bottom. Up and to the right, at least thirty yards away, up there by the big campaign signs and not close to any of the action stands Ayala in his sandwich shop uniform of blue polo and khakis. With his hands in his pockets, standing perfectly still away from the chaos, he looks about as threatening as a dandelion.
Of course, I wasn’t there. If I’d been there it might have looked different. Some people saw what was going on around the country as a long-overdue reckoning on police violence, i.e., protests, and some saw it as unchecked lawlessness, i.e., riots. But what united Americans was that everyone was Big Angry.
This is the third week in a row that I’m going to mention Dr. James W. Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas and the author of The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, and I feel compelled to reassure or perhaps apologize that this is not, in fact, becoming a Jamie Pennebaker fan blog. But when the city settled two lawsuits for $10 million and the district attorney indicted 19 police officers stemming from the police violence in Austin in late May 2020, I was reminded of something Pennebaker had told me.
Remember last week when we talked about his research that found COVID-19 elevated our anxiety to historically high levels that, because they were sustained, altered our psychological states, “reflecting a new normal”? That was March, April, and May.
Then George Floyd was killed, kicking off what he calls “engagement in racial issues” that “has been sustained in a manner unlike anything seen since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.” But this didn’t happen in the ‘60s but in a fun house version of history when we were also living through a reboot of the Spanish flu, stuck at home doomscrolling while the President aped a Lindbergesque pose of a godly strongman, having the streets cleared of protestors so he could pose with a Bible by a church he never attended. Suddenly, Americans weren’t anxious about the plague anymore. We were angry.
In a yet-to-be published study co-written with social scientists from Rice, the University of Michigan, and UT called “The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 led to decreased preoccupation with the pandemic,” Pennebaker and his co-authors found to their apparent surprise that not only did the BLM protests knock our focus off of the pandemic but also kept our attention for the rest of the year. “The increased engagement was unlike anything seen in the five-year period explored in our dataset,” they write. “Typically, interest in race-related issues dies down within a few weeks after a key event, including after past incidents of police brutality.”
And that interest was characterized by anger. “When it comes to people’s emotional state, levels of anxiety doubled at the start of the pandemic while levels of anger doubled after Floyd’s death,” they write. “Both anger and anxiety remained elevated at the end of August.” Remember, people, the baseline was waking up every day and Donald J. Trump was president. That was normal.
So here we were, America, riding historically elevated levels of anxiety and anger, and unlike past events, whether we’re talking Charlottesville or SARS, the anxiety and anger remained elevated. What would normally be a spike became a plateau. We remained freaked the ever-living heck out for longer than our factory specifications recommended. Flight or fight? Why choose when you can jack up the murder rate by 30%, steal whatever isn’t nailed down, commit a historically staggering number of hate crimes, and engage in a little light insurrection. Emotionally speaking, the state of the union is effed in the bee.
The anger jumped the rails and has spread o’er the land. You hear a lot of talk these days about anger. You hear it more and more. We’re supposed to remember we’re all Americans and relearn how not to hate our fellow man.
Big Anger has admittedly exacted a horrible toll on our national psyche and continues to do so, but the discourse about the anger now centers on the people who are angry who are mad at Black Lives Matter, mad that their school districts might provide equity training to teachers and queer books to schoolchildren, mad that they have to wear a mask or get vaccinated, mad that someone somewhere might be teaching history in a way that ruffles their baby bunny fee fees, mad oh so mad Ineedtospeakwiththemanager! Before, the people who were Big Angry wanted the police to stop murdering Black people or at least maybe possibly get arrested for it. Now the people who are Big Angry want schools to stop talking about racism or the Holocaust or anything else that might make white kids question the inherent blamelessness of whiteness.
Into this particular punchbowl dropped a couple pieces of news recently, and right here in Austin, to boot. First, the city settled a couple lawsuits for a total of $10 million brought by two protestors injured by the police in 2020. One concerned a college student who was hit by bean bags when police missed someone who threw a water bottle and hit him instead, fracturing his skull and causing brain damage. He was in intensive care for three weeks. The other lawsuit was a brought by someone whose jaw was broken by a bean bag, which sounds a lot nicer than “weaponized bag of lead.”
Those settlements were preamble to the big news that a grand jury was returning indictments against 19 Austin police officers. The police chief said he was confident that nothing the officers did “would rise to the level of a criminal violation,” which makes it sound like he’s backing the blue but which also gives him wiggle room should a jury disagree. The city manager, in a triumph of misguided bureaucratic thumb sucking, came out against the district attorney, saying, “Any indictments will heighten the anxiety of our officers.” Heaven forfend.
One of those officers mentioned in the news reports about the indictments was Nicholas Gebhart, who was in that picture up above, clearing the freeway while Ayala watched well apart from the action, standing perfectly still with his hands in his pockets. In a frame filled with chaos, he is still, at least until Gebhart raises his shotgun and fires a bean bag at Ayala’s head. One second he’s standing there. And then he’s falling straight down. He falls so quickly, so straight, that it looks like he’s being pulled down. And then he doesn’t move. His brother said he needed seven hours of surgery.
I wrote back in June 2020 how the police violence in response to protests about police violence forced me to accept as normal what I had previously rationalized or written off as isolated incidents. And though there were many examples of excessive force by the police that day, it was Ayala’s fall that stuck with me. One moment he’s a curious, 16-year-old boy standing away from the action, his hands in his pockets. The next he’s a body on the ground. Maybe it’s because I have a son Ayala’s age, but I really don’t care if getting indicted heighten’s Gebhart’s anxiety.
We cannot sustain much longer this heightened state of anxiety and fear, or at least we can’t and keep a country. But there’s a greater danger in Turning the Page, or Agreeing to Disagree. Since then, Austin’s done a good job reforming the police department, particularly in overhauling the police academy. And I’m proud of the district attorney for getting indictments where his predecessors would not have. But I’m not going to be done being angry until Ayala and others get justice.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting by
Rooting for Estonia
Dancing to a Cheeto
Hiring a TV engineer
Paying more than MSRP
Being interviewed by robots
Starting businesses at a record clip
Patrolling the border with robot dogs
WFH because of choice, not necessity
Looking for love in all the wrong places
Finally requiring insurance to own a gun
Making the Barefoot Contessa’s seafood chowder
Reading Clausewitz’s On War as a parenting book
What I’m reading
Russell Gold: “One Candidate Shows Her Breasts. Another Dies Tragically. A Third Is Accused of Graft.” - This is just the latest example of why I’m glad Texas Monthly hired my friend Russell.
“I have boobs; welcome to having boobs, Russell. When you have boobs, you get held to different standards.”
Ryan Holiday: “Our Country is Filled with Problems; Reading Too Many Books Isn’t One of Them” - Ryan’s giving away banned books at his bookstore in Bastrop. Kudos.
As my wife and bookstore partner Samantha reminded me, to sit by while the government or your fellow citizens ban books is to endorse it. Each of us has an obligation to push back against the anti-intellectual bent of our time—whether it comes from the right or the left.
Charlie Warzel: “The Bad Ideas Our Brains Can’t Shake” - This article made me sick to my stomach with anxiety that I’m not good enough at my job.
…there’s still so much politicians and public-health communicators could learn from thinking about the continued influence effect and the way to communicate risk in future crises. In the case of COVID, there’s been a particular challenge, which is that science and politics collided quickly on a global stage. Sometimes, like in the case of discouraging masking or the decision to delay booster shots, policy decisions designed to shape public behavior (preventing shortages of masks for health-care workers) were framed as purely scientific decisions. People were told to “trust the science” but what officials were really saying was to “trust specific scientific and political institutions, who are working off of science that is changing daily”…
What I’m watching
Can’t say enough good things about HBO Max’s Somebody Somewhere, and neither can NPR’s Glen Weldon and the rest of the gang at Pop Culture Happy Hour.
As odious as I find true crime, Netflix has a new season of Catching Killers out that my dad is on for his role in helping catch the Happy Face Killer.
What I’m listening to
Really digging “Kathy Left 4 Kathmandu,” a track from her latest album, Asha’s Awakening.
Kevin Johansen’s Latin-infused cover of of The Cure’s “Modern Love” is 10 years old. Glad I finally caught it.
After nearly 50 years, Lavender Country is back with a sophomore album. Yes, I’m adding this just for Charlie Bonner. Yes, I’m OK with that.
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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback this June!