Radical Acceptance
This week Robin Whetstone is back with another chapter from her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket. Also, remember last month when Elie Jacobs showed us what it’s like to get through a day sharing an 800-square-foot apartment with a working wife and a potty-training toddler? Well, this week it’s his wife’s turn. And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to.
But first, did I ever tell you about the time I hung out with the riot police in Moscow?
When I wrote for an English-language tabloid for expatriates in Moscow, I talked my way onto a ride along with a busload of riot police. All night we stopped at kiosks where they would hit up the shopkeepers for bribes and roadies for the commander, who got so drunk as the night wore on that his lieutenant had to take his Kalashnikov away when he pointed it at me and slurred an intention to force a sex act on Hillary Clinton, who was then the First Lady. I turned in an article that made them sound like corrupt bumblers, but then again I wasn’t the one getting robbed by a busload of police in body armor.
Naked, venal incompetence and corruption by law enforcement was the rule in Moscow. Bribes were so common that officers would compete for traffic duty because it offered an off-the-books pay raise. In United States, I thought, such instances of corruption, buffoonery, and malevolence represented exceptions to an otherwise solid rule.
When Bill Clinton became president, I came home from Moscow. I felt called to serve and spent a couple decades in the sublimated warfare we call political campaigns. We’re better than those countries. We transfer power peacefully. We don’t shoot each other.
In 2015, I went to work for Austin’s Mayor and ended up working alongside his security detail. We worked together when an Austin police officer shot and killed a naked Black teenage boy, when an Austin police officer beat a second-grade teacher because she didn’t put her feet in the right place, and when three officers beat a jaywalker because he wouldn’t go facedown on the sidewalk fast enough for them. But I also wrote the Mayor’s remarks to salute the officer who got off the world’s luckiest shot to drop a domestic terrorist. I was there when officers ran toward the serial bomber to stop him from blowing himself up. I knew these people. I believed in them. Bad apples could be fired. Policing could be improved with progressive reforms.
Everyone has seen footage of police attacking peaceful protestors. Below are just the examples from Austin:
Look at the tall man wearing the bright blue shirt in the upper right of the frame below.
Below, they opened fire after being splashed with water. Water.
It sure didn’t take much for police in this country to shoot at peaceful protestors. Maybe it was a President who told them they were at war. Maybe it’s a structure imperviousness to accountability. Maybe it’s training that teaches police to dominate and subdue and not de-escalate. Maybe it’s because “policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery.”
We have reached a point in Austin in which public safety officers are the biggest threat to public safety.
We have ended up with a system that legally excuses a cop for killing an unarmed Black man if he says he felt scared but requires Black people to remain calm, composed, and deferential when they have a gun pointed at them — even when they have done nothing wrong.
We have arrived at a moment in history when the United Nations is openly comparing police violence in present-day United States to the “racial terror lynching of the past.”
We have reached a point where marching peacefully in your hometown makes you a Freedom Rider.
Those who marched have my gratitude and admiration. I did not because I was unable to reconcile my hopelessness about the possibility of racial justice and my contempt for the young, white activists who initially co-opted the George Floyd protests with mindless vandalism and performative hooliganism. But people kept showing up, night after night, and the police went on war footing against their own countrymen for no greater sin than exercising their rights as Americans.
I was raised a patriot, proud that I lived in the Shining City on the Hill. I put my hand over my heart and meant it when I pledged my allegiance to the flag. I sang love songs to America into adulthood, telling her she was beautiful and blessed by God. I made allowances for her, rationalizing that things had been worse, so they must be getting better. I found her excesses and absurdities endearing, never quite owning up how I was insulated from her worst moods.
I am going to work harder to practice radical acceptance, because if police are killing unarmed Black Americans so often that I become numb to it then it’s not the exception, it’s the rule. When a tree produces this many bad apples, maybe it’s time to rip it up by the roots and plant something new.
Red Ticket: 66 Sykharevskaya
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, she moves into her new apartment and manages to avoid getting deported in the process.
Elizabeth’s Day
by Elizabeth Jacobs
In May, we heard from Elie Jacobs about what it was like to share 800 square feet with a working wife and a potty-training toddler. A month has passed, and his wife, Elizabeth, has lost her job as a fashion designer in New York. Today, it’s her turn.
RIP
How we’re getting through this
Going to summer school
Not being surprised by this at all
Listening to The Daily Stoic podcast
Making homemade Hamburger Helper
What I’m reading
CNBC: “Global CFOs more negative on economy and expect big coronavirus hit to their company in 2020: Survey”
Center for Ethics and Rule of Law: “Reforming police recruitment and training is a national security imperative”
GQ: “The Remaking of Steve Buscemi”
The Guardian: “Great speeches of the 20th century: Emmeline Pankhurst's Freedom or death”
They have said to us, government rests upon force, the women haven't force, so they must submit. Well, we are showing them that government does not rest upon force at all: it rests upon consent. As long as women consent to be unjustly governed, they can be, but directly women say: "We withhold our consent, we will not be governed any longer so long as that government is unjust." Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.
Monica Hesse: “‘Karens’ try to make unequal power structures work for them”
Ryan Holiday: “Stoicism isn’t Pessimistic. It’s Boldly Optimistic.”
Paul Kane: “Copying the GOP, Democrats focus on data exchange with Dean leading the charge”
Morning Consult: “Brands Are Speaking Out on Black Lives Matter. How Are Consumers Going to Respond?”
Alexandra Petri: “Someone who didn’t know better might think death by ‘underlying health conditions’ was murder”
Someone who did not know any better might think that if no officer had been involved, these conditions would not have been sufficient to bring about death at all, and that “the combined effects of underlying health conditions and being restrained by the police” is doing a tremendous amount of work. Why, the combined effects of underlying health conditions and fatal force could kill almost anyone. Someone who did not know any better might think this was murder.
San Francisco Chronicle: “SF, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn: 'Never seen anything like it'“
Rents for a one-bedroom apartment dropped most in the cities richest in high-paying tech jobs, falling 9.2% in San Francisco compared with May of 2019. In Mountain View, home to Google, rents fell 15.9% year over year, while in Apple’s hometown of Cupertino rents dipped 14.3%, according to the rental search engine Zumper. In San Bruno, where YouTube has its offices, rents tumbled 14.9%.
Omar Wasow: “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”
Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.”
WaPo: “America’s response to coronavirus pandemic is ‘incomprehensibly incoherent,’ says historian who studied the 1918 flu”
Dan Zak: “The pandemic isn’t over. But America sure seems over it.”
What I’m watching
The Office + Steve Carrell doing the Felonious Gru voice = Space Force, a funnier idea than a show, for now, but when it grounds itself in real emotion the show becomes surprisingly effective. It’s a goof until it’s real, and then damn.
What I’m listening to
On Monday, I felt like giving up, and then I listened to The Daily Stoic podcast, “You Always Have the Power to Resist.” I don’t feel like giving up anymore.
Ace Tee, a German-Ghanaian optimist, was supposed to visit Austin for SXSW with her updated ‘90s R&B vibe. Late in 2016, she posted the video for “Bist du down?” (Are you down?), and it jumped borders and got her noticed by the global music nerd press.
German is her second language, but it sounds alright coming off her tongue. Stephen F. Thompson included Ace Tee on the Austin 100, NPR’s curation of the up-and-coming musical acts he was looking forward to seeing in Austin. We’re going to have to settle for enjoying her music remotely for now, indoors, hoping that SXSW survives in a post-pandemic future. What do you say? Bist du down?
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