Dateline: The Big Easy, New Orleans, Louisiana. As I sit here in my hotel room on my fourth night away from home, I am marveling at how easy it’s been to be away in the Big Easy — a sharp contrast to days not so long ago when leaving three kids, two dogs, and one husband at home required much planning and delegation of duties.
This time Katie went from big sister to substitute suburban mom quite nicely. It helps that her brother is now 16 and needs not so much mothering as driving and feeding. He knows where he has to be and when and has plenty of input and independence in his day-to-day management, so the burden of business travel for this suburban mom is much lighter than it used to be.
Yes, children grow up; routines and responsibilities are accepted and completed; families learn, change, and evolve with time. Progress is made to a higher plane of organization and existence. Of course, it is only right that this happens; this should be the expected course of events, and for that I am grateful.
If only race relations and human progress could have that same evolutionary pattern. If only time, knowledge, and experience could elevate everyone to an advanced level of behavior, where kindness, understanding, and acceptance could rise, even just a tiny notch, with time and each succeeding generation.
But if anything can be observed from the burning of Baltimore this week, it is that human development is not so upwardly linear, that for every step taken forward, it seems that we take another step or two back, or at the very best, move sideways.
Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray. Black men whose lives were taken prematurely at the hands of white police officers. I won’t go into the reasons behind their interaction with law enforcement; it has been established that these men were not saints. Each case, each man, each confrontation, is different, but the one common denominator is color. There’s also the brutal reality that it is 2015, and yet, these stories of violence and unrest could have come straight out of the tempestuous 1960s, and even the violent post Civil War period when black-white relations were turned upside down and a new page had been turned.
Katie was sad to see Baltimore broadcast to the world in such a negative light. She spent four happy years there in college and grew to love the city with its distinctive personality, and all of its diverse nooks and crannies and people. The Inner Harbor, Camden Yards, Mount Vernon, Fells Point, Canton, Federal Hill; these are just some of the neighborhoods that I had grown to love as well, and it was heartbreaking to see a bunch of under-occupied thugs and hooligans — many of them high school students out for a spring lark — confirm only the worst stereotypes about Baltimore and set the city back decades in its efforts to clean up its image.
Of course, I understand the hardship and horrors of being a young person in the inner city, especially a young person of color, disillusioned, underserved, and outraged by injustice in general, and specifically, by the horrific death of a young black man. I’m outraged too. Again, Freddie Gray was no saint, but he did not deserve to die as he did.
As for the rioters: destroying your hometown, torching a long wished for and badly needed senior center, burning and looting a neighborhood pharmacy, attacking innocent bystanders, and law enforcement — this is no way to further your cause or win people to it.
There has been much made of the mother who — catching her high school son in a ski mask and part of the riots — beat him in front of the television cameras. While I don’t agree with the violence of her attack on her own kid (I don’t believe in corporal punishment, and I do believe that violence only begets more violence), I do understand the emotions behind her actions: angry, sad, and frightened that my son could become another Freddie Gray. I also agree with the pundits who are calling for more parents to take control of their kids.
On the floor of the convention I’m attending this week, all of the television monitors were turned to the Baltimore riots, and all eyes remained glued to the unfolding chaos, even as the death toll from the earthquake in Nepal continued to climb into the thousands.
Given the death and destruction that Mother Nature can wreak, given the horror that can rain down upon us from terrorist groups that don’t know us but hate us, given the unpredictability of life and death on any given day, would it be really so difficult to see each other, accept, and even love, beyond the prism of color?
Sadly, as the lessons of Baltimore, Ferguson, and North Charleston have taught us, the answer is yes, it is too difficult. Apparently, we cannot accept and love with a colorblind outlook. Not even in 2015, with a black president and newly sworn in black, female attorney general of the United States. And, as history has shown us, not likely in 10, 20, or 30 years either, since human DNA seems incapable of remembering social progress and passing it along to the next generation.
