{"id":79077,"date":"2014-08-23T08:25:19","date_gmt":"2014-08-23T12:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=79077"},"modified":"2014-08-23T09:23:58","modified_gmt":"2014-08-23T13:23:58","slug":"presumption-of-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/presumption-of-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"Presumption of Guilt"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Midwest is under heat alert, sweltering beneath a late summer sun. The temps have been steadily climbing for several days, with humidity stifling and little relief in sight. I suspect our collective sense of weariness with news emergencies, at home and around the world, feels similarly oppressive. I’m quite sure that residents of Ferguson, Missouri have had their fill of intimidation and night terrors, that all but the most determined are pleading for a return to normalcy. So much for the “lazy, hazy days of summer,” especially when the haze comes from smoke bombs and tear gas.<\/p>\n

\"PoliticalI’m not focused primarily on racial issues this week; we’ve covered that pretty well, with Eric speaking to more of that dynamic in\u00a0Friday’s\u00a0subscription issue, but there are a few tidbits to add that make the question of “Why Ferguson?” clearer. I’m more interested in following those cookie crumbs to the broader issue of class today, of the economic disparity that is becoming more apparent by the day, and another sliver of the “us\/them” dialogues that are part of our spiritual separation issue.<\/p>\n

No matter how many economists agree that tightening our belts and paying down debt do nothing to grow our economy, the Pubs continue to dig in their heels, refusing to sacrifice the ‘givers’ in order to satisfy the ‘takers.’ (That’s a Paul Randism, although it turns out the givers don’t actually give, just as trickle-down economics doesn’t actually trickle, so these characteristics might more truthfully be labeled the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To prove the point, House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems eager to hold the budget hostage again, should he win re-election. Rumors are flying that he intends\u00a0to make Obama open a vein to pay in exchange for funds to run the country.\u00a0For Mitch, it’s party over public good every time, and those pesky ‘takers’ can just eat cake.<\/p>\n

I’ve previously complained about the ‘shrinking middle class’ sound bite that is bandied about by politicians, including our president, suggesting that good citizens who ‘play by the rules’ no longer have access to a ‘level playing field.’ It seems to me that the meme itself is classist, and I wouldn’t have looked so closely at it if I hadn’t heard it so damned many times that I’m chaffed. It supposes that:<\/p>\n

1] playing by the rules is a prerequisite for deservedness, easy to accomplish in 21st century America, and even in our best interests, incentivized and rewarded:<\/p>\n

2] a level playing field is actually possible, given the lobbying and legislative coup on rule of law over the last thirty or so years and the Supreme Court’s most recent excess, giving corporate entities more rights than the average citizen;<\/p>\n

3] the assumption that the middle class is where most of us were, prior to Dubby’s Big Recession, and want to be again, even though that status in the middle requires us to earn between $40,000 and $95,000 per household and pit ourselves against continually shifting matters of job insecurity, taxation and inflation. These days, given the decline of unions and well-paying manufacturing jobs, the middle class is now singularly defined by skilled technicians and those in white collar and management positions. Are being a member of the middle class and obedience to the establishment synonymous?<\/p>\n

What’s missing from this equation? The poor, the disenfranchised, the chronically ill, elders and handicapped. Now add those who have limited educational opportunities, those who face domestic and community violence, those who are unable to find full-time work or any at all. Factor in those who are used up like tissue working at places like Wal-Mart, who bleeds their employees as much as they bleed the social services their workforce is required to depend upon. Count in single mothers working a job or two, underpaid and undervalued.<\/p>\n

Very few of these can even show up on the rolls of the lower-middle or lower class. These are the people we seldom hear about, either bordering on poverty, or locked within it.<\/p>\n

The list of reasons for this is seemingly endless, pulling at our shirt-tails, threatening to drag us down into hopelessness. Perhaps that’s why we seldom talk about it, even though examples of the kinds of socio-economic struggle that has long been ignored by those in a position to assist pop up on a daily basis in whack-a-mole fashion, calling our attention to their need and then fading from view as another critter turns our head. Who are these poor people, citizens of a shaky underclass, we wonder? Are they in the ghetto? Are they hiding in the dark of night?<\/p>\n

Know what’s also missing from this equation, dearhearts? Reality. The 2010 census showed that 50 percent — 1 out of 2 — in this nation either lives at low income or poverty level ($11,344 for a single person, $22,113 for a family of four). Statistics show that the largest share of SNAP (food stamps) go to white families, or at least they did before sequestration — we may now find them lining up at food banks on distribution day — and many of the people we see around us every day are either receiving some kind of assistance or are in dire need of it. Of course, rumors that the recession is over and has been for quite a while may not reflect on our own pay stub, but rest assured Wall Street and the 1% — including their betters, the .01% — have just uncorked another bottle of bubbly. It’s dog eat dog out there in the streets, and sharks eat both!<\/p>\n

Let’s go back to Ferguson for a moment, as an example of all of the above, and issues of race to boot. This is a little town where fundraising is done by\u00a0issuing police citations<\/a>\u00a0for minor city infractions payable to the municipal court. Some 12,108 cases and 24,532 warrants — an average of 1.5 cases and three warrants per household — fattened the city coffers by $2,635,400.00 last year. Ferguson, you may recall, is a city of just 21,000 low-income people, inappropriately targeted for pricey citations and without the means to fight a highly corrupt and deliberately opaque judicial system. After years of that kind of treatment, is it any wonder they’re in the streets today?<\/p>\n

Now, before you say that’s mostly about race — some of which I’ll grant you — you have to tell me that you’ve never been intimidated by a cop. I’ll leave much of my past behind and just stick to Missouri: once stopped by a Missouri Highway Patrolman, I asked a general question about out-of-state licensing and you’d have thought I’d called him out for six-guns at dusk. These people are accustomed to Yes-Sirs and No-Sirs, and that’s all they want to hear. They’re like Cartman on his Big Wheel, wearing his mirrored shades, yelling “Respect my author-a-tay!” Intimidation is the name of the game, and in Ferguson, intimation includes the occasional dead black kid lying in the street.<\/p>\n

And while, again, the majority of police personnel have more respect for the law than to bend it too far, there are many young souls out there who not only crave rules but take an inordinate amount of glee in enforcing them. According to Victor Kappeler, an associate dean at the Center for Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, this is systemic to the\u00a0culture of violence<\/a>\u00a0within law enforcement.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolicing has been a hypermasculine, conservative profession. And to a large extent, police culturally embrace violence as a form of problem solving,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd when you equip them in [such] a way and you have a lack of leadership in the police agencies, this is the kind of behavior you\u2019re going to see as a result. A lot of these guys live for these kinds of situations \u2014 the opportunity to use force and to work a riot.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We’ve talked about the courage lent us by Jupiter moving into Leo, but think about the kind of courage that witnesses to Brown’s shooting have shown. They’ll be staying when the reporters take their leave. So will Ferguson’s 53 cops, including, quite probably, the man who thought killing the big black kid easier than dealing with him. Target much? The Klan and their supporters have raised well over $135,000 for Officer Wilson, who continues to keep a low profile, although he must know that the incidence of cops actually being\u00a0held accountable<\/a>\u00a0for these events is minimal. According to Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles, “It is really hard to convict a police officer, they get a super presumption of innocence.”<\/p>\n

As to the economic\/racial mix of issues that have exploded in this case, let’s pick just one today. The picture we most often see of Mike Brown shows him looming large and unsmiling, his face unreadable. Occasionally we see the picture of him in cap and gown, graduating from high school. In an early interview, Mike Brown’s mother asked a reporter, “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many.” Sadly, this is not just the cry of one anguished mother, but hundreds of thousands, and it’s not just black children at risk.<\/p>\n

In Ferguson, where the local high school is one of only a handful no longer accredited by the state, only 53 percent of kids graduate. It would be fair to blame much of that problem on the local poverty and social instability that qualify 90 percent of students for free or subsidized lunches, leaving many of these kids hungry during the summer months. The state considers this school district ‘failed,’ and greater St. Louis named it the worst school in the area.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, because of zero-tolerance policies, “infractions such as insubordination, uniform violation, horseplay, truancy, and tardiness” are subject to 10-day suspensions — or worse, criminalization into the juvenile justice system — which typically drive students to quit rather than stay in school. In a state that does not prop up its\u00a0needy schools<\/a>, too often reflecting the struggling socio-economic areas in which they reside, Ferguson finds itself at the end of the line in a geographical and sociopolitical location where “only 14 other states had school funding distribution systems that were more unfair than Missouri’s.”<\/p>\n

From a national policy point of view there’s a bit of good news on that front. The administration is taking a closer look at “teaching to the test,” a policy that has failed to educate except in the narrowest of terms. Education itself has become a political football in the last decade, creating havoc within school systems, which many argue has contributed to America’s competitive decline. Zero-tolerance policy — the student equivalent of the “tough on crime” policies popularized in the mid-90s — is being scrutinized as well, considering its abject failure to correct behavior problems. And while race is highly visible in the “school to prison” pipeline that unfairly targets children of color, it creates a high-wire balancing act for the maturity level of anyone’s young child.<\/p>\n

In the good old days, if your kid had a problem in pre-school or kindergarten, a parent was made aware that their child was not mature enough for a classroom situation. You kept them home a year. Now, little kids are being bounced out, judged troublemakers early on, and especially when they are children of color. Bob Herbert outlined this\u00a0disturbing trend<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0in his essay on roots of racism in Ferguson:<\/p>\n

I will never forget traveling to Avon Park, Florida, a few years ago to cover the case of an African-American girl in kindergarten who was arrested by the police, handcuffed and taken to the police station in the back seat of a patrol car because she had thrown a tantrum in the classroom. When I interviewed the police chief, I expressed amazement that this had happened to a six-year-old. His reply came in an instant: “Do you think this is the first six-year-old we’ve arrested?”<\/p>\n

Handcuffing the child had proved difficult. “You can’t handcuff them on their wrists because their wrists are too small,” the chief explained, “so you have to handcuff them up by their biceps.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What will life be like, I wonder, if you discover that you are under siege by a hostile and authoritarian presence at the tender age of six? How could any child, of any ethnicity, trust authority after that? And how level can we consider this child’s playing field as she enters into adulthood?<\/p>\n

In January, Obama urged an end to harsh zero-tolerance policies and recently, Los Angeles School District– 1,100 schools, 640,000 students — abandoned its zero-tolerance policy, which had criminalized approximately 9,000 students in the 2011-12 school year with tickets and arrests. Ninety-three percent of them were African American or Latino students from low income areas. Errant students will now be sent to counselors or mandated interventions rather than delivered into the arms of the juvenile justice system.<\/p>\n

Piece by piece, we’re making progress on these kinds of domestic problems — not in big bites, but little nibbles — and I’m continually surprised at all that the Obama administration influences behind the scenes. I think when all is said and done, we’ll\u00a0be amazed that his people could accomplish so much walking while trying to chew the more explosive and controversial gum of foreign affairs, security and environmental issues, and just plain politicking.<\/p>\n

BUT — there’s always a but — there is a worrisome level of danger now that I didn’t feel twenty years ago, or even\u00a0forty.\u00a0The cracks in the Liberty Bell\u00a0have grown\u00a0deeper with each leap in technology, pitting us against ourselves.\u00a0Even with those that we support, among those that have our cooperation, since 9-11, very few of us enjoy the “presumption of innocence.” We are all presumed guilty, thanks to the fear that infects the human collective.<\/p>\n

Presumption of guilt is the natural extension of humanity’s misunderstanding of itself. The ‘other’ must be the one that’s making the boat rock, it SURELY can’t be me, tap dancing here in the bow. In order to look at ourselves, we need not just a heavy shot of courage but an understanding of human nature that allows us to put what we find in proper perspective. Our Judeo\/Christian underpinnings solidifies the concept of guilt by declaring us a creature of original sin, requiring us to bury our authentic feelings or face the condemnation of our repressive culture. We’re programmed for guilt.<\/p>\n

I read a recent study that suggested that conservatives see things in black and white, either\/or, because it is the least threatening way to perceive a stimulus. Falling back on tradition, complete with an established laundry list of moral platitudes, creates a comfort zone from which we do not have to do much thinking, or threaten our ego by taking too close a look at who we are and why. Liberals are typically less anxious and have an easier go of it, less fearful of choices and new ideas but they, too,\u00a0suffer a mix of impulses.<\/p>\n

We know that fears can be neatly wrapped up by projecting our own trespasses outside of ourselves and onto those guilty ‘others’ who so often represent our shadow-self, that undiscovered self we occasionally glimpse before we quickly turn away. Like matters of racism, we may not even be aware that we’re doing it, nor conscious that the whole of our lives reverberate with that darker energy. And, seriously, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that fear is what runs this game we play with one another.<\/p>\n

But there is another game we could play if we\u00a0choose it, a loving one. What would the world look like if we gave ourselves a pass, stopped self-criticizing, stopped projecting? What if we presumed ourselves innocent, and everyone around us as well? That’s the larger template, isn’t it? Or is that just too airy-fairy? Our innate innocence\u00a0is a<\/em>\u00a0tenet of\u00a0A Course In Miracles<\/em><\/em>, the condition of our indwelling Higher Self, and as I was thinking about how dark this separation game of finger-pointing and demonizing has become, I thought of a passage I appreciate from the\u00a0Workbook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This week, as much of the world simmered in chaos, I was wondering how we might come back around to forgiveness, how we could remember our own innocence and relieve ourselves of this deadly presumption of guilt that drives us to attack another. It’s only by remembering that we are part of one another, all the same human family, that we can cast off this useless bias and judgment, like slipping off a too-tight shoe that has hobbled us for so long. And once we do, finally free of the toxic guilt that hides our face from the Light, then?<\/p>\n

“He does not have to fight to save himself. He does not have to kill the dragons which he thought pursued him. Nor need he erect the heavy walls of stone and iron doors he thought would make him safe. He can remove the ponderous and useless armor made to chain his mind to fear and misery. His step is light, and as he lifts his foot to stride ahead a star is left behind, to point the way to those who follow him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves The Midwest is under heat alert, sweltering beneath a late summer sun. The temps have been steadily climbing for several days, with humidity stifling and little relief in sight. I suspect our collective sense of weariness with news emergencies, at home and around the world, feels similarly oppressive. I’m … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}