Assaulted

It was a Saturday afternoon, 3:30. I was returning from a long overdue run, a habit I have difficulty maintaining in winter. I could tell something was going on in the courtyard in front of my apartment building, because people were ambling over to it, as people are wont to do when drama is occuring in public spaces. I circled around them and approached around the side. Some guy in a baseball cap was screaming at a girl.

My mistake was in not taking the situation seriously enough. It was my building, after all, on a Saturday afternoon. This guy and his problems were in my way.

These are mere excuses.

Think of how I must have looked to him. A white boy, wearing strange running clothes, my old lightweight jacket much too small. Vibram FiveFingers on my feet. In the midst of the gathering handful of Dominican men, I was the one who stood out. I’ve learned, since moving to NYC, that I am much smaller than the average city male. I was a perfect target in that moment.

In that moment, as men gathered to watch him in his turmoil, his eyes locked on mine. His face was bloodied. He had been in an altercation. He was charged with anger and shame. He was taller and heavier than I.

“What the fuck are you looking at, white boy?”

He charged. I backed up, not quite believing that anyone would just begin assaulting a stranger without any reason. He did.

I ducked and backed up and ran a little bit. Apparently, this was an invitation to him for full on onslaught. On hindsight, the smart thing would have been to run completely. I would have easily outpaced him. But part of me was outraged. This was my building! So I stopped and faced him, as he commenced swinging. He missed most of his punches, but grabbed my jacket and threw me down on the sidewalk and dragged me down to the corner of the street.

I managed to mostly maintain my balance and get back to my feet after landing on my knees, but he was on me, kicking and punching. I was able to avoid any serious blows, but I could sense in that moment that I was utterly overpowered. I was a victim.

“Fuck you, cracker! Fuck you, cracker!” he shouted with every attempted blow. I was the representation for him of everything that had gone wrong in his life. The vessel for his release of anger, shame, and fear.

Before he could cause any serious damage, a couple of the bigger bystanders chased him away.

“Never come back here again!” two of them shouted, as the guy backed away down the street cussing them out.

One of them made sure I was OK, and continually assured me that this sort of thing doesn’t happen around here (unfortunately, not entirely true. My neighborhood isn’t exactly the pinnacle of peace. My wife witnessed a man stabbed in broad daylight last year). I nodded and shook his hand. I wasn’t all that shaken up, all things considered. In my last 2 years in the classroom, aggression and violence were unfortunately somewhat common, so perhaps I wasn’t as prone to getting emotionally aggravated (at least, not immediately). I was bleeding in places, but otherwise intact. He seemed to have landed a kick or punch to the back of my head, and a few on my body, but nothing on my face.

It turns out that he had been in some kind of fight with his “friends” who lived in my building, and had been beaten up with a glass bottle (hence the bleeding face).

Later that night, as I lay in bed, I kept reliving those moments in my mind. “Your heart is racing,” my wife told me.

This was the worst aftereffect of senseless violence, the replaying, over and over. Asking myself why I didn’t immediately attack. Angry at myself for letting myself get into the space of a person who was obviously in a heightened state of aggression. I recognized that if this hadn’t happened in the middle of the day, I knew that I would have been seriously hurt.

I could tell myself that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the fact is, I let my guard down and I walked into a situation without better assessing the danger. This could have been avoided.

Lesson learned.

Restorative Justice and Perspectival Shifts

There’s an interesting article in The Independent on ‘restorative justice’ methods in Britain which deal with bullying in some schools. The restorative justice approach, based on Maori cultural principles, attempts to deal with bullying not through punishment, but through face-to-face facilitated discussion and reconciliation between victim and offender. Having been bullied once upon a time myself in my childhood, simply because I was a quiet and introverted kid, I can well understand the ineffectiveness of attempting to “tattletale” on the bully. All that happens is that you make them more angry, and they will only seek later to make you pay for telling on them and getting them in trouble.

The restorative justice approach sits the bully and their victim down together, and the victim tells the bully what the effects of their bullying have done to their lives. The bully is thus shown quite viscerally what the effect of his/her actions has wrought, and he or she is thus given the full action-and-consequence perspective that they had not thought through before. It teaches them to understand the victim’s perspective. Once this perspective is developed, 9 times out of 10 the bully has lost all desire to continue abusing another human being. Because no longer can they pretend they don’t know what they are doing.

What a unique and deceptively simple approach to justice! Community and communication based as opposed to hierarchical law based. Because law, even when developed with noble ethos and egalitarian interests in mind, is set in stone—well not stone, because it can be amended, but more like thickly stirred sludge—and is little able to adapt to unique particular circumstances and contexts. Our law is a law focused on punishment and retribution, suing and money kickbacks, with little to no compassion and healing.

I just realized from the article that I had already unwittingly been training some of my workers in restorative justice approaches when it came to dealing with matters of poor cleaning jobs done by staff under them. I tell them that instead of yelling at people and making them feel bad, simply take the person into the place where they failed to clean adequately and show them visually what they missed. Once they have an understanding of this, they will not usually make the same mistakes again, unless they really are just asswipes. The fact is that most people simply do not always have the oversight and follow through of thought that takes them to the point of realizing the bigger picture, unless they are specifically shown the bigger picture. Then they get the A-ha moment.

Our culture, I often think, works from the angle of assuming that people are inherently stupid and pretty much worthless except as mindless consumers, spoonfed drivel and guidance from above. But on the contrary, I think that people are innately quite capable of doing highly creative acts of beauty, if given half a chance. It’s this ‘half a chance’ that is oftentimes missing in most situations. The most potent power that we all hold in the world is our perspective, and if most people’s perspectives are delimited and negative, then that has a profound affect on everyone. Even the simple inner act of allowing another human being to exist beyond the box that you daily choose to confine them in can have amazing consequences. All you did was change the way you look, and then the outer world shifted! Is this possible? It is. It happens every day. The little revolutions. The little openings of light shining from within making their way into another’s eyes.

Time to Grow Up

Systems of exclusion—this is what we learned in primary school. Find a niche, fit yourself in, make fun of the kid who stands out (even when you were one of them). This is survival mechanics, biological manifestation, pattern recognition. Learned behavior. Although there was always that part of you that understood that the outcasts, the sore-thumbs, were in fact much closer to you than you cared to admit. That you were in fact dependent on them to give yourself purpose and meaning.

You grow older, and as your awareness of the wider world extends, so too does your need for readily definable enemies. Again, there are given culturally or sociologically established minorities: the homeless, perhaps, if you need something closer to home; or homosexuals; or maybe simply the dark-skinned turbaned men from gutteral lands on the evening news waving guns. “Here, it’s ok,” your peers and consumer media tells you, “you can hate these people. They are different.” And thus, you can pretend to know who you are. You are not them—you are God fearing, freedom loving, money making, success driven. You are clean, you are whole, you are pure.

Maybe you come to realize—or maybe you do not, given your level of intelligence and ability to imagine—that at some level, you are only hating yourself. That you are not representative of some cultural, sociological elite. That such an elite does not exist. That this so-called “elite” in fact consists of a conglomeration of power hungry, unscrupulous warlords, gang leaders, fighting like rats for their little piece of turf. And everyone in between either living their lives heedless, caught in the crossfire, or simply pawns in the play by play, puppets on strings. And this is the part of yourself, this subservient mass of complacent fodder and indignant impotence, that you have been pushing away as an “other” and hating. This is the part of yourself that you don’t want to see. The part of yourself that sits at street corners and begs for money, the part of yourself that turns a trick in the spaces between lamplight on side streets downtown, the part of yourself that sleeps in doorways, the part of yourself that picks pounds of fruit during harvest seasons for a few cents, the part of yourself that crosses the border in the desert without food or water, the part of yourself that talks to yourself in tongues, the part of yourself that shakes uncontrollably, the part of yourself riven, stricken, striped with a subharmonic pulse of the moon that can’t be named, can’t be helped, can’t be driven into the light of the day.

Children are reflective of this rift. They are growing increasingly distant from what is understood, while ever increasingly congealed as an easily groomed consumer group. They are labeled with acronyms, thrown into detention centers, fed with pharmeceuticals, whipped with crafty standardized fill-in-the-bubble questions. Toxins, radio waves, video games, free porn, Doritos, Pepsi, Britney Spears shaved sex symbol trailer trash meltdown, ADD, ritalin, SATs, cellphone ringtones, Clear Channel. You know the rest. It’s overloading everyone. The mercury is raiding the fish. The carbon is filling the air. The phosphates are flooding the deltas.

The world collectively awaits its adulthood. We all need to grow up. The biggest threat to our existence, the greatest enemy to be overcome, is ourselves. Ourselves. Not some Korean, Arabian, Venezuelan enemy. Not some teenaged runt with a trenchcoat and a gun. Not some poor, destitute, homeless, drug addled nameless on the street. Not them. Not other. Just us. Just you and me and our kids and our future. Time to include, accept, embrace. Time to grow up.

Speculative Revolution Part II

what i am suggesting is a way of life. thinking about things around me in terms of politics and commercialism only makes me angry, and then hopeless, and ultimately negative and pessimistic. and in becoming this, i am only furthering the whole bullshit. you see the problem is that a system is inhuman, and has no relation to my emotions. i thus say that it is not the system that is at fault, but our relation and interaction with it through each other. in tangible terms, take the example of our relations with each other based on cars, personalized packages of modern wonder. we get in our cars and turn on the radios and ac and drive deftly through streets we only know by sign-names and intersections. we get on the freeway and pass by a big bill-boarded advertisement every couple of seconds, just like commercials on tv, only faster. and when someone gets in your way, couldn’t you just kill them? it’s amazing how the most gentle and laidback people can suddenly become monstrous at the helm of an suv. you step into your vehicle and your relationship with the world changes. you become a machine, speeding towards your objective. it is hard to feel much compassion for a machine that is driving too slow in front of you, or cuts you off. now think of how this is similarly affecting your attitude towards the communities you drive through. you couldn’t care less, it’s just scenery, background to the game level you’re on. i’m not accusing you. it’s a natural response to the way we live our lives. we might crash if we started looking around us and stopped focusing straight ahead.
i’ve always been somewhat cynical, but i’ve always been basically positive in my view of general humanity. i’ve been getting more negative in recent years, and i realized suddenly that i’d begun hating people i don’t know personally. i had no relation to these people. they were usually getting in my way. and this isn’t the right way to live. so i blamed corporate colonization of our minds through tv and news and movies. i blamed imperialist minded politics. i blamed gender and sexual misunderstanding. i blamed academia, i blamed science, i blamed religion, i blamed family, i blamed self. and guess what? nothing, noone, holds up to this accusation. not the one asleep and innocent in their dreams, not the one looking away, not the one fucking someone else, not the one holding them down, not the one on the ground naked getting raped. not the one who judges, not the one who is imprisoned, not the parents, not the children, not the man and not the woman.
we are only as strong as our weakest link. anyone ever involved in some group setting understands this on the most basic of levels. it therefore is quite logical that those who are weakest are the ones who place themselves in positions of “power,” “dominance,” and “knowledge.” feeling threatened, feeling in need of some security? the nazis sure did. and somehow a cult of weaklings exterminated millions and threatened other countries’ boundaries. you remember that bully in elementary school? it’s a cliché, but most likely his parents either abused him, or his parents ignored him. and so he is insecure, and the only way he can relate to other people is by dominating them, so that he knows they will take him for real. this is what i mean by weakness. could this boy help the way he acted? maybe, maybe not. but i think it is clear that he is not the one who deserves all the blame. and i think it should not be too much of a jump to say that the parents are not the only ones who deserve the blame. and so on. and so on.
we are all involved in the violence that occurs everyday. this is what it is to be weak. this is what it is to be connected. this is what it is to be a human being. we must be “weak” together to be strong.