The Death of the Heart

Following are three status posts that appeared on my Facebook wall this morning, responses to the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot a young black man named Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri:

150 years ago, whites went to war to free the slaves. Fifty years ago, whites marched together with blacks to Washington to demand an end to segregation. We need to stand united once again. We need to show that this decision to not press charges [and] letting Wilson off was unacceptable. As a country, we are better than this. As people, we are better than this. We need to demand change. We need to use this as a rallying point to stand up not just for what we believe in, but what is right.

      --17-year-old white male, rural central Maine

Really disgusted with America right now. Darren Wilson deserved at least some form of punishment for killing an innocent teenager. Has society come to the point where killing someone doesn't matter if you're a white policeman? Is it a coincidence that the majority of votes needed was nine, and out of the twelve jury members, nine were white? When will race issues ever end?

    --17-year-old white female, rural central Maine

I am appalled and saddened by a society that allows a man to shoot an unarmed African American teenager and get away with it. Or all the other terrible murders/shooting that people have gotten away with because the victim was colored. I cannot wait for the day when the US is officially the land of freedom and equality for everybody regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, sexual orientation, gender identification, religion, rich or poor or whatever else you can think of. We are all human and we all should be treated equally and strive to treat others equally. Live by the Golden Rule; Treat people the way you want to be treated. 

      --19-year-old mixed-race male, rural central Maine

I think it's safe to say that, like most Americans, these three teenagers did not comb through witness testimony, watch hours of video footage, or conduct interviews with law enforcement and family members. They watched or listened to news highlights, glanced at Internet updates, saw selected photographs or video clips. What they (and I, and most likely you) absorbed was the bare bones of the situation, buffed up for generalized public consumption. Nonetheless, facts emerged from that disclarity: A police officer shot and killed a young man. The officer was white. The officer did not first attempt to subdue the young man with a taser or pepper spray or anything less than deadly force. The young man was unarmed. The young man was black.

Meanwhile, administrators at the University of Virginia are dealing with allegations of gang rape at a fraternity and tales of a longstanding rape culture at the university. Though the story that broke in Rolling Stone doesn't specifically describe the perpetrators, the student body portrayed in the article reeks of privilege. This issue doesn't end with UVA, of course: it's endemic, and it's not going away. In 1960 my mother was kidnapped by a fellow student at a small Christian college, driven to the town dump, and threatened with rape. In 2013, according to the Rolling Stone article, a Dartmouth University student posted a "how-to-rape guide" online. This weekend, you, too, can watch frat boys reeling through the college-town streets closest to you--drunk, rowdy, predatory, and mostly white. Will police officers shoot any of them? I'd say it's highly unlikely.

I went to college with a young man who grew up to become a prominent human-rights lawyer. He recently visited Ferguson, where I'm sure he did comb through witness testimony and watch hours of video footage and do all of the things that the rest of us have not. Yet this was his Facebook status after the grand-jury decision was announced:

This empty feeling in your stomach right now happens when justice is sorely lacking . . .

His reaction to the decision in the Ferguson case was not so different from the reactions of the three rural Maine teenagers. Something, somewhere, somehow, had gone wrong. Or had stayed wrong. Once again, a young black man had paid the price for being a young black man. Rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps paternally remarking, "Aw, he's just being a regular kid," or, in a more hopeful scenario, asking, "I wonder if that kid's had too much to drink and ought to go the hospital," the officer killed him.

So now a young man is dead, for no particular reason, other than being foolish in public. Meanwhile, another foolish young man on the street has broken a beer bottle against the face of the young woman who dared to tell a reporter that she had been raped at a frat party. As far as I know, he's still alive and partying.

This morning, in a comment on one of the teenagers' posts about the grand-jury decision, someone wrote, "You're too young become a cynic." That remark made me as angry as anything else I'd been reading. Sure, all three kids simplified the current situation, simplified history, simplified justice and morality. Yet they are not cynics but idealists, and their idealism has been crushed. The same goes for the woman who had the bottle broken against her face. She thought she was going on a date with a handsome, friendly guy. It never occurred to her that he was purposely setting her up for a gang rape. Would it have occurred to you?

Two weeks after Jackie's rape, she ran into Drew during her lifeguard shift at the UVA pool. "Hey, Jackie," Drew said, startling her. "Are you ignoring me?" She'd switched her shift in the hopes of never seeing him again. Since the Phi Kappa Psi party, she'd barely left her dorm room, fearful of glimpsing one of her attackers. Jackie stared at Drew, unable to speak. "I wanted to thank you for the other night," Drew said. "I had a great time."

After the decision not to indict, Michael Brown's parents released a statement through their lawyers:

We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions. While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen. Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera. We respectfully ask that you please keep your protests peaceful. Answering violence with violence is not the appropriate reaction. Let's not just make noise, let's make a difference.

Idealism is not dead, at least not insofar as public statements go. Brown's parents are maintaining their dignity; they are trying to help the rest of us angry onlookers maintain ours. But their lives have been ruined. How could they not be? Their child, scarcely older than the three teenagers I have quoted, was murdered. Nothing will stanch that wound. Jackie, thank goodness, is still alive. But I wonder how her parents felt when they read the description of her rape, when they saw the "blood-red bruise around her eye," relic of that broken bottle. The heart is fragile, and death isn't the only way to kill it.