The Day After They Called the Election: A Subdued Jubilation

 

"What Makes America Great." Artist: Michael D'Antuono

 

On Saturday, November 7, 2020, they called the win for Biden-Harris.

A quiet relief filled me, followed by the sobering certainty that most Americans - no, wait - followed by the sobering certainty that a majority of white Americans will fall back into a comfortable somnolence, relieved that things will return to the old normal.

In the old normal, many of us white Americans walked in the special dream state that families of alcoholics or emotional and verbal abusers live in. Where a frothy fog of amnesia settles in, even just a day after our abusers vomit their vitriol on us. Where we want (need!) to dismiss, discount, and deny how wounded all of us are - the targets, the abusers themselves, the bystanders, and the upstanders, so that we can avoid the pain of change from the known to the unknown, in addition to the inevitable, virulent backlash from our abusers (or their proxies).

With Trump dethroned, COVID will still be with us, to be sure, but all the rest of the stressors - Black Lives Matter, children in cages, Karens and Kens, the Wall, Defund the Police, protests (riots!), imprisoned refugees, all those things that make us feel uncomfortable, they will submerge into a dormant state, like a chicken pox virus, the itchiness gone, the red spots faded, thus ignorable. Won't they?

Besides, didn't we settle on Biden because he represented a comforting familiarity? Didn't we approve his selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate?! We are pro-woman! We are anti-racist! We did our duty by going to the polls or mailing our ballots and voting Biden in, and now we can relax, right? 

We need the answer to be yes because it is so hard to stay awake, and so easy to follow old scripts. We're mentally and emotionally exhausted after 1500+ days of unrelenting emotional and verbal violence rained upon us by the garden-variety abuser at the White House.

We need the answer to be yes because change - systemic change - that raises the water level so that all of our boats can rise - demands discomfort, uncertainty, fear of losing the security of our accustomed spot at the table, having to listen to voices we didn't hear before, of having to learn new rules, and of making mistakes while learning new rules.

It's a truism that most of us don't change until our backs are against the wall and the wall is on fire. 

Our wall is on fire. To go back to sleep is to miss our appointment with history to change the future. 

 

Tucson, AZ: A Bully's Ripple Effect

Very, very fresh chicken at McDonald's. North Louisiana. August 2015.

I arrived early for a meeting at a local McDonald's. I bought a senior diet soda for 76 cents. I sat at a small table in one of the restaurant's alcoves. I pulled out my phone to continue reading the e-version of Augusten Burroughs' tragicomic drunkalog, Dry.

The only other customer in the alcove was a man seated at a table by the front window of the restaurant alcove. He tried to engage me in conversation almost as soon as I sat down. I'll call him Stu.

First Stu talked about the weather, how it had turned a little chilly here. But how it didn't compare with the cold of Chicago one time when he was there. Then Stu segued into climate change.

McDonald's in the Marjinishvili neighborhood, Tbilisi, Georgia. June 2012.

But then Stu got into something that was troubling him. The previous day, at the same McDonald's, he'd been the unwilling witness to a man who berated his woman companion. The man told the woman what a worthless human she was, how she was nothing but trouble for him, and so on and so on.

Stu described how distressing this was for him, an observer. Stu relayed his concern to the shift manager. The shift manager said there was nothing he could do.

Stu did not intervene, and this gnawed at him. Was he right not to have? Should he have? The scene he witnessed took him back to when he was a child and he saw how his father heaped verbal and emotional abuse on his mother, and how she - and Stu - were powerless to stop it.

He asked me, a stranger: Should I have done something? What should I have done? He could have had a gun.


It later emerged that Stu had only recently been released from a "long incarceration," and that played into his decision-making, as well.

The abuser's ugly words looped through Stu's mind over and over and over, as did the uncertainty of what he might have done differently. Or the same.

As Stu kneaded and rolled and turned that mental knot with me, it settled into my thoughts, as well, taking me back to a scene in which I'd been that woman, and also to another time, when I'd been a witness who did not intervene, ever-after torn, like Stu, in wondering if I should have stepped up or if it had been the right course to witness in silence, out of respect for the recipient's dignity of self-determination.

The bully's ugly words and the hatefulness with which he uttered them at a local McDonald's in Tucson. They didn't just poison his target. They splashed and burned onto a witness. A day later, albeit diluted, they splashed and burned onto me, and I wasn't even there.

When my friend arrived for our meeting, Stu turned to one of the McDonald's employees, who'd just entered the alcove to wipe down some tables. He began to tell her his story of that bully.

And now I share it with you.

A toxic leak.

Louisiana: About a Girl

Image: “Plaque from a Casket with a Dancing Woman” by Coptic via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

A phone was stolen from a child by a child. A couple of videos created by the young thief. Unbeknownst to this child-director-actor, they were automatically uploaded. Seen by the owner of the phone, someone I know. Reported, same day as the discovery, to four child-protection or law enforcement agencies in two states. Persevered over several days to push an investigation. Not about the theft - who cared about that? - no, about the obviousness of child abuse, both current and, inferentially, the recent past.

The videos: Graphic, disturbing, alarming, no ambiguity at what occurred.

Responses by the agencies: Indecisive, vague, incomplete. Dismissive, even.

I think about this young girl, age unclear. Ten? Twelve? Fourteen? She is a girl of color. There is zero doubt that she has been exposed to things that no child should be exposed to, and the same holds true for at least one young child in her circle. When I say zero doubt, I mean that. The videos make that clear.

The sheriff's office referred the caller to the city police although the video was filmed in the parish. The city police tried to refer the caller to the sheriff. The child protection agency in Louisiana determined insufficient cause - without even looking at the videos - for investigation. The child protection agency in the reporter's state referred the reporter to Louisiana. The city police assented to look into things, but there was a delay until the appropriate detective could talk to the caller about it. There was a further delay while the city detective decided how to accept or view the videos.

It all ended up so ambiguously. The child would get counseling, apparently. Or maybe the family. Or both. For what, one wonders. Unknown.

Everybody seemed to have missed the point.

This girl, albeit the actor on a superficial level, was clearly in an environment of abuse, present or past.

One person, among the numerous consulted during the reporting chronology, made a throw-away comment about the sexual precociousness of girls these days. Like them being the aggressor with the boys, etc. This, despite the fact that I had described graphically what was on the video. That this girl is a child.

Here are some perspectives about the vulnerability of young girls of color: 

Sex Crimes Against Black Girls Exhibit Uses Art to Confront Incest

Why Are Black Women Less Likely to Report Rape?

Sent Home From Middle School for Reporting a Rape

Sexual Abuse and the Code of Silence in the Black Community

Why Does Our Culture Sexualize Young Black Girls?

Marvel Pulls Sexualized Riri Williams Cover After Backlash

The Onion Tweets That [a Nine-Year Old Girl of Color] is the C-Word


Updated information

The Truth About How People View Young Black Girls is Disturbing

How Black Women's Bodies Are Violated as Soon as They Enter School

Texas: Video of Invasive Search Shows "Rape by Cop" ....

"This same officer body slammed Ms Corley, stuck her head underneath the vehicle and completely pulled her pants off, leaving her naked and exposed in that Texaco parking lot," he added, saying that her treatment amounted to "rape by cop".

"They then took Ms Corley and placed both ankles behind her ears spread eagle position and started to search for something in Ms Corley's cavity in her vaginal area."

This young girl in South Louisiana, whose life intersected with mine, briefly. What is she doing today?


A song from one of my favorite artists, Rhiannon Giddens, At the Purchaser's Option: