I don’t normally allow myself to imagine untoward events in the future. However, I do anticipate more riots when the Baltimore police verdicts come down.
Many, many people, black and white, have misconceived the trial and have set their hearts on outcomes that cannot obtain.
They want this to be the trial of Darren Wilson. They want it to be a new trial of George Zimmerman. They want it to be the trial of those who killed Eric Garner, and of every white perpetrator against any black man in the history of this country. Their expectations for this trial are fraught with those emotional energies. And when those expectations are not met, as they cannot be, all those energies will come down in thunderbolts of rage, to destroy again.
Some of my neighbors watch and re-watch compilation videos of police brutality, for hours on end.
Trayvon Martin’s death is not before this court. Michael Brown’s death is not before this court. Racism, joblessness and poverty are not on trial here. The court will consider only how these six officers dealt with Freddie Gray. No more than that.
I speak often enough of accepting or embracing What Is. This is What Is.
The basic mechanism here is what is called “transference:” the dis-attachment of emotional energies from one unalterable fact or concept, and re-attachment or investment of those energies in another, unrelated concept.
Transference plays a major role in the generation of racial hatred in any direction whatsoever. In “This is how you become a white supremacist,” Arno Michaelis chronicles how he took the rage he felt over the unalterable hell of his childhood, and transferred it into an absolute hatred of black people. In the next brief section of the same post, I link to an article about the movie character who became Dylann Roof’s personal hero, a boy who channelled all his anger over a similarly abusive childhood, into vigilantism. Roof saw himself as acting out a similar role.
Both stories, Michaelis’s and the Japanese teen’s, involve an abusive alcoholic parent. Will not some black people similarly transfer their rage, at such a childhood, onto zealous hatred of racism? Or take the beatings Stacey Patton suffered as a child: do they not feed her passion today against a racist “system?”
I have no solution other than to keep one’s attention here and now, and deal with those feelings that occur. This is not an easy task, but is essential if one is to embrace What Is.
Originally posted 2015-08-08.
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