Whether fighting gun violence, corporate abuses, global warming, or disease, we must never despair. Hope, solidarity, creativity, and love all help us hold fast. As Harvard professor and researcher Pardis Sabeti has written in her new song, One Truth, "I'm in this fight with you, always." And we all say, with lots and lots of gratitude, "Yes," and "Amen" despite another shooting, despite another death, despite injustice and stupidity, "Yes," and "Amen."
So, I’m reading a KOS Diary by Scout Finch, “Albuquerque police officer jokes about shooting James Boyd—kills him two hours later,” and as I’m growing sullen and angry, and thinking about what a weird word Albuquerque is, and wondering what has happened to capitalization in titles, the reality dawns on me that I’m watching yet another video of cops killing some guy who, as far as I could tell, did not need to be killed.
Foremost in the recent spate of killings, of course, is the case of Michael Brown who in August was shot dead by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson.
Not quite a week ago, I watched a video of another very troubling incident, the now famous South Carolina gas station shooting of Levar Jones by P.O. “Trooper of the Year” Sean Groubert, against whom criminal charges have now been filed. Jones survived.
Third in this continuing series of cops with over-zealous trigger-fingers is the March shooting of a mentally ill homeless man named James Boyd by a couple of Albuquerque, NM cops—the subject of Finch’s Diary. The video (all three incidents are posted on youtube) shows that Albuquerque police officers Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, despite being unprovoked, first flash-bang Boyd and next sick a dog on him prior to--let’s just say it—“murdering” Boyd who had finally produced a couple of knives to protect himself from the officers' onslaught.
The lack of proportion with regard to each of these incidents does not merely raise questions about official "over-response" to a perceived threat, but also raises questions over the fact that in each of these incidents the victims were doing nothing gravely criminal or even outlandish enough to warrant police attention to begin with--there was no real threat to be perceived!
I am put in mind, again, of New York City’s Eric Garner who was asphyxiated subsequent to being taken down in a chokehold by police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Pantaleo, along with several other officers, wrestled Garner to the ground and forcibly restrained him even as he told them he could not breathe and quickly went unconscious. Why? Because officers had been sent to arrest him for, of all things, selling loose cigarettes on the street.
I list these events here not in chronological order, but rather, in the order that I became aware of them.
Brown: a recent high school graduate walking down the street with a friend who may or may not have shown an officer contempt; Jones: a man reaching into his car after being told to produce his license; Boyd: a man who, finding society difficult to bear, chose to camp in the Albuquerque foothills; Garner: a man reared in poverty and selling loose cigarettes to locals. Boy, this is some list of offenses. I am reminded of Arlo Guthrie’s embarrassment when in Alice’s Restaurant his fellow jail-mates ask him, “What’re in for, Kid?” and he responds, “Littering.” At least he wasn't shot for it.
For their offenses, Brown and Boyd were both shot in the back; Jones caught a hip wound and is recovering; Garner suffocated to death.
At the opposite extreme of these kinds of images—cops shooting unarmed “thugs” and “undesirables,” not to mention the increasingly militarized responses of police departments around the nation—I am put in mind of the armed standoff with federal agents this past April at the Cliven Bundy Ranch and again, only yesterday, September 30, a Fern Creek, Kentucky school shooting.
Against any and all the disclaimers made by the NRA, every “craven” politician, and an over-abundant chorus of obsessively pro-gun activists (all of whom were indicted by Richard Martinzez when his son Chris was gunned down at the U.C. Santa Barbara campus during a mass shooting this past May) a September 24th N.Y. Times headline reads, “F.B.I. Confirms a Sharp Rise in Mass Shootings Since 2000.” My response? “No shit.” With regard to mass casualty incidents like school shootings, the Times reports:
“In the past 13 years, 486 people have been killed in such shootings, with 366 of the deaths [occurring] in the past seven years.”
A proliferation of weaponry and enticements to violence, violence practiced by criminals as well as state-sanctioned violence, along with a Super-Power philosophy of war as politics in the Global War on Terror, has rendered our people morally vacuous. Fear replaces respect. Subterfuge usurps trust. Corporate power drains the compassionate heart. We have created the very world that we arm ourselves against, both here at home as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shame is our rightful inheritance. For, as another N.Y. Times piece from September 26, 2014, observes:
“Part of the gun lobby’s grip on timorous congressional lawmakers has involved the suppression of studies and information vitally needed to enlighten the public and galvanize support for stronger gun safety laws. Congress ducked the need for effective controls after the Sandy Hook massacre, which left 20 children and six adults dead. The new F.B.I. survey is the first such federal study, despite decades of gun carnage.”
How is it possible that we worry more about our guns than we do our babies? These are the kinds of things that keep me awake at night. In October, 2006, I traveled to Lancaster, PA because I could not make sense of the news reports that a gunman entered a one-room Amish school-house and shot ten little Amish school girls, five of whom executed. After the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I despaired. Twenty first-graders massacred, shot in cold blood, and the best we can do is say “it’s not the Second Amendment’s fault. Let’s go to a gun show.”
*
By now beset with pain and bewilderment, I knew that I had to stop obsessively watching James Boyd get shot (out of disbelief) or I would just curl up in the fetal position for the night. Instead, I decided to read email. I received a solicitation from a list-server. It was a job offering sent out by the University of Oklahoma. They are searching for a scholar to fill the Farzaneh Family Professorship in Iranian Studies.
I dream of a professorship somewhere, the life of a scholar, and so I lamented the fact that all I know about Iran is all that 1979 Carter vs. the Ayatollah ugliness, and that “we” don’t like those guys, and “we” can’t permit them to develop nukes. I was proud when I, after much practice, could roll out Ahmadinejad’s name with something that resembled a functional approximation. As I finished reading University of Oklahoma's job offer, I fell into a Biblical frame of mind and I uttered to no one in particular, “Can anything good come out of Tehran?”
I opened another email, this one from Nature Publishing Group. It was tagged, “Nature video: Healing through song.” I’d never heard of Pardis Sabeti before, but she is in fact something good that came out of Tehran, even as fate would have it, on Jesus’s birthday: Sabeti was born in Tehran on December 25, 1975. Heh.
The gist of her story is this. Sabeti is pretty smart; she conducts research at Harvard University, where she is “Associate Professor at the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT. Dr. Sabeti is a computational geneticist with expertise studying genetic diversity, developing algorithms to detect genetic signatures of natural selection, and carrying out genetic association studies.”
One of the algorithms she’s developed maps mutations of the Ebola virus which, as everyone by now knows, is epidemic in Western Africa, “the worst Ebola outbreak in history” (Nature). Sabeti is part of a team of people working for a cure and/or a vaccine. Some of her team are native to Sierra Leone where Kenema Government Hospital is daily inundated with Ebola victims.
Sabeti’s team, obviously, does very important work and the regions in which they work are economically poor. As a result, part of her work involves lobbying politicians and agencies for resources, both monies and materials, labor too. To say Sabeti admires her coworkers in the field does not do her feelings justice. Working as a team on behalf of a people who are, it would seem, doomed to die horrible deaths, creates a bond that feels more like love than admiration. These are people who refuse despair a foothold.
Sabeti considers fellow researchers her friends. These are friendships forged of courage in a fight against time and a devouring enemy. To be a physician treating Ebola victims is to put oneself at risk, and many of Sabeti’s friends who refused to stop fighting have since died of Ebola themselves. One such person was her colleague, Sheik Humarr Khan, “an infectious-disease physician at Kenema . . . often the only doctor in charge of treating 80 people. He felt alone and afraid for his life” but his moral compass would not permit him to stop. “If I refuse to treat them, who would treat me?” he once asked.
Sabeti often thinks of the people she has known and worked with, and currently several African researchers have joined her at Harvard where they continue their work. She has made a pact with these friends and colleagues. As odd as it seems, she says, we make time to sing. She has written a song serving as a tribute to those who, like Dr. Khan, have sacrificed their all for others. The name of the song is “One Truth,” and she cites a line that sums up her solidarity with Dr. Khan and many others with whom she shares this common bond: “I’m here in this fight, always.” Like Dr. Khan, Sabeti is no quitter. This is true. I try to hold on to that despite another headline in the Times, September 30, 2014: “Ebola is Diagnosed in Texas, First Case Found in the U.S.”
Guns. War. ISIS. School Shootings. Ebola. Climate change. I’ve got to get off this pity pot. There’s work to be done, guns and corporations and politicians be damned. I must say, with Sabeti and Khan and all our many brothers and sisters, “I’m here in this fight, always.” Here’s Dr. Sabeti’s song, “One Truth:”
https://www.youtube.com/...
"Published on Sep 29, 2014
Thousand Days' video for "One Truth," filmed in Cambridge, MA.
"Written for the many who have put their lives at risk saving others during the Ebola putbreak. The women and men in this video are now back in Africa working as scientists to help fight this deadly disease. We hope that we let our world not be defined by the destruction of one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds together ‘in this fight always’.
"One Truth Lyrics
"I’m sitting in here in this room
Watching everything move
I do not know how this city was built
We are forsaken to the sound
oh that life that goes
but we were born to radiate
"Chorus
Uhh uhh uhh uhh yeah yeah yeah yeah x 3
"Verse 2
We are gathered on the ground waiting for a sign to arrive
looking for the answers in the starry sky
but we were home all along
and we are the light
---we think, we speak, we walk, we breathe the air
"Chorus
Uhh uhh uhh uhh yeah yeah yeah yeah x 3
"Yeah
A lifetime that we write
We laugh
We cry
We pray
We areee love
--
"we dream
we scream
we strive
our hunger will never die
I’m here in this fight, always
"Chorus
Uhh uhh uhh uhh yeah yeah yeah yeah x 6
"A lifetime for one for one truth
That I’m alive, And so are you
We are here, We are the proof
Yeah
"A lifetime for one for one truth x 3"