***Edit*** Intentionally posted at 11:00AM on a Sunday morning. What MLK referred to as the most segregated hour in America.
There is a 1964 Disney movie called “A Tiger Walks”. It centers on the hunt for an escaped circus tiger in the woods of a small rural town. As experienced by the town sheriff and his young daughter. Who because of her compassion wants the tiger to be captured and not be killed. And though it is an otherwise relatively standard formula 1960s Disney movie, one of my brothers nonetheless ended up being deeply traumatized by it. Because he apparently saw the movie when he was still too young to handle the concept of runaway circus tigers stalking humans (namely children). And until his dying day he still swore that watching that movie as a child was one of the most traumatic experiences he ever had.
My brother was stalked and eventually died a slow, agonizingly painful and torturous death from a relentless and merciless metaphorical tiger called AIDS.
And so we begin.
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus unleashed the first of what would eventually end up being millions of metaphorical tigers into America over the next five centuries. First on the Taino people that he encountered in San Salvador. Saying in his journals upon his arrival:
“They… brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells,"he wrote. "They willingly traded everything they owned … They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features …They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron …They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
And they did.
By just the first decade of the 1500s the entire population of Taino people were driven to virtual extinction by ruthless enslavement,torture and disease. A pattern likewise repeated by Spanish and Portuguese explorers throughout Central and South America, and western North America. Then in 1619, we added a new chapter to our collective “book of tigers”. The arrival of British settlers in Virginia. And an almost immediate unleashing of the same kind of merciless brutality and dehumanization on the Native populations of North America. In the name of what would eventually come to be known as “Manifest Destiny”. But alas, we were just getting started. Half a century later we added a new twist to the degree of violence into the mix. We began to “legally” institutionalize it. Deciding that the cruelness of indentured servitude was not lucrative (or apparently violent) enough, we began to go from legally limited indentured servitude to full-on multi-generational chattel slavery, starting in the second half of the 17th century. With the right to inflict truly limitless violence at that time, by virtue of “God-ordained” full ownership of Africans removing any further restrictions to what levels of violence could be inflicted. And for the next 200 years, between the continuing Native American genocide and the sadistic brutality inflicted on enslaved Africans, the total amount of blood we spilled was practically Biblical. Next came the Civil War. A war costing more than 600,000 total lives. Fought over that same “God-given” right to do limitless harm to Africans. But the good guys won. And chattel slavery was ended. But somehow we ended up replacing limitless cruelty being mainly restricted to the South, with nationwide Jim Crow. And we created millions of new legislative ways to inflict new(albeit more subtle) violence on Black people. For yet another 100 years. Followed in turn by a veritable rogue's gallery of racists and staunch segregationists in powerful positions throughout America: Nixon, George Wallace, Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan David Duke, Joe Arapaio, Rep. Steven King, Paul Le Page and of course trump (to name but a few).
And now, here we stand...(almost) Post-trump. A nation saturated in 500 years of endless and seemingly limitless racialized bloodshed and torture. Five hundred years of unleashing millions upon millions of metaphorical bloodthirsty tigers into the lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human lives...strictly because of the color of their skin.
But there now suddenly appears to be a rather astronomically huge and unforeseen catch! We've grown so accustomed, after 15-plus generations, to not seeing the bloodthirsty carnage of those tigers,that we long ago unleashed into the lives of all those millions of people artificially deemed nonwhite, that we've now apparently grown numb to seeing most all human suffering, on anything but a shallow and superficial level. And shockingly, somewhere around a half a century ago, those metaphorical hungry tigers stopped restricting their movements to only nonwhite victims. And not only that, statistically those tigers are now devastating more overall numbers of white lives than POC (Eg: COVID, corrupt and increasingly militaristic policing,mass shootings, addictions, poverty and wealth inequality,destruction of the social safety net, etc.). So many of the very mechanisms that were long ago designed to make it easier for those tigers to target POC are now enabling them to statistically pick off even greater numbers of white people.
Which leaves us in the year 2020 between a proverbial rock and a hard place. Because to stop those metaphorical tigers from now decimating increasing millions of white people, instead we first have to somehow find a way to turn back the clock on our long-lost capacity to feel some sort of real compassion for the suffering of those millions of injured and dying POC. After having spent centuries trying not to see them. In order to awaken our capacity to feel compassion for those increasing millions of now white victims too.
A ravenous and merciless tiger walks...among white people now!
And ironically, the only way left to eradicate them is to accept that they're going to have to be removed from the lives of people of all colors...once and for all. And that can't legitimately even start to be done until we first begin to start honestly seeing all those centuries of suffering in the lives of POC first. After having ceaselessly worked to mentally hide from, and erase that suffering from the historical record, for so many, many centuries.
Do we finally accept the need to invest in caring about the suffering of the people we've spent five unbroken centuries hating, strictly for the color of their skin, or do we die a slow, painful and torturous death ourselves, in the jaws of the very same tiger that we unleashed upon them, as a result of addictively trying not to?
It’s a literal make or break choice!