Observations-September 11, 2020

September 11 is a date that is seared in the minds of most of us living in the United States. It is difficult to comprehend that 19 years have elapsed since that fateful day. As we see the memorials crop up on social media on this date; the sights, the eeriness of the day and the many days that followed flood our memories and  overwhelms our senses. Many of us will forever remember where we were when we first heard the news.

Unfortunately, it has been 19 years, this means that today’s teenagers cannot recall the events of that day; even those who were born before that day might not remember events clearly.  The commemorations and memorials will mostly elicit reactions from those who had lived through the day and its aftermath.

I still remember in devastating detail the events that I saw on this day 19 years ago, as I sat with my colleagues in the cafeteria of the company I worked for. I recall the image of the second tower blowing up, I recall the shock that resonated with us, that this could not be happening, and yet our doubts were dispelled immediately and emotionlessly as we saw live footages, both on traditional and social media repeat, time and time again, the horrors of people jumping off of the World Trade Center and their bodies tumbling helplessly into the pavement. I recall the ash and smoke-filled skies in Manhattan, as well as the helpless faces of those on the ground.  

For most of us who were not directly affected, the memories have inevitably become a little fuzzier with each passing year. If you are not part the select group: people who had family members or friends who had perished; or those who were first responders and their families, who paid with the health and lives for their immediate fealty to their duty, the pain and horror still remains, but for the rest of us, our recall of that day has lost much of the clarity and sharpness. The difference between then and now is that what was once vivid mental pictures have now become memories compressed into my mind along with so many other memories, my recall of the events had lost the immediacy of the moment. The shock that comes with witnessing the moment in real time had also faded.

This is not to say that the day’s events have less meaning to us, it is just what happens with human memory.

The memorials that we have dedicated year by year in total earnestness are pictures and monuments that we have seen before, and are static, earnestly paying tribute to those who had passed. We use photos of the dead to remind us of who they were, our visions of them is forever etched at that moment in time for static eternity, the static imagery does not actively remind us of them as they are, we have forever lost the chance to them as their active and dynamic selves.

We seek to celebrate and honor the heroic, but heroes are humans, not caricatures of who we think they should be, frozen in time. Heroes are not two dimensional and monochromatic, they are three dimensional and vibrant.  By emphasizing the heroic, we are neglecting the heroes.

We are performing these rituals of remembrance to assuage our own guilt and sadness. It is our mourning of the dead, which in a psychic sense is necessary, for us, but how does it serve the memory of the day?

I truly have no problems with the tributes as they are now, but deep in my mind, I keep thinking that we need to do more to make the memories and the memorials more sustainable, more active,  and we need to make the memorial more salient and proactive.

19 years is a short time in the arc of human existence. It would be imprudent to draw conclusions and make judgments on the meaning of our fading memories regarding 9/11. What we can do is to say that we should not let this memory go by ritualistically as if it was just another obligation we needed to satisfy.  

Why am I writing this right now, it is because I wondered what we will be thinking about when we think about 9/11 20 years from now or 40 years from now? How can we actively preserve both the horrors and inspirations of that day, that week, that month in perpetuity, as we had reflectively avowed? How can we turn the ritualistic rut of remembrance that we comfortably perform almost automatically into something more meaningful, more purposeful, and more thoughtful? How can we make our observance of the anniversary less automatic, less symbolic, less practiced, and less comfortably familiar?

The answer lies in what we have done as a collective, as a nation, and as a society.  Why does it take a celebrity like Jon Stewart to beg congress to make the first responder compensation fund permanent? If we are indeed grateful for their sacrifice, this should be a no-brainer. This is but one example where the politicians sought to politicize a monumental scar upon our collective psyche. Thankfully, Jon Stewart called their bluff and held their feet to the fire. It took all the potential bad publicity and potential bipartisan anger to get the present administration to back off. The question is why? Why should it take so much effort?

Part of the answer lies in what I had mentioned before, tragedies and deaths mean passive memorialization to us. It needs to mean active participation in the democracy, it needs to mean active reconstruction of our democracy as it should be practiced and executed, it needs to mean that active civic actions are organized to pay honor to those who had perished every September 11^th in addition to the traditional memorials. It needs to mean that we are continually bettering our society to make it worthy of their sacrifice.

Observation-Tiananmen and the US: Same Picture, 31 years apart

On June 4th 1989, I was in Graduate School in Atlanta and I was having dimsum with other Chinese graduate students. It was at Hong Kong Harbor on Cheshire Bridge Rd. It was in between the main educational institutions in Atlanta where Chinese students are matriculating. As we were enjoying our social gathering and our food, bits and pieces of news were coming through about the crackdown in Tiananmen square. We had been well aware in the days and weeks previously of the protests in Tiananmen Square. We were all at various stages of hopefulness. We had hoped that the mere fact that the students who are in the square protesting are still alive is a good omen for China and for Chinese democracy. Zhao Ziyang was the main communist party leader that had allowed the protests to continue even after Premier Gorbachev had ended his state visit to China, and he became the beacon of hope for us. We remained hopeful even after he was ousted in May of 1989 and there were no movement in the government stance, little did we know that martial law had been declared.

The News was ominous that morning, as the televisions in the restaurant were showing CNN and the coverage showed the  Chinese Army tanks moving in overnight into the square. We all rushed over to Emory University where some of the graduate students there had set up an impromptu rally in the student union. We all took turns speaking our minds and letting go of our emotions. Obviously, there were lots of tears, lots of anger, and despairingly, lots of dashed hope. The Chinese graduate students that I knew from China were mostly sympathetic with the protesters, some even bragged that they knew people who were camped out in the square. It was to them that we turned to earlier that month in order to decipher the signals from Beijing, for the most part they were cautiously optimistic in reading the tea leaves from the Chinese government. All of that disappeared in that one day. The mood changed swiftly from hope and optimism to despair and pain as they became fearful for the lives of their families, their friends, and most all, for the people who were still in Tiananmen Square throughout that week.

Our moods changed yet again as the camera trained on the solitary man with the bag who confronted the tank. He was not going to budge; he was not going to let them through to what we all expected to be a massacre of the people in the square, that was a momentary flash of defiance, we never found out who the lone protester was.

The Chinese government had pulled out all of the local troops that had been on the square during the protests, they were considered to be suspect because they were from the capital city and they knew many of the students, they probably had  families among the protesters. The Chinese government moved in troops from the North who had no connection with the capital city. They had no familial or friendly relationships with any of the protesters. They were to be the cudgel with which the Chinese government will put down the demonstration. That was the plan all along.

Here we are 31 years later. Many things have changed, although the kind of democracy that the protesters were hoping for had never come to fruition. Many of those protesters have escaped to the West and they have found a place to reside in the West, it was not exactly a home but also not exactly a jail either. China has changed significantly since that day but what is important is that Chinese policy about dissent has not changed. China’s actions in Hong Kong recently has shown that they are actively changing their mode of governance in Hong Kong. The laws made in the days immediately after the turnover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 has been either changed or suspended. We expected this to happen all along because we knew it would be very difficult for a Tiger to change his stripes, but once again we were very hopeful that over time the global political situation would change enough to make progress in the Chinese society, enough so that the idea of a democratic self-government would squeeze into China, in between the cracks. It never happened.

Now let us turn the camera to cities here in the United States: Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Louisville, Atlanta, Columbus, and your own town.

The chaos on June 4 from the United States in 2020 is similar to the chaos in Tiananmen on June 4 in 1989, we see tear gas, we see rubber bullets in 2020 while they used real bullets in 1989. In China we saw armored troops, we saw the police in their militarized equipment using the riot shields. One of the significant differences is that the armored troop carrier's or tanks in the streets of Beijing are not present in the USA of 2020, yet. Although this present administration seem eager to put those weapons at the disposal of the police and troops.

There was an instance in Washington DC of a military helicopter using aggressive flying tactics to disperse the crowds, tactics that our military had used in Iraq and Afghanistan as a show of force against our military enemies. Think about that a second, same tactics being used against citizens as they did against enemies.

We saw pictures of National guardsmen in military equipment battle ready to take on an imaginary enemy on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a very jarring visual to say the least. We see flashbang grenades and tear gas launched into the crowds to disperse them and we see also see some aggressive tactics being used on the demonstrators.

Yet we also see the police taking a knee with the protesters. We see the Sheriff in Flint MI take off his helmet and join the protesters in a march. We saw many police taking knees and then hugging the protesters because they were ashamed of what some of their brethren had done. We also saw a black woman police officer chase and shut down a fellow policeman after he was acting aggressively to a protester that was already on her knees. Thank goodness for the differences. It differentiates the United States of America year 2020 and the People's Republic of China 1989. Yet the similarity is what is troubling, or should be troubling, and no amount of dissimilarity should obfuscate the fact that we as a nation and culture are closer to being the totalitarian police state of China od 1989 than to the United States that we had assumed to be the norm in our dreams.

The present administration had threatened to mobilize the federal troops into each of the cities and sovereign states to forcefully put down the protests and riots. It sent chills down my spine as I recalled the Chinese government bringing in northern soldiers to replace the police and soldiers stationed near Beijing because they were too close emotionally and were too familiar with the protesters. The media footage of the police taking a knee and their show of  empathy with the protesters is not what a totalitarian regime wants to see.

How did it ever come to this? How did we, the land of hopes and dreams for those Chinese dissidents in 1989 come to be so familiar to what they were experiencing in China? How did United States of America in 2020 become more similar to People's Republic of China 1989 than to the United States in 1989?

I hear people proclaiming that we are better than this behavior, on both sides of the divide. We protest that these rioting and looting is not the real us, yet, we see that there are white people who are looting and rioting in order to fan the flames of hatred against the protester. The latest tabulation says that out of the arrests made in Minneapolis, 20% of the people are from out of state, agitators, and fomenters of chaos? Definitely. For what cause? We do not really know. Rumor is that there are both left wing and right-wing agitators among the groups. The present administration wants the blame the antifas for everything, even though no one has the true breakdown of numbers yet, that is lying at best and promoting a race war at worst. I don't know how many of the rioters fall under either camp, but I could see the white supremacists’ agitators from Charlottesville being encouraged by the present administration of taking advantage of the chaos. So actually, it is us, a microcosm of us.

Going back to the comparison between the United States and China, The Chinese laws and legal system and infrastructure in 1989 were not race based, although some are, specifically the racial minorities in the northern China. The governance rules were built to protect the public order, the public order being any dissent against the communist party. It was totalitarianism.

Here in the United States in 2020, the protesting was against the uneven application of laws because of inequalities in the economic and judicial systems. The governance rules were also supposed to be built to preserve the public order, except in our case the intent was not supposed to be totalitarianism, it was supposed to protect and promote dissent and plurality.

So how did the two events in supposedly different systems end up looking so much alike? Is it because we have grown to be closer to totalitarianism?

The problem with drawing the parallels with the two events is that on the one hand we have 20/20 hindsight, after all, 31 years had elapsed between Tiananmen Square and June 4, 2020, whereas the protests around the nation for George Floyd is still ongoing and no one knows how it would end. But the similarities are jarring all the same and portends more sinister things to come. One does not need to be very imaginative to see that.

I hope I am being pessimistic.

Observations: Minneapolis, a death and it's aftermath

In these times of chaos and uncertainty, the murder that happened on Memorial Day in Minneapolis exacerbated our own sense of confusion, anger, uncertainty, and fear.

Today, Friday, after days of rioting and looting, two posts from two different friends on my Facebook time line stood out.

These posts were painful to read because the writers exposed so much of their emotions, their pains, and their fears in their posts. It was a naked, honest, and impromptu exposition about how this heinous act affected the posters. One was from a white man whose name is Justin Pletcher. The other is from a black woman whose name is Deltha Katherine Harbin

Justin Pletcher’s post

https://www.facebook.com/jjp119/posts/10112579068233321

Deltha Katherine Harbin’s post.

https://www.facebook.com/deltha.scott/posts/10102862110993933

Both are heartbreaking to read, both are heartfelt and sincere. While Justin’s story ended with a sense of hope and a sign of hope and understanding, Deltha’s had a sense of desperation, lost hope, and despair.

Justin talks about his experience as a white policeman in a town adjoining Minneapolis. He briefly recites his life experience and how he came to be a policeman.  He very quickly talks honestly about his revulsion and disbelief at what a fellow policeman perpetrated and the emotions that went through his mind. He then proceed to tell of  his serendipitous  meeting with a black man named  Calvin, a health inspector who has  to walk around the neighborhoods and he didn't want people to be calling the police on him because he’s a black man with dreadlocks. Stop for a second. Think about that. He is doing his job and he is afraid of being targeted because he is a black man wearing dreadlocks. This is the United States of America in the year 2020.

Justin meets Calvin and Justin decides to walk with Calvin to get his job done, just to make sure that he was OK. The post is so deserving to be read, so I will skip much of the details, You need to read Justin’s words.

Justin’s narrative and his gesture towards Calvin was heartwarming, as it was inspiring. The story gave me, and I hope all the other readers, hope. At the end of the narrative, Justin tells us that they parted as friends and they hope to continue that friendship. Indeed, it was a bright ray of hope in a very dark time.

Deltha’s story was the complete opposite from Justin’s. She talks about her husband, the love of her life, the father of her children. She talks about all things that made her fall in love with him. She tells us about a night when he went to the gas station to fill up her tank because it was too late, and he didn’t want her to do it in the morning.

Please read Deltha’s story from her posting as well because she deserves to be read. She relates how an older white woman called the police on her husband just because he is black. She tells about how it became an instance of a white woman’s accusation against the black man, and the police believed her words against him even though she had no evidence to make the claim, just that he is a black man. It was not until another white person, a white man, vouched for her husband that he was released. Imagine that, the police refused to believe a black man they did not know but was willing to take the word of a white woman and then a white man they did not know. Let that sink in. This is the moment when all the handy disguises and camouflages disappears, and the inherent biases take over the decision-making process. Given two unknown people, one black and one white, the people in the position of authority chose to believe the white person.

I will give the policemen the benefit of the doubt, that they don’t secretly own white hoods and that they don’t, as they say, have a racist bone in their body, at least not consciously. The problem is that we are dealing with ingrained prejudices, something that is not at the forefront of your consciousness. I am very sure that if you asked the officers why they chose to believe the white people versus the black man, they would have no idea why anyone is so upset, that is just the way they see the world, and that is exactly the problem.

I implore you to read Deltha’s narrative as closely as you read Justin’s because even though both narratives are heartfelt and blunt, Justin made me feel much better about my friends and neighbors, Deltha’s made me angry and paranoid. Justin made me hopeful and Deltha made me understand the problem in a much deeper manner that I had before.

Earlier in the week, when the protests in Minneapolis for devolve into riots, a close friend was expressing his own dismay and frustration with the rioting and looting that went on. He expressed the sentiment of many people: what are they thinking? Why are they destroying their own neighborhoods? Why are they burning businesses, some of the black owned? It is the same sentiment that is expressed time and again during the rioting and protesting after each killing of black people, this happened in St. Louis, It happened in New York City, it happened in Texas. Looting and rioting are obviously not acceptable at any time in a civilized society, I am not condoning any of those actions, especially the actions of those opportunists who took advantage of the chaos, anger, and fear. But, and this is not a WhatAboutism, it is a statement of fact.

I think James Baldwin in his interview with Esquire magazine in 1968, laid it out clearly:

Q. How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.

 The underlaying assumption in my friend’s question is that the looters and rioters don’t realize that they are doing harm to their own future, to their own community, and they destroyed  any chance that they had of redemption by turning public opinion against themselves. What this also assumes is that the system of justice is applied evenly, that lady Justice is indeed blind to all the differences that defines us externally, not giving heed to the fact that justice is meted out by human beings: flawed in their thinking because of the prejudices exemplified in Deltha’s story.

My friend also pre-supposes that we have no precedence to reference, that the black citizens of America have always received some modicum of justice in the legal system created, executed, and operated by white people. It also assumes that legal recourse, review, and exoneration are a regular part of the black citizen’s experience with the American justice system. We know better. We have seen the results from the justice system that is decidedly skewed against all minority citizens, but especially skewed against the black citizens. Strange fruits indeed.

Returning to my friend’s question: are the black citizen’s who chose to riot and loot crazy? Do they not how the system work? Are they just so ignorant and primitive that they are not capable of understanding what is best for them? Or have they been figuratively and literally pinned against the ground so many times, had their necks stepped on by a someone’s knee so many time, and lost their lives so many times that they have lost hope of ever receiving justice from a system that is designed to work against justice for all, but actually gives justice to only those who possess less melanin? In short, have they given up on this system and they figure they had nothing to lose. Maybe they figured that destroying wealth and property, the keystone to the American soul, is the only way to get the attention of those who created this unfair system?

Think about THAT for a moment. How desperate and oppressed must one be in order to believe that their only chance for justice is to destroy whatever they had in order to make progress. It certainly speaks volumes.

Please go back and read Deltha’s post once again. If it gives my melanin challenged friends the kind of sadness and pain that it gave me, it gives me hope, just as Justin’s post gave me hope.  

One more hope is that the next encounter Delitha’s husband has with a white policeman, it is with Justin, and they can both have a laugh at the Karen that called in.

Observations-Rugged Individualism in the time of COVID-19

I was watching television in fascinated horror as CBS News interviewed a bunch of young people who are enjoying life on the beaches of Florida in the days leading up to shelter-in-place, but after the orders from the CDC and WHO to observe social distancing. They were doing what young people at beaches do: having a lot of fun and sun;  a lot of drinking; a lot flaunting their youth; and assiduously practicing their privilege to disobey the rules of civil society. The interviewer asked them whether they knew about social distancing, the threat of the coronavirus, and whether they knew that what they are doing can threaten the health of  everyone gathered as well as themselves. Their responses was about what one would expect from a bunch of young people: self-absorbed, lacking in self-awareness, and self-centered. The backlash was immediate and harsh.

There have been reports of other young people all around the world doing the same things, so those Florida revelers are not alone. Indeed, I’m sure that American youth does not have a monopoly on entitlement, selfishness, and self-absorption. I do believe that there is an exclusively American attitude and brashness that stems from the myth of the rugged individual that is the hallmark of American identity. It is the origination of the idea of American exception, of the entitlement mindset, of how we feel the government fits into our culture and how our society should function.

The mythology of the American rugged individualism is ingrained throughout our culture, throughout our society, and throughout our core beliefs. We worship at the altar of the lone hero, who is always right, matched up against the vast majority, who are always wrong. We worship the mythological self-made man who succeeds, alone, through pulled up bootstraps.

This mythology is propagated through our entertainment media: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and many others have made the lone gunman character the hallmark of their acting careers, the Die Hard franchises, the action adventure films, as well as the entire comic superhero genre is a tableau of the lone hero, succeeding because they are left to their ingenuity and individualism.

It is a mythology because the entire background of these stories of the lone hero, fictional or non-fictional, are ignored. We ignore, whether through deliberate myopia, or through the blurring of the background details by the deliverer of the message; the role that community, society, and the infrastructure of people who enables the smooth and efficient functioning of society. The existence of the invisible background detracts from the theme of the mythology, because the reality does not fit into the desired narrative.

Quite simply, this invisibility allows the individual to make their claim to be the lone hero, to exercise their unencumbered freedom without regard to the others around them. The narrative is that these lone heroes are what stands between us and a society of groupthink which threatens to subjugate individual rights.

It is extremely Randian in its unreality, and just as silly.

The irony is that without society, without community, and without basic support infrastructure, these individuals would not have the wherewithal to exercise their rugged individualism.

Returning at the situation at hand, these people on the Florida beaches are demonstrating their rugged individualism by exercising their right to do as they wish, without consideration for the health of the people around them, whether they are family, friends, or strangers. In a broad sense, they are living the rugged individual lifestyle, with an unrealistic disregard for the community and society that surrounds them, support them, and enable them to be who they want to be, yet they ignore that fact and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the existence of their immense support infrastructure.

In yet another ironic twist, we have seen people shower effusive praise and appreciation for those who had previously blended into the invisible background. We have seen people not only acknowledge the vast importance of the massed powers of the society, indeed we have seen them show deference and gratitude to those who were once considered a drag on the noble quest of the rugged individual. Whereas we had shown our appreciation for the police, fire fighters, emergency room doctors, nurses, and EMTs previously; we are seeing the less appreciated workers in our invisible background for what they are: the true foundation of civil society. It is as if suddenly the once adulators of the rugged individual discovered, much to their surprise, that there is good in mass action, even as they consistently looked past them. They pretend that the individuals who are willing to work together did exist, that the people who are the base of where we all stand on to do our work do not exists. In other words, they think they hit a home run because they were put on second base by the masses who don’t perform saliently heroic things, just necessary non-heroic things. Yet, when our society is in crisis, we realize how much they contribute to our society. It is only then that we, quite belatedly, realize how fundamental they are to our society.

Unfortunately, that is the way of our society: we don't appreciate what we don't see. There is a Chinese proverb: referring to someone who is hugging the feet of the Buddha at the very last minute. It applies to those people who cram for a test at the last moment rather than studying when they have ample time. It applies to this case because we heap praise on those that we have ignored throughout our daily existence.

In kind or non-pressure environments, we embrace the idea of the rugged individual, we lionize them, and we hold them up as the standard of excellence. In wicked or challenging environments, i.e. in times of crisis; we rely on the system, the collective whole, to pull us out of crisis. We realize that the rugged individual alone is not enough to overcome massive challenges.  Are we schizophrenic, depending on the nature of our immediate surrounding environment? Are we hypocrites? Are we two faced?

I would not be so harsh. I would, instead, say that we are living in a pluralistic society, so we have an infinitely number of possible solutions which allows us to prosper regardless of the environment. The environmental conditions vary continuously through different sets of challenges with varying difficulties. Adhering to a single mindset, both the rugged individual mindset or the groupthink mindset are recipes for disaster because there is no room for the uncertain, there is no room for adjustments, we have made the commitment to a deterministic reality.

The Spring breakers, through their youthful hubris, and a dedicated belief in the rugged individualism that they have swallowed from childhood gave them the cachet to respond to possible disaster by catering to their lone hero fantasy, that the fate of the collective whole does not depend on them, and that their fate does not depend on the collective whole. They are the rugged individual, and rugged individual always win.