“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here She might have come curving down a glide path, intent on prey, and then blinded by sudden headlights turning the sharp bend, and then struck, her neck broken, and thus left hunched on the edge of the road, her ear tufts giving her away and drawing from me a choking sound. Traces of blood had dried below her beak. Her immense eyes were open and bright, a burnished, radiant black encircled by an […]
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You Can Listen Here Just before his death Michael Brown acted badly. He strong arms a much smaller Indian clerk while stealing cigarillos. The raw video of this assault is ugly. It inspires a visceral anger in the viewer. Photos abound of him flashing the finger at the camera and of his unsmiling expressions. These images are wrapped into the use of “Thug”* to describe him, “a violent person, a gangster, a criminal.”** Its synonyms include goon, gorilla, gangster, […]
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You Can Listen Here Not the sunny-eyed, bouncing, hands-raised, tail-wagging ones, not the polite, joyfully running, smiling jumpers, but those who huddle at the back of the run, and the ones who slouch in the middle seat of the middle row, the best place to hide in the open. Teaching high school age kids taught me lessons about how to work with abandoned dogs, and I know now that had I worked with dogs […]
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You Can Listen Here Because my father also was a police officer and had his share of charged, hair-trigger stand-offs, I imagined him as Darren Wilson and placed him inside the Ferguson PD cruiser that August night, and so I waited to find out what had happened, or at least as much as could be gleaned from the physical evidence and the testimony of eyewitnesses and Wilson’s story as told to the Grand Jury. Because […]
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