Mondays with Mike: Long time coming, still not there

This past Thursday three Chicago Police Officers, who had clearly lied in the interest of their fellow officer Jason Van Dyke, were acquitted on all counts. I’ve bounced between furious, disappointed, and plain sad since then. That kind of behavior—the same kind that enables horrific behavior in other institutions like the Catholic Church, Penn State, and Michigan State Universities—should be long behind us. But it ain’t. It’s still in front of us.

When Van Dyke himself got what, to this Chicagoan, looks like a slap on the wrist relative to the way other citizens are sentenced, well, it made me sad. I don’t wish prison on anyone, but he broke the law and he killed a member of the community he is charged with serving. I also couldn’t stomach his or his family’s statements, because their words were all about them, their hardship, and there wasn’t a hint of  understanding his culpability. Yet somehow, the pearl clutching about how awful it must be for that lunk—who had an ugly history of abusing citizens—went on and on.

We certainly don’t dole out the clutching evenly.

Last year about this time I wrote about how Martin Luther King’s death made an enormous impression on me. I was 10 years old when he died. And today, here we are.  We want to think we’re done with it, just like when I was a kid and I wanted to think that the Emancipation Proclamation, and the good guys winning the Civil War, fixed everything.

But the kind of sickness that enabled slavery and Jim Crow—the virus-like psychology and the tilted structures they left behind—it’s naïve to think it just fades away. Maybe it all will never be stamped out, but we’re obligated to try, aren’t we?

I’m trying to ask better questions and listen a little better, especially with, frankly, my black friends. It’s worth the risk and discomfort I might feel. For example, I’m well aware, intellectually, of the risks that young black men are exposed to simply by driving on public streets. That isn’t up for debate. Hard data and heartbreaking anecdotes say it’s a fact. It infuriates me. But, talking to a black friend with a grown son and watching her face when she recalls the time she recognized that she had to have “the talk” with her teenage son, well, there’s a level of fear and hurt in her voice that transcends the data or my outrage.

Anyway, we have a lot more to do. The good news, kind of, is that it shouldn’t take much to do better.

To that end, here are two pieces of reading that you may find worthwhile; I did:

We like thinking all the ugliness is in the rear view mirror, especially those of us who just want it to be over with. Bryan Stephenson thinks otherwise.

But, perhaps preaching to and shaming those that aren’t woke enough for out tastes isn’t the most constructive route, either.

Let’s fight the good fight, and happy birthday to Dr. King.