Threats and neighbors
I have been thinking about two things -- one a matter of life and death, the other not -- that seem, at first, unrelated. The less serious one is a lengthy public complaint that a group of college students made against their professors. (This has been marginally in the news.) In the complaint, the students remarked on how difficult it is to "speak truth to power to a powerful institution like" the academic department where these professors teach. An academic department, powerful? University of Chicago economics, maybe, but that's not the department we're talking about. Why did the students feel the need to call the department a "powerful institution"? What are they afraid will happen to them as a result of speaking up?
The more serious thing is the recent killing of Atatiana Jefferson, a black woman who was just at home playing video games with her nephew one night last month, by a white Fort Worth police officer who saw her inside the house through a window and shot her. Jefferson's killing was depressingly similar to that of Botham Jean, whose murderer had just been sentenced a few days before. Jean, who was black, had also been at home when a white Dallas police officer, who claimed that she thought she was at her own door, entered his apartment, decided he was a threat, and then shot him dead before she figured out that she was wrong.
What unites these very different events is that in each encounter (the students complaining about their professors and the police approaching strangers), one party inflated the other into a powerful threat. In the college, not much is at stake in the inflation. The students seem to have legitimate grievances, but they probably don't have much to fear in speaking up. Sure, maybe this department is so toxic that professors do retaliate against students who raise concerns. But that's definitely not how most academic departments work.
On that night in Fort Worth, though, the cop turned the stranger (who surely could not see him outside her window) into a threat and immediately shot her to death.
I keep thinking that our political and moral and cultural crises are all manifestations of a much deeper epistemological crisis -- that is, a crisis of knowledge. We encounter the world without knowing much about it. I don't think there's any way around that fact. The problem is that we have somehow convinced ourselves that we ought to know everything about the world and the people we encounter in it. So we fill in our knowledge gap with assumptions, ideology, wishful thinking, and fear. We pre-know. We pre-decide. (In some cases, like the police shootings, racial pre-judice plays a role.) And in our pre-decision, we exaggerate threats. We imagine ourselves as innocent and other people as monsters. And then we act. Sometimes the results are merely farcical, but often, they're tragic.
I am not going to solve the epistemological crisis in this newsletter. But I've begun thinking that if we're going to stop turning the people we encounter into powerful threats, we're going to have to start seeing them as neighbors first. Some of what I'm thinking has to do with the command to love your neighbor as yourself, but I'm also thinking about how we deal with annoying next-door neighbors -- people we need to coexist with, and who need to coexist with us. How do we approach them? How much do we try to find out before we raise our concerns with them? How do we keep from turning them into our enemies? And how do we make it possible to coexist after our encounter?
Holiday Gift Guide (why not?)
Christmas and Hanukkah are a mere five weeks away, and I have a couple of gift ideas for you!
These electronic holiday ornaments from South Berkeley Electronics (which is really just my friend David Jacobowitz) are both super cool and super nerdy printed circuit boards that do important holiday-time work. Both the menorah and the snowflake have multiple lighting settings, so you can turn the LED Hanukkah candles into KITT's scanner or set the snowflake to blink in time to your favorite Christmas song. (Perhaps you're a fan of "Marshmallow World," and if so, then you're a psychopath.) The ornaments are programmable, making them extra good gifts for the tinkerer in the family.
For the kid in your life, consider my friend Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail's picture book, Alis the Aviator, which rhymes its way through the ABC's of aviation, with a particular focus on the history of flight in Canada, which is Danielle's home and native land. There are really cool cut-paper illustrations in the book, and there are details on all the featured aircraft in the back of the book for kids who want to take a deeper dive. (I was just such a kid.) The book also tells the story, in words and pictures, of Alis Kennedy, the first Canadian indigenous woman to get a commercial pilot's license.
For everyone else, please consider a gift subscription to a small magazine. Whether the recipient's interests are literary, political, religious, or whatever else, there are great magazines out there that will surprise them with every issue. Big magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic are great, but reading them just gets you what everyone else knows. When you read The Hedgehog Review or The Point or America or Commonweal or the literary magazine published by your local university, you get the pleasure of knowing what everyone else doesn't already know. Also, subscribing (or giving someone a subscription) is one of the best ways you can support writers like me who get published in those magazines.
I expect to have three or four short essays coming out by the end of the year. I'm eager to write to you about them, but we'll both have to wait until they're published. In the meantime, please spread the word about this newsletter. The full archive is here: https://tinyletter.com/jonmalesic/archive. Thank you for reading!
Jon