My Blog Week: August 30 to September 5

A Word on the Week

Doom and Gloom

A thought occurs, that we keep seeing videos of violent police encounters, where the citizen finds him/herself in a wrong place and very suddenly, gets shouted down to the pavement, confused and worried about what the charge is meant to be, sometimes chased and shot. As in the case of George Floyd, there isn’t always a right choice left, after the hard tactics come out. Having to be restrained when you haven’t offered to be unrestrained, puts you at the mercy of chokeholds and knees-on-the-neck. But statistically, most police encounters must pass off in ordinary ways. Why then aren’t body cameras used to record (they may be) “good” encounters? Arrests that go right, calls to subdue a mentally ill person or break up a fight, welfare checks…people on the street being asked where they’re going…

A lot must be learnable from comparing what goes right with what goes wrong. When suspects or citizens are not put under restraint, what are those people doing differently? When a family reassures that everything in the house is really fine, what do they say or do that makes their word enough? Race definitely suggests itself, but suggestions don’t work as well in creating better systems as irrefutable data. Data collection—cross-spectrum—analysis, and reporting, is more of administration than military-style leadership, but somewhere in the higher echelons of city government, solid administration is needed too.

And it’s a sound principle that you can do what you’ve already proven you can do.

Now, I promised doom and gloom. Let’s think about some scenarios if red state cheating and the electoral college give us Trump for another four years. Speaking for myself, when I see ads for new movies and TV shows, a lot of the themes and ideas just don’t feel important in our present times. Escape entertainment was right once, but this is a kind of uncertainty Americans have never lived under. Wars and plagues we’ve had, our economy has tanked, but Washington has always been led by sane people who care about the country, its people, and its laws. Maybe stocks will somehow surge on the news, but most of us by far will be left wondering if there’s any future…

We’ll bunker down in survival mode. Our mood won’t allow for new cars, season tickets, beach vacations. We won’t want to buy new clothes, eat food we can’t justify paying for, watch TV talent competitions. Advertising, as a means of supporting media empires (like Fox) will crash, when nothing advertised returns sales.

Of course, other economies need ours. China in particular, as to election interference, can’t really want Americans on a no-more-cheap-doodads diet until further notice. Russia must also rely on some financial interactions with the American economy. At the least, having no plausible enemy, having prostrated our nation with their trolling, the Russian intelligence agencies and the Russian military aren’t needed as they once were, and any large expansion could hardly be justified.

So, on the bright side, Russia can tackle air pollution, deforestation…