What We Were Not
Albert Camus was a political journalist, novelist (The Stranger and The Plague) and essayist known for his absurdist work. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was thinking of a quote attributed to him this week as I was considering Americans’ behavior during this very trying time when our very government seems to be the enemy of so much we take (or had taken) for granted. I thought of him because of what he wrote about our very selves in times of peace and times of war:
He wrote, “To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in a time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not, it all becomes a question of style.”
This, I thought, describes the babies we were in this country right up to the time of the first disastrous reign of the current white house squatter and the ways in which the unsought maturing process is only deepening during his second, insane, term.
In our innocence, we were a country that took for granted that elected leaders meant what they had said in campaigning, or, at least, wanted to secure the best for us. Suddenly, we were forced to grow up, to realize that we were innocent of the trials that so many others had faced, and that we were, astonishingly, at war with our own government. Thus we were forced to change.
Many read Camus’ words and think that what we are forced to become in war is all negative. But, looking back on what living in a time of war, specifically the Vietnam War, did for an entire generation in terms of waking them up, waking us up, standing against our own government and, eventually, building that generation into the people who spent the last half of the Twentieth Century and the first quarter of this one trying to make the country live up to its ideals, I had to consider the positives. In that war, we became who we had not been. Astonishingly it is that very fact that binds these two disparate times and allows that generation to lead, in many ways, in sounding the rude raspberries of protest.
To clarify: I believe the same thing is happening to us now. We see that the leadership to whom we entrusted our well-being is venal, corrupt, mendacious and worthy of our opposition. Thus, we are at war in our own country and, because of it, we are becoming who we have not been, sudden and fierce defenders of our own, taken-for-granted Constitution, protectors of the rule of law, demanders of equal protection and due process. It has changed us and, as to Camus’ line about it being a question of style, we are more self-assured every day, channeling our anger into the funniest protest signs ever and dropping the pretense of deference to government like the bell-bottoms we finally threw out of our closet. We are growing up and suffering the growing pains. Or, as Pulitzer Prize winner, Andrew Sean Greer puts it, near the end of his latest novel, Villa Coco, “The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.”
To borrow and twist an old Neil Sedaka hit, “Growing up is hard to do” but I am coming to like the new me, older but wiser, and prepped for the fight. OH, yeah.
A Shocking Choice
When the news broke a week ago that the feared and reviled Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was going to equip their poorly trained and sadistic officers with electric gloves, I had to read it twice. Who in their right minds would give this kind of dangerous and unfettered power to an agency famous for lack of training, lack of judgement, and lack of impulse control? Well, duh, it was the orange guy and his cronies.
A closer look at these “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” shows that, in order to use them, the officers must press a switch to activate their electrical mode. They are then placed directly on someone’s skin and deliver a pain stimulus that, according to the company, helps an officer gain compliance within seconds. The device, according to the manufacturer, should not be used as punishment, against people merely exhibiting verbal defiance or on high-risk populations, such as children, pregnant women or elderly or disabled people. Also, it should not be applied to two parts of the body at once, which is very likely since each officer will have one on each hand. And, of course, we are all aware of how careful ICE officers are about their use of force. The Marquis de Sade would be so proud.
Officers must complete a course on how to use them and go through recertification every two years. Of course no one in their right mind actually believes that ICE will care about warnings or directions on how to use them “safely”. A lawsuit is pending in Virginia for the death of a man in a jail in Richmond after being shocked for 45 and then 99 seconds when the limit is 15 seconds. The company that manufactures Tasers, another form of shock-compliance technology, has recently phased out its drive-stun feature, a similar pain-compliance tool that had been misused by some officers.
The Gestapo is coming to mind, more and more. The feared and sadistic storm troopers of Hitler’s fascist regime got their name from a combination of the German words for “secret” (geheime) and “state police”(staatspolozei). Well ICE is no secret but we know whose police they are. Time to become the people we have not been. This is war.
Author
About The Author
