Tipping Point, 2

White people know that you’re—generally speaking—tired of them.

They know, in fact, what you suspect.

They do—at least most of—the hiring, or grant the home loans, or compose or allow the publicity of the negative punditry besmirching your very essence, or target you for frisking, or mete out the unequal sentencing, or justice.

They know too that, in no small part due to their magnanimity, you live generally better—that you have access to and can get more stuff— than most of your kind around the world.

Yet they know—via their habit as humans from their perch above—what they would do, or would want to do, in your situation.

You—generally—balk. In some unwritten agreement about handling yourself as King would in all your struggles against them even if it’s them only—your victories lie in all you take from them. They know, then, from your being the humans they know you are, you will likely steer your aggressions toward each other and create a Clarence or a Cain or a Chicago.

They worry about how tired you are, how long you’ll accept the trade-off.

Christopher Dorner broke the rule. He dared have a tipping point, or be human and owned it.

Wait a minute, you say. I see where this is headed. You’re about to glorify a killer. Plus that mothafucka was crazy.

I say that I abhor violence. There’s a not so public reason. Also, my lone observation of someone violently dying (a young black man shot, blood gurgling from his mouth, way back in the early eighties on Montgomery Street in Savannah) haunted me for too long.

I also say give me some credit here. Would I say such a thing—in such public spaces—even were I such a believer? My mama, as the saying goes, didn’t raise no fool.

I say Dorner tapered the vision. That he struck a chord toward lessening future fratricide. I’ll say that whether he tried to or not, whether it was just all about his sensitive ass and damn the rest of us, he upped the bar, with you the beneficiaries.

I’ll say this too, after others certainly more learned than I: Politics is not a morality play.

Neither is change.

Change, like war, fought for good or ill, is messy—fraught with seamless clarity and sinful contradiction.

I’ll say Turner, in that one harrowing act of rebellion in Virginia, was as effective as Douglass and add that the visual of a country burning, by providing the terrifying ultimatum, supplemented King.

They contend drone-dropping, despite its indiscriminate lethality, stymies those who would stop them.

Killing, like those that occurred in the LA rampage, is wrong.

I’ll say also that somewhere in the morass of all that negativity, that’s hardly the whole story.

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