“...and when the smoke died down, there’s still a n!&&@ left to deal with…”
Scarface, ‘No Warning’
In the 80’s, the Tylenol corporation was faced with a business-ending crisis. There had been found bottles of Tylenol that contained poisoned tablets, cyanide if I’m not mistaken, though I may be. Tylenol had a choice to make; to either try to make the entire thing seem like ‘the act of one madman’, use their public relations people to smoke and mirror everything for a while, and let it all blow over. Instead, Tylenol recalled their product, took ownership for the packaging that allowed said madman to threaten the entire population and re-made their packaging to be more tamper-resistant, actually ushering in a change in the way the industry did what they’d been doing for decades before.
When I worked briefly at GM, on the fabrication line in Production, if you were aware of a part that came to your press and it had a ding in it, if it had a demarcation or an indentation on it, you didn’t keep rolling and hope nobody noticed, or go back to the die where things started, say “Well, it’s just this one bad die, the rest of them are okay, just forget about it.” You would shut down your machine, which may or may not be fine, the inspector on that line would find the machine that was putting out bad parts, rectify that, all the machines would be wiped down and greased with ‘dope’, and the line would be restarted. Imperfect pieces would be sent to the body shop to be repaired, not put on a new automobile. And should something major slip through and the public notice it, then you have a RECALL on that particular model, and it goes back to having the problem tended to.
....am I mistaken?
You expect competency from the individuals you hire. That doesn’t require a great deal of thought, does it? From selling newspapers to trading in stocks and bonds, you expect competency, a sense of honor, respect for the craft and a level of professionalism, depending on how high above the ground the job is seen to be. Why should any profession be different? And why do people have such a hard time with, and make such a big deal about, such a common sense thing?
Current events have driven me insane, possibly. I can admit that. My mind doesn’t feel right. My thoughts don’t flow anymore, they sort of tumble and pile up. But this isn’t something that requires a great deal of thought. Every job comes with its own set of requirements. If one is hired into that job or profession, one is expected to adhere to those expectations. If one cannot, then one has to face reprimand, at the very least; consequences of some kind. Otherwise, there would never be any purpose to doing any job right. And we see the results of that in so many different areas these days. Customer service, by and large, is a joke. Because the pressure to fill positions means gambling more often that an applicant is actually qualified for the position, only to find out later they assuredly are not. But you see it everywhere, in attitudes, in lack of helpful information, in mistake after mistake. Cashiers who can’t count, street workers who can’t direct traffic, home builders who build cheap and expensive, to have products falling apart at the first occupancy. So many examples. Why would police work be any different?
ALL LIVES MATTER. The battle-cry of the willfully indifferent. And there seems to be only one way of looking at things. And because I have gone crazy in this ‘new normal’, I have not been able to speculate and articulate a response...until now. See, my thought is this: I have friends of different colors. And if something happened to them, something harmful, I would be concerned about them, even though they weren’t my color. Or my culture or my religion or my belief system. I’d be concerned if a wrong was done to them. That’s part of me being human. It wouldn’t devalue my own people if I felt that way about someone from a different grouping. It wouldn’t, that’s not a question. More to the point, though. What I would desire would be for Every Single One of My People to be treated respectfully EVERY SINGLE TIME. Regardless of their race, their creed, their belief system. That’s what All Lives Matter should mean, at least to my understanding. But it doesn’t. It is a way to minimize the importance of one group. So, if there were 33 people killed by the Tylenol as mentioned, and Tylenol had said ‘Well, all bottles matter’, and just went with the fact that most people HADN’T been poisoned, then the killing would never have stopped, right? (ahem)
Black Lives Matter. Of course they do. I’m black. I matter. My life as a black man is important to me. Eric Garner was my age. George Floyd was close. Their lives mattered to them. It doesn’t change who they were, or what their past lives were about. It’s the fact that, in a heartbeat, their future lives were ended, for no equitable reason. There’s no balance that a man died over a sale using counterfeit money. There’s no balance to a man killed for selling loose cigarettes. Never one time have I heard of a police person bursting into a Palestinian store and firing off rounds at the cashier for selling loosies. Never heard that before.
But, if ALL LIVES MATTER, then their lives mattered as well. I won’t list all the names I can remember here. Because it’s an unbroken line of names that dates back to the ending of slavery, here in America. Reconstruction is hand in hand with Jim Crow, the birth of the Klan, and white terrorism in high places designed to ‘keep the niggers in their place’. This is not conjecture. This is a documented fact. There has not to date been documented a stopping point to that. Not in the late 1800’s, not in the 1900’s at any time, and not into the new millennium. It hasn’t happened. And if ALL LIVES MATTERED as they say they do, then somewhere along the line, we’d have documentation of some group of some OTHER ethnicity trying their damndest to break the stranglehold of domestic terrorism against black Americans. And we’ve not seen that. I haven’t. You probably haven’t either. Because ALL LIVES DO NOT MATTER IF ONE GROUP OF LIVES IS EXCLUDED FROM THAT. ONE OR MORE. That’s the truth.
I don’t care if this is deconstructed and frowned on. I don’t give a damn if it’s shared and ridiculed. Think about it. If you have an empty five gallon water jug, how many marbles can you put in it? Exactly...one. Because once you put ONE marble in, it’s not empty any longer, it becomes something else. Same with ALL LIVES MATTER. If you take one group out, then you can’t say it. You have no grounds for it. And simply shrilling it over and over won’t make it count more.
I’m into competency. I love it. It makes me happy. When things run the way they’re supposed to, I get good results. This year started out pretty poorly and just kept going downhill. And now, Coronavirus cases are on the rise, 50 states have protested police violence against people of color and the police are being upgraded to military status to deal with the protestors with little restraint. And they’re hanging black men and women in California. Worse and worse. And why? Is a race war the goal? We have enough now to begin such a thing, were that the object. I think we miss something, something really important. Competency. It’s a big sounding word, but it’s not that big a deal.
When you went to restaurants, if you ordered a strip steak medium rare and it came back well-done, you’d likely sent it back without hesitation, instructing your wait person to tell the cook to get it right. When you go into a store because something is advertised at a certain price, and you get to the register and find it hasn’t been discounted, you make a fuss, you argue your case. When you Know for a FACT you were speeding you may try to argue your way out of that ticket (if you’re not black or brown). We make corrections when things are important to us. Someone else’s incompetence is not something we just ride on. So why do we do it with this situation? Why do we not hold police accountable? Why are we allowing people to determine how a pandemic will be dealt with, non-medical people? Is there a connection there? Seems like there is.
America is a funny continent. Stolen through murder, built by kidnapping and slavery, layer upon layer was added by the oppression and indentured servitude of one immigrating race or culture after another, until those immigrants became part of the fabric, seeking to oppress or indenture the next wave. And so on and so on. But only one race did not pass Ellis Island. Only the black race. Kidnapped, stolen people don’t get the tourist tour. Even today they don’t. And a lot of what has allowed that to happen is willful ignorance. A choice to be dumb enough to believe the lies that partially benefit oneself, even if the benefit is false, short-term and harmful in the long run. For example, cell phones. Not a person alive doesn’t know (factually) that a cell phone is a radiation transmitter. Always have been. And once there was a great debate about such things, but when the money possibility was seen, they got brighter and fancier and more fashionable and now the worry is about how many Gigs and how much memory and how easy it can pick up the tower or wi-fi, and the radiation thing has been willfully forgotten. And we continue to pump radiation into our skulls, our health continues to decline, we get these weird symptoms we’ve never had before and don’t even think of looking at our hands to see if we’re not pulling the trigger on ourselves with every call we make.
Just an example of our willful ignorance.
Well, even in my craziness, there are things I can’t ignore. I can’t ignore that medical people said we should chill, and a snake oil salesman said we should not chill, and both Democrats AND Republicans decided to give snake oil a chance, to one degree or another. I also can’t ignore that this election has once again become a race of two old white men for the most powerful seat in the country, and maybe still, the world. Because no way that shit with the black guy is going to happen again, not on my watch, buddy.
Another thing I remember, from way back, is that the Constitution of the United States of America had nothing to do with me.
Not when it was written. When all that bullshit about ‘a more perfect Union’ was written, anyone who looked like me was property. At the same time, to be fair, there was nothing provisional in it for cattle, chickens, hogs, cats, dogs, turkeys, wild game, Native Americans...or women. All just forms of property. Oh, there’ve been amendments, yes. There have been some things here and there where an attempt to allow something to change has occurred. But the document itself, flawed and biased as it was written, still stands today. And any talk that does not include EVERYONE getting a section on an OFFICIAL CONSTITUTION is less than favorable to me. Because, as Prohibition should have taught us, what can be Amended can also be...Repealed. And then what do you have? Back on the chain gang, for real.
So it’s time for some change, yes. And it scares most people, because the willful ignorance runs deep, because it’s hard for many to conceptualize life without someone to look down upon, because we’ve been sold a bill of goods that is all surface material without any true substance, and we buy it because like starving wanderers at the end of the apocalypse, we take what’s left on the shelves without complaint and make the most of it we can. But if we ever really want to make some change, we’ll think about all the bad pieces that have been coming down that conveyor belt lately, about all the pills that are supposed to make us feel better that leave us puking and sprawled in vomit on the bathroom floors, how many over or undercooked meats we’ve consumed, how many times we’ve been cut off by some fool who can’t drive, by how scared we were when we saw a global shutdown for the first time...and how our stomachs crawl, even just a little, when we see some black man or some woman or some kid getting the shit kicked out of them by the militant force that was hired on public money ‘to protect and serve’ us...maybe we’ll think about some of those things and consider whether we need to keep asking for maintenance of a Constitution that doesn’t even cover us all, that only seems to protect those who don’t give a fuck about America or the person standing right next to them.
(quick story at the end of this long rant. I have/had a friend named Richard, in the 12 step rooms where I currently reside. Wasn’t a friend at first, because he was a card carrying member of the KKK, though I never saw his card. I know one thing, though. He adhered to our principles, he worked a Program, and he changed. I never saw any later evidence of any cross-burning activity, never heard anything bad about him. He helped those he could, worked for the Clinic briefly, was a friend to our community. I know he’s relapsed, I saw him once washing dishes at a downtown restaurant that’s no longer there. But for his time in the rooms of recovery, he put his personal shit aside, and was a help to everyone. Is that too much to ask? You hire on to do a job, you do the job. You don’t bring your personal shit in with you, you leave it at home, or in the car. And when you leave, if you need your shit, you put it on then. But you respect your environment, your profession, your credo. And if you don’t, then you shouldn’t be considered worthy to carry the mantle of the organization you pretend to represent. I see no problem in that, and if you do, then I only hope the well done steak doesn't choke too much as you swallow it down without complaint next time…)
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