So far in this blog I haven’t gotten into too much about my personal life. Mainly because I don’t think I make for all that interesting of a subject. But something happened today that I need to work through, and I reckon this blog is as good a place as any to work through it.
In order to provide some background let me tell you a bit about myself. I am a 38 year old, unmarried white guy from America who currently resides in the Philippines. Most people who know me would describe me as outgoing. They would be accurately describing what they have observed of my behavior. They would also be wrong. I am in fact highly introverted. This is not as much of a contradiction as it might seem.
I am introverted, but I learned a long time ago how to play the social game. If you see me out with a group of acquaintances chances are I will be laughing, telling jokes, and in general being “the life of the party” but its all an act, a role I play. In truth I don’t much like people in general and prefer to stay home reading rather than to go out and party. However when the need arises, or when I feel like its expected of me, I slip on the mask and do what I have to do.
As a result I have a large number of acquaintances but very few actual friends. And today, I think I lost one of the better ones. And its all because of Baltimore. Sort of.
One of my few friends is someone I’ll just refer to as the big guy. Hes a a bit older than I am, married with two kids, a veteran of the navy and a former private military contractor. He is also as it happens black. We have known each other for years now, and often get together over beers to discuss the issues of the day, which is always interesting because we disagree on just about everything. I am a libertarian he is a liberal. We often talk about politics, religion, race and other supposedly taboo subjects because even when we disagree there is usually no animosity, and while we may think the other is wrong, we don’t believe each other to be evil or to be acting in bad faith.
At least that’s how it used to be. However recently we have been chatting on FB about whats going on in Baltimore. Now that may have been part of the problem, text alone doesn’t convey information as well as face to face communication does. But needless to say I don’t think that’s all of it.
His point was that whats going on in Baltimore is racism pure and simple. He believes that the Baltimore police have “declared war” on the black population and that they are targeting black folks for extermination. He seems to feel that the riots are the natural reaction to a system that doesn’t allow for any kind of peaceful change.
The point I was trying to make was that it didn’t matter whether the cops in Baltimore were racist or not, by supporting government efforts to give the government more and more power, by supporting policies that give the police more and more excuses to investigate and apprehend anyone they want to, while at the same time making that same government less and less accountable, incidences like what happened to Freddie Grey are going to keep happening. That even if the cops in Baltimore were the most racially enlightened people in the world, the culture of authoritarianism in our government would have led to the exact same outcome.
In essence his feeling is that the problem is racist cops, my position is that the problem is that there is too much government, and too much deference to government which allows cops to get away with anything they want.
Now to my way of thinking, the two positions are not mutually exclusive. In fact I see the problems he is focusing on as a small part of the larger problem. I tried to point out that the reason Freddie Grey ran from the police in the first place was because he had a small pocket knife on him, and he feared the consequences of it being found on his person. I also pointed out that Eric Garner first came to the attention of the New York police because he was supposedly selling “loosies” (aka single cigarettes). The point I was trying to make was that had the laws not been passed that made carrying a pocket knife a crime, or made selling individual cigarettes a crime, those young men never would have had interactions with the police in the first place.
As I said I tried to make the points, but apparently I failed. Miserably. I failed so badly that the big guy now seems to think I was justifying the actions of the cops, and that I am now as a result, one of “them” But the thing is, I don’t think in all honesty that I can actually take full credit for my failure, because the big guy wasn’t responding to what I actually wrote, but rather to what he thought I had written. Heck, some of his responses seemed to be to someone who was saying the exact opposite of what I was actually saying.
But either way, whether the fault was mine, his, or both, the result is the same. I lost a good friend, one I cared for deeply. And now the big guy sees me as the enemy. And that is something that truly saddens me, because even when we disagreed vehemently, I never saw him as such. I still don’t. But it doesn’t matter because it takes two people to be friends, and no matter how much I care, no matter how much I want to continue being friends, all I am now is the enemy. And now my very short list of friends has grown that much shorter.
