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| Wild Rose on Cypress Hills |
Michael Brown was shot dead on the
street in Ferguson, MO a few days ago. There are plenty of opinions
around: the shooting was triggered by Brown’s behaviour;
the gun-happy, race-profiling cop shot him unnecessarily; the entire
African-American population of the USA suffers under a pall of hate
and prejudice that gives rise to such events.
I obviously don’t know enough to
assign any blame, neither for that shooting nor for the violence that
followed resulting in yet more gun killings, which will also have to
be investigated and judgements concluded.
On The National last night,
Keith Boag claimed to have observed at least two incidents of people
being robbed in the street by young black men while he was covering
the demonstrations. Obvious conclusion—if based solely on his
comments—would be that police profiling of black youths may be
justifiable—or at least understandable—given the facts . . . a
politically incorrect conclusion even if were accurate.
In Winnipeg, a 15 year-old Aboriginal
girl was placed in foster care by a care-giving relative because she
was becoming unmanageable. A few days ago, her body was found in the
Red River. Assessments of how and why she got there are already being
expressed by all and sundry, even before the facts are known.
These
media-driven stories remind me again that we don’t quite grasp the
nuances of cause and effect. There is seldom an event anywhere on the
face of this earth that is the consequence of a single cause. I can
think of at least a dozen possible causes for the death of Michael
Brown—theoretically— and it’s not unreasonable that in a
heavenly court of law, the perpetrators that drove Michael Brown’s
life toward its tragic end might well have included his parents, his
teachers, his classmates, his uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters,
the local grocer, the police, the people who train police, the
economy, the church, President Obama, the NAACP, the KKK, guidance counselors . . .. A massive docket.
It gives a new slant to the Biblical
“for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
Most effects are the result of
serendipitous, chaotic chains of events and the best the courts can
apparently do is to determine who the last person in the chain with a
potential for preventing tragedy might be. In the case of Michael
Brown, it’s the policeman who pulled the trigger that will be under
scrutiny; those further back in the chain will never be brought to
trial.
This is not to excuse the cop that
pulled the trigger, or the person who killed Tina Fontaine and threw
her body into the Red River. What I’m arguing against here are two
things: first, the finger-pointing and blaming of specific persons
without acknowledging our own complicity and second, the
tendency to neglect more rigorous identifying and addressing of
factors earlier in the chains of events that set directions for
people’s lives: child rearing, child poverty, education and
developmental activity, employment, housing, etc.
Michael Brown and Tina Fontaine were
not “born in sin,” as many are led to believe through some
Christian doctrine. They were born to unlimited vistas of
possibilities to which “sin” was introduced by the carelessness,
selfishness and neglect of those who ought to have been nurturing
them toward the best of the available futures. Exactly the same could
be said regarding the cop who pulled the trigger in Ferguson and the
Winnipeg killer of Tina Fontaine. Tragic events such as these have antecedents;
most of the time we’d rather not be bothered with them.
Perhaps naming and blaming the last
person in the chain is a way of protecting ourselves from the
guilt of knowing we are complicit in these tragedies.
" . . . Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." -John Donne
