With all this talk about terrorism and how the terrorists will "test" Obama and the how Gitmo detainees will surely be sent to some vulnerable American neighborhood, I was reminded of an essay I read years ago called
"One Violent Crime" by The Nation's
http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/bruce_shapiro">Bruce Shapiro.
He wrote about the night he was the victim of a brutal crime.
"I had not planned to write about this assault. But for months now
the politics of the nation have in large part been the politics of
crime, from last year's federal crime bill through the fall
elections through the Contract With America proposals currently
awaiting action by the Senate. Among a welter of reactions to the
attack, one feeling is clear: I am unwilling to be a silent poster
child in this debate.
The physical and political truth about violence and crime lie in
their specificity, so here is what happened: ..."
In remembering this, I hypothetically placed the event in a Third World country instead of New Haven, Connecticut, substituted the word "terrorism" where Shapiro wrote "crime" and replaced "Reaganomics" with "disaster capitalism."
"I actually read the entire text of the crime bill --
all 412 pages. What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the
circumstances compelling: Not a single one of those 412 pages would
have protected me or Anna or Martin or any of the others from our
assailant.
(...)
On the other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety net
shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might
have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant --
and thus in the life of someone like me. (...) A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net might just
have saved me and six others from untold pain and trouble."
As I remembered it, the fear of this one crime echos the fear of terrorism, not just for the victims, but for the community at large:
"The reaction of most was a combination of decent horrified
empathy and a clear sense that their own presumption of safety was
undermined.
But some people who didn't bother to aquaint themselves with the
facts used the stabbings as a sort of Rorschach test on which they
projected their own preconceptions about crime, violence and New
Haven. Some present and former Yale students, for instance, were
desperate to see in my stabbing evidence of the great dangers of
New Haven's inner city. (...) Fear of urban crime and of the dark-skinned people who
live in cities is the right's basic text, and defunding cities a
central agenda item for the new Congressional majority"
I also remembered Shapiro wrote about being tough on "crime" and which way was best to combat it:
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" To understand that question is to
understand, in some measure, why crime is such a potent political
issue. To begin with, the question carries not empathy but an
implicit burden of blame; it really asks "Why didn't you stop him?"
It is asked because no one likes to imagine oneself a victim.
(...)
The country is at present suffering from a huge version of this
same delusion. This myth is buried deep in the political culture,
nurtured in the historical tales of frontier violence and
vigilantism and by the action-hero fantasies of film and
television. Now, bolstered by the social Darwinists of the right,
who see society as an unfettered marketplace in which the strongest
individuals flourish, this delusion frames the crime debate.
I also felt that the question "Why didn't anybody stop him?"
implied only two choices: Rambo-like heroism or abject victimhood.
To put it another way, it suggests that the only possible responses
to danger are the individual biological imperatives of fight or
flight. And people don't want to think of themselves as on the side
of flight. This is a notion whose political moment has arrived. In
last year's debate over the crime bill, conservatives successfully
portrayed themselves as those who would stand and fight; liberals
were portrayed as ineffectual cowards.
(...)
But this impulse to communicate, to establish
human contact across a gulf of terror and insanity, is deeper and
more subtle than the simple formulation of fight or flight, courage
or cowardice, would allow.
(...)
The right owes much of its success to the anger of crime victims
and the argument that government should do more for us. This appeal
is epitomized by the rise of restitution laws -- statutes requiring
offenders to compensate their targets.
(...)
I also worry that the rhetoric of restitution confuses -- as does
so much of the imprisonment-and-execution mania dominating the
political landscape -- the goals of justice and revenge. Revenge,
after all, is just another version of the individualized,
take-out-the-bad-guys myth. Judith Herman believes indulging
fantasies of revenge actually worsens the psychic suffering of
trauma survivors: "The desire for revenge...arises out of the
victim's experience of complete helplessness," and forever ties the
victim's fate to the perpetrator's. Real recovery from the
cataclysmic isolation of trauma comes only when "the survivor comes
to understand the issues of principle that transcend her personal
grievance against the perpetrator...{a} principle of social justice
that connects the fate of others to her own." The survivors and
victims' families of the Long Island Rail Road massacre have banded
together not to urge that Colin Ferguson be executed but to work
for gun control."
Shapiro concludes, reminding us that we already have the tools to "solve" the problem of crime, without having to over-react:
"What it all comes down to is this: What do survivors of violent
crime really need? What does it mean to create a safe society?
(...)
Every fragment of my experience suggests
that the best protections from crime and the best aid to victims
are the very social institutions most derided by the right. As
crime victim and citizen what I want is the reality of a safe
community -- not a politician's fantasyland of restitution and
revenge. That is my testimony."
I know I totally broke the rules by posting more than four paragraphs, but I feel this is too important to disappear in the vast internets tubes.
The full essay is available online in PDF form
here and in an "html" version
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:y0hid-qKOLoJ:www.sweetcommunication.com.au/files/dart/BruceShapiro_article2.pdf+%22One+Violent+Crime%22+%22Bruce+Shapiro%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us">here.
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