Thinking Like a Grunt

The Army trained me to shoot at anything that moves.  I walked through field courses in the northwest woods where humanoid shapes would pop up from the brush and I would fire my M-16 blanks.  The training was to create a conditioned response.  In war everything is a threat and the best way to fight that threat is to fire quickly.

That attitude might seem rational in the twisted logic of war.  It has absolutely no place in civilian society.  Yet, the repeated shootings of black Americans by police makes me wonder if police now think like infantry soldiers.  Instead of a foreign enemy police see threats and react with force.  Sometimes, they cannot even say why they fired their weapons.

I understand that police often face life-threatening situations and must make spit-second decisions.  But so many of the shootings don't come close to that level of threat and might not have required lethal force.  Yes, I am second-guessing the police.  I do so because they are acting in my name and I expect them to be as well-versed in de-escalation as in the use of firearms. Fewer people are likely to end up dead.

The infantry soldier's mission is to kill.  The police officer's mission is to save lives.  The police should know the difference and be prepared to use judgment and skill before resorting to force.

postscript

This doesn't begin to address racism in policing practices.  For that I recommend the Bad Tux tutorial for police officers.

Also, I don't shoot at anything that moves these days but I am always on the look out.

Preparing for War

Anne Applebaum assesses Russian actions and intent and asks if the west and its preminent superpower shouldn't be preparing for an all-out war.  The question is sobering  Too much fighting, destruction and death has already occurred in eastern Ukraine and evidence suggests that Russian forces are intervening directly in support of separatist rebels.  Applebaum quotes any number of Russian exceptionalists (yes, they have them, too) along with Vladimir Putin to support a reasonable conclusion that war is likely and the world should prepare for it.

Her logic is hard to dispute.  It's certainly consistent with my understanding of Russian history and culture.  Her conclusion has a hard reality:  if you think someone is out to harm you, it's prudent to be ready to prevent that.  All that makes sense.

But given that the threat arises from historical and geopolitical relations among ethic groups and nations, its underlying causes will not easily be resolved by war and re-aligning borders.  War may, in fact, further inflame the conflict by sowing new resentment and division among people already suspicious of one another.

For me, seeing a situation spiraling into violence means the most logical policy is to find ways to stop the spiral.  I expect my government leaders and other nations' leaders to be smart enough to figure out how to work with all parties to stop the spiral and find alternatives to war.

That is the best preparation for war.  That may seem like a hopeless dream given our bloody human history but the alternative is to accept the inevitability of war as a constant.  I am not willing to accept that.

Call me a dreamer.

Silence is Consent

This came across my computer screen last night. Not exactly a Thanksgiving thought but worth passing on without delay.

A Long March

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate not only sums up the Supreme Court's vision of the Affordable Care Act, her analysis pretty much sums up the Republican/right-wing vision of America:

This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

The far right has been pushing in this direction since the New Deal. They may well succeed.