Let me describe to you a recently published photo that
appeared on various news outlets:
In the darkness, a figure is captured
in an instant of dynamic motion: legs
braced, long hair flying wild, an extravagant plume of smoke and flames
trailing from the incendiary object he is about to hurl into space. His chest is covered by an American-flag
T-shirt, he holds fire in one hand and a bag of chips in the other, a living
collage of the grand and the bathetic.[1]
If you are an editor of a local newspaper and this picture comes
to you through the wire service and it was taken on the streets of Ferguson,
Missouri, during the days of the recent civil disturbances, what are the chances
you will run it? After all, the
disturbance is attracting a lot of attention; the picture is pretty much self-explanatory,
and the image conveys meaningful information.
You might even run it on the first page, given it is dynamic – the description
says it is – and it might sell some papers.
From just the description, can you think of a caption for it? Well, here is one caption that was used by
the Breitbart News: “Rioters Throw Molotov
Cocktails at Police in Ferguson – Again.”
Now does that caption affect how you see the described scene? Does it taint your perspective? Are you bolstered in your initial reaction of
“I thought so”? Now consider this other
caption from the CBS St. Louis/Association Press: “Protester Throws Tear-Gas Canister Back at
Police While Holding Bag of Chips.” How do
you now see the scene? The same? I doubt it.
I tend to think the second caption is truer: I just don’t see a rioter going about his
business with a bag of chips in his hand – but that’s just me. The point is that visual evidence can be
highly misleading; one of these caption writers has it seriously wrong. I’m sure there are some ulterior motives
going on here, but even with those, if you reacted as I did in reading this
account, your perceptions were highly influenced by the different takes the
captions project.
Whether one caption is truer than the other, both sort of
miss the point. From all the recent
incidents around the nation of cases of questionable police tactics, one thing
stands out glaringly: too many police
forces are not genuinely federated – structurally and emotionally – with the
communities they serve. I don’t write
this with much of an accusatory tone.
The fact that this is so is a prime consequence of what I have been
claiming all along in this blog: we are
a nation imbued with a natural rights perspective, inclusive when it comes to
our view of politics and governance.
From what we see, our police forces have been by and large seen as
systems and a systems mentality has governed how we administer them. By purely systems thinking – organized efforts
to accomplish goals through the input-conversion-output logic which drains all
subjective considerations – police forces are seen as so many figures,
structures, and command chains. Long
gone is the cop on his walking beat knowing and commiserating with neighborhood
bound, fellow citizens – the personal touch, if you will. Today, police are subject to purely
efficiency concerns: how they decrease
crime rates at the lowest cost. I am not
suggesting that all of that is not important, but we sacrificed a lot when that
personal face was eliminated from the streets.
Throw in cultural prejudices that linger all too fervently among too
many, and we have the level of indifference depicted in the videoed incidents
that have sparked the recent disturbances.
I am not blaming all of this on the police. When you constantly interact only with the
criminal elements or the extreme hostilities that flare up among the citizens
you deal with, you are bound to develop that thick, indifferent skin we see in
too many policemen and women; hence, yet another reason to question this
overall perspective and ask: is that the
construct that should guide what we teach in our civics classrooms?
[1]
Whitehead, C.
(2015). What we don’t see. The New
York Times Magazine, May 31, pp. 13-15.
Citation on p. 14. Meaning of the
word bathetic is something that is unintentionally anti-climactic.
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