In the aftermath of Katrina, we can see that the President's Homeland Security is not a security that cares for an expanding circle of freedom. His Homeland Security is all about increasing the freedom gap between those who can already do as they please and those who must seek permission and certification to count for somebody. This is the significance of the whisper that Karl Rove will be taking over the reconstruction of New Orleans, where prevailing wages will be neither maintained nor expanded, as the gap between workers and overseers will continue to widen apace.
The Clarity of Our Tears
So we don't say, "no more tears." Instead we value the clarity that the tears have brought to mind. From our place upon the sorrow plateau we feel the difference between the President's concept of freedom and the concept we pursue. What we might also take to heart is how the form of struggle that follows from the concept of an expanding circle of freedom looks much different than the kind of power that gets organized to increase a freedom gap. In a circle of freedom already established, the sorrow circle is also already drawn. But for a circle of freedom expanding, sorrow helps to draw us more quickly outward.
When asked about the problem of people shooting police, Rahim stated, "I know that the police shot a guy for looting." After that Rahim says people did shoot at police, but not so much to hit them as to warn them that firepower was not a monopoly. Then says Rahim gangs of white vigilantes in pickup trucks appeared with guns, threatening to shoot people who looted. This provoked people into looting gun stores right away so that if the vigilantes came around again, the firepower would be more fairly distributed. In the aftermath of New Orleans, gun news was an important focus of concern.
But notice how in Rahim's account of things the guns show up to defend property. And the property needs defending in this case because it is surrounded by people in dire need. So if we are on the side of expanding freedom (rather than seeking to expand freedom's gap) it seems that we notice how deprivation is the condition that produces guns. From the circle of expanding freedom, we have here a lesson to learn. Guns teach us that deprivation is our danger. Failure to cure deprivation is what provokes a cycle of guns.
When I shared these thoughts with a friend she replied: deprivation, you mean like Cindy Sheehan losing her son? Yes, what a godawful deprivation. In Iraq, cycles of enforced deprivation during a decade of sanctions spiraled into cycles of grim violence that escalated to the point of full scale war between peoples who were forced into the ultimate deprivation game of all: your life or mine.
Of course at this point someone will raise the spectre of 9-11 and the massive deprivation of life on that day. Didn't that require some response--a reaction armed with guns? I don't know the exact answer to this question. It would certainly help to know more about the secret intelligence operation they called Able Danger--the one that had Mohammed Atta and three other suspected hijackers identified one year before the attack, the one that refuses to tell us more--but I do know that we as a nation have not yet tried to find an answer to 9-11 in good faith. We refused to step up to the plateau of sorrow. Instead of asking how we could respond to the massacre of 9-11 in a way that would expand our circle of freedom, we circled ourselves tightly and rushed off to kill. From the sorrow plateau that our movement has finally reached today, we must see that it is in our power to greet the world with a resolve from here on out, to always act in better faith than that.
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Note: Thanks to Michael Parker, and the Shreveport Unitarian Universalist Church circle of activists who commissioned these remarks for the occasion of a teach-in that linked "Iraq, Katrina, and the State of Civil Rights Today."
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