TEMPER OF THE TIMES

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 26, 2020

An author whom I respect was appalled watching Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s television rant on CNN about the systemic racial injustice and inequality in America, justifying all the riots, violence, looting, toppling of statues and renaming of military bases and mascots.  I did not see this program but wondered why politicians of whatever political persuasion put political gain above social sensitivity and civic responsibility. 

He is right.  It is an American problem but to characterize it simplistically as the Speaker of the House is alleged to have put it does more harm than good.  That said, I look at the situation differently than that of my friend.

Nearby my home which is in the area of the University of South Florida where I went to school as did our daughter, during the recent riots commercial buildings were torched and main roads blocked  with looting and plundering.  It terrified us as we have never seen such behavior so close to our home, yet responsible African American families live in our area, people we know and respect.

For ten years (1970 – 1980), I was a consultant to police organizations along the East Coast of the United States, and while I encountered a few rogue police officers, more than 90 percent were exemplary in their conduct under sometimes considerably difficult circumstances.  I know because part of my work was riding with them during their working shifts. 

By the coincidence of timeliness, philosopher and former police officer Charles D. Hayes has written a brilliant, comprehensive and compelling guide to police officers on the job in this most explosive and emotionally combustible period in American history.

The book is titled, BLUE BIAS (2020), and it doesn’t spare one iota of apology for intemperate behavior of those committed to protect and serve.  On the other hand, I have never read a more useful manual on human behavior, and I’ve written a few myself.  I not only recommend that this book be in every Police Academy across the United States, but in every University Criminal Justice college curriculum.  Indeed, I think every American citizen who is a reader would find it useful.  Hayes doesn’t only go into human behavior, but provides a comprehensive and understandable exploration of neuroanatomy and how our brain works.  

My family and all my progenitors were what we call “Yankees,” yet I’ve never been offended by the display of the Confederate flag or monuments to that cause which took the lives of a quarter million Confederate soldiers.  Slavery was despicable but slavery was not the principal reason for the Confederate rebellion, but states’ rights.  Unfortunately, the economy of the South was built on the manual labor of slaves with which these United States will forever carry as its original sin.

Sure to be made a cause by some African Americans, given the temper of our times, is the fact that with the exception of President John Adams, and his son, President John Quincy Adams, all of the Founding Fathers, to my recollection, were slave owners.  Does that mean elements in our society will be plodding to tear down the Washington and Jefferson monument, and that of Andrew Jackson, among many other monuments in the Nation’s Capital?

A civil society is always close to madness for sanity is a luxury that can never be taken for granted.  Politicians of whatever stripe are flawed human beings and often not as wise as they purport to be or as we would like to think they are.  We elect people with whom we can identify, people who tell us what we want to hear, and who flatter us with the bromide that we are wise and responsible citizens, yet nearly half of eligible voters never find time to vote.  

As readers familiar with my books, I have called children born in the 1950s and 1960s the “spoiled brat” generation, citizens who benefitted from the victorious West in World War Two, but mainly children of Americans as the United States was able to dictate price and to provide virtually every commodity necessary for life and well-being to the rest of the world, devastated by that war. 

A consequence of this development was the emergence of the white working middle class where workers in steel mills, chemical plants, automotive factories, and the building trades came to be making as good a living as it had taken a person sacrificing four, six to eight years attending university to be equally affluently situated.  I know this on good authority as many of these workers were my customers, and they often invited me into their homes.

My four children were all born in the 1950s and 1960s, but missed this “spoiled brat” designation as I retired from the equivalent of six figure income in 1969, as I’ve indicated in other missives, leaving my children no longer in the arms of affluence.

Young as they were, however, they remembered how a family is treated with a little wealth and a little power, which made a permanent scar on their psyches.  Most children of this “spoiled brat” generation, once adults, inadvertently created self-indulgent children, who became remembered in terms of the alphabet as Generation X, Generation Y, and then the Hippies and Yuppies, down to the millenials and now cententials. 

What I have failed to mention in this critique is that this has been mainly a Caucasian or white phenomenon with people of color seldom participating in it to any considerable extent while being essentially law abiding and submissive citizens. 

If we want to declare shock at this current cultural unraveling, look no further than the hidden prejudices in policing to which author Charles D. Hayes refers, hidden biases that permeate the wider society because a community gets the policing it inherently prefers.   

As always, and Nancy Pelosi is no better than the rest of us, problems are attacked at the content and context level, or in this case, at the level of the police, which will ultimately go nowhere because the problems are buried in the community in its collective subtext.   While the focus is on police, it should be on the American community-at-large.

That hoodlum and his son who killed the African American jogger might have gotten a pass were it not for the choke hold death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer with his knee choking the life out of the man prostrate on the ground before a worldwide television audience.

Society doesn’t like to see itself naked, but now that it has, one wonders if any learning and change will take place.  Certainly, destroying symbols of society won’t solve anything, nor will looting, plundering, burning and destroying commercial buildings. 

The “spoiled brat” generation now rules politics with their self-indulgent children waiting in the wing to soon take over.  God help us if we can survive this predicament.