A fire burns in Ferguson

If you had told me a year ago that the pictures coming out of a small city in Missouri would rival those of the Gaza Strip in terms of violence and destruction, I would have called you crazy.

I had made the mistake of believing that this time in America had passed. I knew that the racism remained, of course, and I have always expected problems to arise because of that. But to watch the sparks from a policeman’s pistol ignite a blaze that has consumed a city — and to see it happen in 2014 — has been dreadful.

It’s been nearly two weeks since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. I may be a fan of prose, but when we speak about the incidents that followed, the pictures will tell a more vivid story: an older, white police chief speaking in front of a cluster of microphones; a young black man with his shirt wrapped around his face looting a convenience store; hordes of policemen gripping their assault weapons and sniper rifles tightly as they advance on civilians. The only picture we haven’t seen (thankfully) is piles of bodies in the streets. But then again, the week isn’t over.

I often say that I don’t like judging those involved in street violence because it’s all too easy to play "Monday morning quarterback" and, with the benefit of hindsight, tell someone what they should or should not have done. But the fact is, unless it’s you in that situation, with your heart galloping and your hands trembling and a real (or imagined) threat to your life looming, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. This makes it hard to talk about killings in the black-and-white terms some would like me to use, but then those are things that should be hard to talk about — they’re terrible and complicated and often much more messy than we wish they were. All I can say with certainty about this instance is that I wasn’t there, and neither were you, so what truly occurred is a mystery to us both.

What I can say is that there’s no excuse for what’s gone on in the aftermath, and that both the police and the public should be ashamed. Citizens should never loot stores and burn buildings, and cops should never act like paramilitary groups seething for a fight. Their aggression towards one another makes me believe that this is about much more than just the murder of one man, and that this conflagration has had its flames fanned by many, many other incidents over the years.

But that’s not justification to throw a city-wide tantrum. And even though I’m not the sort who believes that "violence never solves anything" — in fact, it solves many things, and it’s a useful and necessary tool sometimes — I also see it as a trump card meant to be played when all other options have been exhausted. That’s hardly the case here. But then didn’t we know this already? Haven’t we walked this road once or twice before?

That leads one to ask, "Well, what’s the point of all this?" Was it to pretend to be outraged while we liberate some liquor through the broken window of the corner store? Or was it to try out the nifty new AR-15s we bought with that Department of Homeland Security money?

Either way, it’s dead wrong. This isn’t the direction we want our nation to head in. Awful things happen, it’s true, and sometimes the police do them and they’re justified and sometimes they’re not. And the public may become disturbed, and maybe even throw rocks or smash storefronts, but the answer isn’t to outfit the police like they’re going to invade Poland and then loose them on the populace.

This sort of mass violence is never the answer, and first, before all else, it must end. Then we can speak about what’s actually wrong in Ferguson.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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