HOW THINGS ARE

HOW THINGS ARE
This column appeared in the Sunday edition of the Register Guard. It doesn't need much introduction except to note that I had a huge lump in my throat and was almost crying by the time I was finished reading it. Most small children have that expression that says "all things are possible." To see that change to "this is how things are no matter how hard I try" has got to kill part of their parents spirits.

LEONARD PITTS JR.: Race issue hits home with son

October 7, 2005

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

My youngest son was arrested last year.

Police came to my house looking for an armed robbery suspect, 5-feet-8-inches with long hair. They took my son, 6-foot-3 with short braids. They made my daughter, 14, lie facedown in wet grass and handcuffed her. They took my grandson, 8, from the bed and sat him beside her.

My son hadn't done a damn thing. I was talking to him long distance at the time of the alleged crime. Still, he spent almost two weeks in jail. The prosecutor asked for a high bail, citing the danger my son supposedly posed.

A few weeks later, the prosecutor declined to press charges, admitting there was no evidence. The alleged perpetrator of the alleged crime, a young man who was staying with us, did go on trial. There was no robbery, he said. The alleged victim had picked a fight with him, lost, and concocted a tale. A video backed him up. The jury returned an acquittal in a matter of hours.

Too late now

But the damage was done. The police took a picture of my son. He is on his knees, hands cuffed behind him, eyes fathomless and dead.

So I take personally what William Bennett said. Bennett, former education secretary, said last week on his radio program that if you wanted to reduce crime, "you could ... abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

Bennett says critics are leaving out his denunciation of the idea and the fact that he was criticizing a thesis that holds that making abortion readily available to low-income women in the '70s led the U.S. crime rate to drop in the '90s.

I get all that. But what bothers me is his easy, almost causal conflation of race and crime, as if black, solely and of itself, equals felony.

The way it is

It's a conflation that comes too readily to too many. The results of which can be read in studies like the one the Justice Department cosponsored in 2000 that found that black offenders receive substantially harsher treatment than white ones with similar records.

They can also be read in that picture of my son, eyes lifeless and dull with this realization of How Things Are.

I asked a black cop who was uninvolved in the case how his colleagues could have arrested a 6-foot-3 man while searching for a 5-foot-8 suspect. Any black man would do, he said.

So how do I explain that to my son? Should I tell him to content himself with the fact that to some people, all black men look alike, all look like criminals?

Actually I don't have to explain it. A few months back, my son was stopped and cited for driving with an obstructed windshield. The "obstruction" was an air freshener.

So my son gets it now. Treatment he once found surprising he now recognizes as the price he pays for being. He understands what the world expects of him.

I've watched that awful knowledge take root in three sons now. In a few years, I will watch it take root in my grandson, who is in fifth grade.

The conflation of black and crime may be easy for William Bennett, but it never gets any easier for me.

LEONARD PITTS JR. appears most Wednesdays and Fridays in the Free Press. Reach him at the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132; at 888-251-4407 or at lpitts@herald.com.

NOTE ON ELEVATIONS

Willamette Pass is approximately 5,000 feet up, I've done some Googling and can't find a figure for Summit Lake so I'm assuming it's about 5,000 feet up too. So the shot of Diamond Peak is another three thousand feet or so.  Most of the plateau behind the Casades doesn't go any lower than three thousand feet or so.

ON A CLEAR DAY

on the way home from work I can see four volcanoes. Two state highways take off from the Springfield area. Through a gap in the Cascades up through the McKenzie pass area you can see the Three Sisters. Looking through the gap they aren’t as tall as the other Cascade Peaks. You have to remind yourself that they are at least sixty miles away.

There are actually four major peaks in the McKenzie Pass area but you can’t see Broken Top through the McKenzie Pass gap. The three peaks you can see have been given really imaginative names. North, Middle and South Sister. Several years ago either the BLM or the forest service suggested that the peaks be renamed. Something a little more dramatic. The silence that met that suggestion was deafening. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The mountains speak for themselves. All three are over ten thousand feet high and have year round glaciers.

The North Sister is probably the oldest and probably topped out at over eleven thousand feet when she went dormant. Heavily eroded, the northern peak probably won’t become active again.

The Middle Sister is the smallest of the three. The cone is gone but the mountain has permanent glaciers. The third peak, the South Sister, is the tallest and still has a distinct cone. The last eruptions probably occurred two or three thousand years ago. And that’s ok by me. Where volcanoes are concerned, dormant is good, permanently asleep is better, and comatose is best.

My reference book “Fire & Ice-the Cascade Volcanoes” has a sketch showing the heaviest ash fall from the explosive eruption that formed the caldera that holds Crater Lake. The fall extends beyond the Canadian border into B. C. and Alberta. The debris fields near the mountain are forty to fifty feet deep. And that was only 6,600 years ago. Give or take a century or two. The original Mt. Mazama may, emphasis on the may, have had an elevation of between 11,000 and 12,000 feet. Parts of the rim are between six and eight thousand feet high now. Think Mt. St. Helens on steroids. Lots of steroids.

State highway 58 heads southeast of Springfield and through the Willamette Pass. On a good day you can see Diamond Peak. It’s a good sixty-five or seventy miles from my front door. Diamond is currently just over 8,000 feet high. The mountain hasn’t erupted since the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago and also has permanent glaciers. I could see the mountain from my old hometown of Oakridge. I can remember walking home backwards more than once on a winter day because the sun was getting close to setting and the peak was a wonderful rose color.

These are the mountains I can see from Springfield but there is a string of peaks from Mt Shasta in California to Mt Garibaldi in Canada. Some have the potential to erupt again. And land in the area of the Three Sisters is rising. We may be looking at a fourth sister. Probably won’t happen in my lifetime.

The pictures are from the net. First is a side view of Diamond Peak from Summit Lake in the Cascades. The Second is the South Sister and the third are the Middle and North Sister. The North Sister is the one in front.

WHERE ARE THE LERTS?

Somewhere in all the books on all the shelves in the bookcases in our house is a bookmark. A very special bookmark. There’s something peeking up out of the drain. Just eyes, nothing more. Spooky eyes. The kind you don’t really want to find looking back at you in the middle of the night. The caption reads Be A Lert. We need all the Lerts we can get.

 

Right now I think that bookmark is more useful than the AOL alerts for comments in my journal. Where’s a Lert when you need one!

ORYGONE

Fall arrived with a very wet thud this weekend. This is a good thing really. Our water year starts on October first and we were about fifteen inches short last year. Actually we’ve been short the last few years. It’s been pretty dry for a part of the state that has a wet reputation to maintain.

Back in the late seventies and eary eighties a local cartoonist did a series of cartoon paperbacks that poked fun at Western Oregons’ wet reputation, Eastern Oregon’s dry reputation and just about everything in between. They starred a guy called Hugh Wetshoe who always appeared in wet weather gear no matter where he was. My scanner still is not talking to my operating system so I’ll have to settle for just the words. My journal has been pretty serious lately and these books have tons of material. I can be funny and serious at the same time.

You know what’s really funny, or scary depending on your point of view? The jibes at the Oregon legislature are still spot on, unfortunately. It’s still true. The more things change the more they say the same.

On the note of “If this is July and it’s raining this must be Oregon.” James Cloutier in Oregon III. (Which oddly enough, was the first book, he really like to mess with our heads)  I think I’ll say goodnight. :-)

BUMPER STICKER

Spotted this on a car today and lucked out on finding the website. There's plenty more where this one came from. Also on a t shirt. I love it, love it love it. LMAOH (laughing my ass off hysterically)

http://www.XpressYourView.com/t_shirts_2 This is the address of the website that has this bumper sticker and plenty more. They have t-shirts, magnets, buttons, you name it. Some are more pointed that this one. Some are more subtle. With a few you have to laugh...........before you start crying.

I WISH WE COULD IMAGINE

This one's been on the back burner for a few days.

One of the excellent documentary series in my DVD collection is the British series The World at War. It was originally broadcast on PBS in the seventies. I’m not sure you’d call it enjoyable but it’s close to the real thing most of us are going to get. The set includes a “how we did it and why” documentary with the producer. Either film footage and or on screen interviews. No reenactments, period. There is some footage that was staged for the camera but you are told about and why it was done. Excellent, and I do mean excellent narration from Lawrence Olivier. That man could do more with a slight inflection of voice than a paragraph of prose.

They managed to get interviews with soldiers and pilots from both sides. There are interviews with Hitler's secretary and German civilians who opposed the war as much as they could, including Dietrich Bonhoffers' sister in law. They tracked down Holocaust survivors and Heinrich Himmler's attache. And got him on film. Oral history at it's best.  

For me, the most effective footage is of bombed out cities, columns of refugees and interviews with survivors of the bombings. On both sides. Allied or Axis, in the end the civilians took it in the teeth, as usual.

Americans haven’t had anything like this happen to our people since the Civil War. Parts of Kansas, Missouri and sections of the south saw devastation nearing the scale of some of the earliest bombing raids. By the time the allies perfected long range bombing they were able outdo the Luftwaffe on a scale of at least a hundred to one.

Nothing on the scale of Hamburg, Dresden, Stalingrad, Tokyo or the fall of Berlin has ever happened on American soil. Sorry folks, as bad as September 11, 2001 was, it wasn’t even close. According to the series the Russians had nearly 200,000 casualties in the taking of Berlin. There’s never been an accurate count of the German casualties when the city fell. And that was one city. Just one city out of hundreds of cities and villages on both sides of the war.

The generation that fought in WWII is passing. The Vietnam generation is aging. None of politicians currently in office have seen combat or cities in flames. I’m willing to bet that very few of them have seen this series. Our leaders criticize European leaders for being unwilling to go to war. We don’t have any room to put the French or Germans down for their reluctance to send their citizens to war based on evidence that hasn’t held up. God knows they’ve seen enough destruction in the last century to last anyone with an ounce of empathy for several generations.

American cities have never had to endure night after night of bombing. We’ve never had a city with so many fires that the river supplying the fire crews literally dropped below the water intakes. Or had fires so fierce that it didn’t matter if the city was blacked out. The flames lit up the Thames so brightly it was like a beacon.

I never, ever want our people to find out first hand what such a war is like. But, maybe if we could imagine it just a little we’d be a little less eager to inflict it on someone else.

Oh, and that goes double for the ones setting off car bombs. But, what did we expect? The Sunnis have held the power in Iraq for several generations. Watching what the current party in power in our country is willing to do cement their hold on political control can we really expect the Sunnis to do any less. As least we’re still content with verbal dynamite. At least most of the time.