de BLASIO'S BROKEN DISCOURSE

Brown, Ramos, Liu and Garner: Finding the Right Words

By Angelo Falcón (December 22, 2014)

The murders of Police Officers Ramos and Liu and of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, all persons of color, expose the insanity we are experiencing today where those whose mission is to serve and protect are compromised by a police culture that in extreme does the opposite, and too many of those who are in more need of protection fear their protectors. The image of a Mayor de Blasio at Woodhull hospital walking past those grieving and frustrated cops with their backs turned to him put in stark relief the failure of a so-called progressive discourse to bring a city and nation together. It all points to a broken discourse, the loss of a language adequate enough to connect racially discordant voices. At a moment like this, we all lack the right words and desperately try to connect via the simplicity of the hashtag.

But our political leaders all seem to relish in using the wrong words. There is the Mayor and his supporters whose bi-racial political relations have generated both racial harmony and discord. A police leadership engaged in a deadly game of brinksmanship in an alliance with a racially insensitive rightwing. And then all those people in between, the families of the victims of police abuse, and the families of the abused police. We even debate the slogans of competing T-shirts using the ultimate currency of death, social and human.

Where we go from here is anybody's guess. How will the Mayor handle the funerals of the murdered police officers? Who will be ultimately held to account? Al Sharpton? The White police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner? Mayor de Blasio and the protesters? Or will we be able to look at all the human damage and finally accept the realities of a system that feeds off of this society's racial and class divisions and tries to make us all socially numb in ways that divert our eyes from who and what ultimately really benefits.

But, for the moment, we need to acknowledge that we don't currently have the words, the language, to support the healing and understanding required. How do we console and support the families involved? How do we dial down the divisive and unproductive rhetoric? We all desperately need to find those words and language together that bring us to a better understanding of the bigger picture within which we will all thrive or, ultimately, destroy ourselves.

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