In a month of posting, day 3

Start from where you are.

I can't help but start with one of my favorite Zen monk stories. I'm sure it's horribly mangled from the original, but this is the version I know, and it goes like this:

One day, three Buddhist monks are traveling the countryside. They come upon a stream swollen from recent rains. The banks are slippery and muddy and on the bank are two women dressed in fine clothing, peering suspiciously at the mud. They see the monks and imperiously demand to be carried across. The monks do this, slipping and sliding and dirtying themselves still further. Once safely on the other side, the women do not give alms, nor even thanks. One scolds the monks for letting her hem get dirty.

The two groups go their separate ways, and two of the monks begin to commiserate about how terrible the women were, how unpious and ungrateful. After listening to this for a while, the third monk turns to the other two and says, "Brothers, I put those women down on the bank of the river long ago. Can you not do the same?"

The meaning, as I take it, is that bad things will happen. People will behave badly. But it does us no good to carry around those ills and hurts forever. The things that happened? They happened. Start from where you are.

Earlier I talked about the arc of past selves that comprise (peoples' image of) me. There is certainly a good deal of my past I'd like not to have gone through, things I've done that I regretted. The normal human stuff. But if you offered me a foolproof time device to go back and change that stuff I would probably turn the offer down. Start from where you are.

Partly this is about unforeseen consequences. If I was not who I was I would not be who I am and I'm not sure who I'd be instead. It feels better (and yes, safer) to start from here and work on future me rather than trying to fix past me.

So here I am: I have this body, this life. It has its good and its bad and I can spend plenty of time complaining about the bad things (let me tell you about my allergies, or how much arthritis sucks). But it's where I am, and I'm starting from here.

Broken windows, broken people

Popehat (Ken White) is incendiary. You should read the original because it's extensively linked to supporting material, but I want to quote the punchline paragraphs:

[J]ust as neighborhood thugs could once break windows with impunity, police officers can generally kill with impunity. They can shoot unarmed men and lie about it. They can roll up and execute a child with a toy as casually as one might in Grand Theft Auto. They can bumble around opening doors with their gun hand and kill bystanders, like a character in a dark farce, with little fear of serious consequences. They can choke you to death for getting a little mouthy about selling loose cigarettes. They can shoot you because they aren't clear on who the bad guy is, and they can shoot you because they're terrible shots, and they can shoot you because they saw something that might be a weapon in your hand — something that can be, frankly, any fucking thing at all, including nothing.

What are we doing about this? Are we pushing back against unwarranted uses of force and deprivations of rights, to prevent them from becoming self-perpetuating norms?

No. We're not pursuing the breakers of windows. If anything, we are permitting the system steadily to entrench their protected right to act that way. We give them second and third and fourth chances. We pretend that they have supernatural powers of crime detection even when science shows that's bullshit. We fight desperately to support their word even when they are proven liars. We sneer that "criminals have too many rights," then give the armed representatives of our government stunning levels of procedural protections when they abuse or even kill us.

I grew up around Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia. The phrase "police riot" has been in my vocabulary since early adulthood.