On Mike Brown

When I heard about Mike Brown's death, I didn't care. I saw the headline and thought very little of it. Very little of it. Do you understand that? An 18 year-old man-child was killed and I barely batted an eyelash. It seems that hearing about black people being killed —by police, by neighborhood watchmen and other self-appointed vigilantes, by paranoid people, by other black people —has become so commonplace, it's no longer worth noticing. Kind've like mass shootings. It's all part of the American landscape now. And you know what? It sucks. It sucks to be in a place in our "evolution" where we barely blink at death any more. We make the required noises, but it doesn't affect us. These things don't shock us anymore, and they should.

Ferguson is what made me start paying attention to this one. The protests, the riots, the images of neighborhoods covered in thick clouds of tear gas, of a police force that more resembled a Michael Bay movie than any police I've ever seen in real life. This got my attention, and so I started paying attention. I paid attention to the news coverage, Twitter feeds, and to what my own Facefriends were saying. What I've seen has gotten to me, and prompted me to write this. I had to write this because all of these feelings were bubbling up and taking away my concentration, making me angry, making it hard for me to move on.

Facebook is not helping matters. I've always prided myself on the diversity of my Facefriends. We have a tendency to surround ourselves (or try to surround ourselves) with likeminded people. It starts with the kind of school we go to, right? Conservative Christians don't typically enroll in Oberlin or Hampshire, and the more liberal-minded of us are not about to matriculate into Liberty University or Brigham Young. So you amass a cohort of people who tend to believe the same things as you, and then you graduate and maybe you turn towards cities that reflect your thinking. And within the cities you migrate towards neighborhoods or nearby towns that are populated by others like you. Sometimes you even gravitate towards professions/businesses that are in keeping with your social and political leanings. I missed the boat on this last one. I went into tech, which is dominated by white guys, and a pretty large number of them have mostly turned out to be conservatives/tea partiers/libertarians because, well...white guys.

There are of course exceptions to absolutely everything I just said because the world isn't black and white and doesn't neatly divide itself. It's messy and the universe is a trickster and contrarian and is always waiting to prove you wrong.

My Facefriends reflect a social and political diversity that is difficult to reproduce in real life, especially real life with a toddler and a demanding job. This wasn't done on purpose. I friended people with whom I worked, people with whom I have never engaged in a political conversation. They know me, we chat and joke and get along, we friend each other online...and then you find out what they think about "things". Things like gun control and immigration and social services.

People like Mike Brown.

And I start to wonder if maintaining this diversity—which admittedly fuels my ego and makes me think I'm so enlightened and egalitarian—is worth the assault to my sensibilities. For every gun control rant that has a few salient and valid points that I can admit to, there are more posts that make me cringe, and comments from their friends that make me wonder who exactly I'm dealing with.

Yesterday one such Facefriend posted a photo of Mike Brown. It showed him sitting at a table, pointing a gun at the camera, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch on the table and what looks like the neck of a liquor bottle just out of frame. Behind him sits another black male, and smoke is curling around him. I'm not going to repost it here. My Facefriend captioned it with: Here's the image of Michael Brown that the news doesn't want you to see. I'm sure you can draw your own conclusions.

Oh boy.