Today, November 24th, 2015, Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois. We all should be charged for the same thing. I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call Jason Van Dyke a bad apple, but the problem is larger than that.

The problem–the problem that led to the death of Laquan Mcdonald–extends to Jason Van Dyke’s police department, whose officers allegedly went into a Burger King and erased the surveillance video. It extends to the Mayor’s office and to the State’s Attorney’s office, who were dilatory in bringing charges. It extends to our legislatures who have shielded our law enforcement officers with cloaks of qualified immunity, impunity, and legal invincibility. It extends to our courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, for eviscerating the Fourth Amendment rights of the citizens.

The problem extends to each and every single one of us who wants to claim citizenship in a democratic republic.

Laquan McDonald is on all of us. 

We are a society. We have a culture. We share a nation. We call ourselves the United States of America. We pride ourselves on our democratic ideals. We claim exceptionalism. Equal protection under the laws. A government of the people and by the people. Just as we as a nation cannot absolve ourselves for the slaughter of innocents overseas when we send our troops to war, we can’t abdicate our own responsibility for the death of Laquan McDonald or any of the others unjustly harassed, abused, or murdered in our name.

All it takes to file criminal charges in this country is probable cause, a bar so low in our courts that if it were not so tragic it would be laughable. It took over a year to charge Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder despite the fact that clear video evidence showed far more than probable cause that he committed first-degree murder when he opened fire on a juvenile, a teenager who was moving away from him, a kid who made no threatening gestures toward Jason Van Dyke. He opened fire and he kept firing. Laquan McDonald fell to the ground and Jason Van Dyke kept firing.

It was memorialized in video. Evidence exists. Probable cause exists. As a society, we should be expected to seek justice for whomever was responsible for the death of Laquan McDonald. But we didn’t. We delayed, and justice delayed is justice denied.

It took 400 days to charge Van Dyke in the shooting of Laquan McDonald. 

Jason Van Dyke gunned down Laquan McDonald on October 20th, 2014. A judge, in response to a journalist’s Freedom of Information Act request, ordered the video of the shooting released to the public by November 25th, 2015. 400 days.

400 days have gone by since Laquan McDonald breathed his last while he lay bleeding in the streets from sixteen bullet holes, with all the bullets being fired by one sworn to uphold the law and protect and serve the public.

400 days. The State’s Attorney, she’s an elected official. She’s a politician. The video had been requested by the public for a year. When the courts finally forced the city to release the video of the slaying as unrest continued to grow, she waited until the day the video was released to press charges.

#BlackLivesMatter –Laquan McDonald’s life mattered. 

If Laquan McDonald had been arrested for shooting and killing someone, if the roles were reversed, he would have been put in jail and charged as soon as the courts were open for business. He would have been denied bail. He would have been assigned to an overworked public defender who could not possibly be expected to provide effective assistance of counsel with the immorally low funding and staffing in the public defender’s office. Laquan McDonald would either be coerced into pleading or he would have a mere formality of a trial before he was sent to prison or death row. No one would blink, because that is how our country operates. That is the status quo.

Instead, Jason Van Dyke is a white police officer who has a thin blue line to erase video tapes for him. He is a white police officer who has the strongest unions and political lobbies behind him. He is a white police officer who works in the executive branch of our government, hand in hand with the attorneys responsible for charging decisions and prosecutions. He is a white police officer who has 400 days to prepare a defense, to prepare his family, to practice those magic words, “I feared for my life.”  He is a white police officer who may have never been charged in the first place if a journalist didn’t fight for that video to be released, who may have never been charged had that video not forced the hand of the State’s Attorney in her own self-interested political game.

We are all complicit; we are all responsible for change. 

Plenty of people will spill words indicting Jason Van Dyke, but plenty of right-wing racists will instead blame the victim and say that if Laquan McDonald weren’t a “thug,” if he had just followed the directions of police, if he had just not committed any crimes in the first place, he would still be alive. Their logic will rest on the idea that anything short of unflinching obedience to the State, anything short of complete purity of spirit (and skin) deserves the sentence of death with no trial.

Plenty of people will blame a police culture that encourages officers to shoot first and ask questions later, yet plenty of others will write op-eds about a non-existent war on police.

Plenty of people will march in Laquan McDonald’s memory to honor him and to protest the sad truth that our government—and thus, the majority of our citizenry—cares less for the lives of black people and other people of color than it does for the white majority, yet many will point to the red herring of black on black violence.

Plenty of people will scream out in anguish because they aren’t heard when they say, “Black lives matter,” but—sadly—plenty of people will scream out in anger and denial to drown them out. Plenty of people will miss the point entirely; and to protect their own fragile psyches, to continue living in denial, or to maintain their own status quo, they will cry out, “All lives matter.”

It’s all so familiar, and it’s all so heartbreaking. So many words will be spilled about the blood we continue to spill, and most of them will be pointing the finger at someone else. So few will hold up a mirror and say, “How am I complicit?” The truth is, we are all to blame.

We live in a culture of fear in which we demonize “the other.” We live in a culture of violence in which we use guns in misguided efforts to solve or prevent our problems. We live in a culture in which we are at war with each other—black lives vs. blue lives, liberals vs. conservatives, extremist evangelicals vs. everyone, and the list goes on.

We live in a culture in which we voice outrage over the blood spilled in our streets, in our movie theaters, and in our schools; yet, we do nothing about it. We live in a culture in which we are all given one vote, we are all given voices, and we continue to either not use them or we waste them to maintain the status quo. The status quo is not acceptable.

My heart absolutely breaks for Laquan McDonald and for his family. And my heart breaks for us all.

 

         

     Matthew J. Hefti is the author of A Hard and Heavy Thing (Tyrus / F+W).

I’m writing this on the eve of Veterans Day, an annual observance in America that becomes both less and more important to me with each passing year. It’s important to view days or periods of time as special; I’m not sure when that began, and I assume there was originally a religious or superstitious connotation to “special days,” but now the special days with which one identifies form an important part of one’s identity.

In thinking about Veterans Day, and what it means to me, I have to admit that many days feel like “Veterans Day” in America. Part of that is my friend circle—as someone who is interested in affairs that affect veterans, I’m constantly encountering them on social media, as well as in the news. It helps that identifying as a veteran is seen, now, as a largely apolitical gesture, and one that is fairly unbiased when it comes to race, religion, sex, or gender (individual experiences will vary on this point, but I’m speaking broadly). In general, veterans tend to feel appreciated in US society. And when they don’t, they let people know.

Being a “veteran” is different from being a part of any other special interest group, especially ones involving birth. Nevertheless, being a veteran is similar in that few civilians know or understand what they’re getting into when they join the military. One goes through basic training and advanced training, and the point of it all is to strip you of your identity as a citizen—to make you simultaneously less and more. Once you join the military, you have become something that you never were as a civilian—part of a unified collective—and once you leave, you are stripped of that collective. Even the people who misbehave, the anti-authoritarians (as I was), the renegades, the individualists—even they are not unaffected by the curious taking off of identity, of returning to what one was before the military changed you—this is a large part of what it means to be a veteran—to know loss, to understand what it means to have been part of a special team.

Not every group in America does feel appreciated, or even safe, necessarily, within the identity that has been assigned to them. I’m currently lecturing a course at Yale called “Memoir and the War on Terror, which has been in the news recently because certain minority groups do not feel safe on campus—intellectually, culturally. The source of the problem some students have with Yale clearly has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, and it is eliciting the usual spectrum of responses. The left, broadly, supports what appears to be a valid concern on the part of students who do not want to be confronted by crude caricatures of their cultures. Yet all over the right, there exists much handwringing over liberal fascism and the thought-police, moderately described by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic and less moderately by people writing for Breitbart and other right-wing sites.

Academia is not crumbling; it’s not under attack; our freedom is secure. What’s happening, near Veterans Day (conveniently for my meditation on that which makes me special and unique in terms of social identity beyond my being special and unique by virtue of my chemical and physical composition), on the Yale campus and at the University of Missouri, is that people are engaged in dialogue. There have been threats, intimidation, and strong language, but unlike in many areas on earth, there haven’t been gunfights or brawls. There’s been language.

When my father was graduating from Yale in the Spring of 1970, there were protests on New Haven Green tied to a murder trial of the Black Panthers. Someone called out the Connecticut National Guard. My father remembers smelling tear gas on campus—the Green is beside Old Campus, where most freshmen live at Yale. Tanks and uniformed soldiers were on the streets. Kent State loomed at the forefront of people’s memories, where students had been shot. That was a protest.

Today, some students don’t feel safe and are congregating, are meeting with professors, and—sometimes—are shouting. There are no tanks, no soldiers, no riot police. No tear gas. The Silliman Master, whose wife provoked this firestorm with a (as Friedersdorf points out) fairly rational, defensible, unintentionally incendiary email, stands (in a prominent YouTube video) in the middle of a group of students—despite being yelled at, he remains calm; his life and safety are not in danger.

We’ve come a long way, collectively, since the days of Vietnam. Veterans of Vietnam came home to an almost-non-functional VA, and were alienated by veterans of WWII and Korea, as well as by segments of the US population. Society itself was in turmoil, everywhere. Today, Veterans of the War on Terror are accepted despite their participation in a war that makes even less sense than Vietnam. Veterans come home to parades, a less-broken VA, and an appreciative (or, at least not a hostile) population. Veterans have it good.

And society has it good. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re far better than they were forty, fifty years ago. The events unfolding at Yale and on other college campuses today are products of integration and products of a democratic society wherein people can speak up and speak out. That’s a good thing.

I’m pleased with what is happening on college campuses and proud that being a veteran of the United States of America’s armed forces is part of my identity. Life isn’t perfect—it never was, and it never will be—but so far, we’re doing it better than just about anyone else in the world.