And that should not be a political statement, but the coverage of the incident and the context in which it happened has made my sympathy and my condolences political. Which is a real shame, because let's face it: a black man killed 5 white people, and somethings hinted and not said are all over this mess. But I want to talk about the non-political things first.
Part of my sympathy comes from the similarity between Kirkwood and my hometown over here on the other side of the river. Like Kirkwood, my town is relatively small, about 20,000 people. It's partnered civically and economically with the next town down the road, except for the city limit signs, we're one town. Both of our communities have seen some economic development, building, and repurposing of land and property in recent years. Both are cozy, historical, charming communities of about the same age, close to 130 years old. Like you, I can walk the streets of my little town feeling quite safe and free. Even late at night. We have largely white, middle and upper-middle class, well educated populations. Largely, but not wholly.
And, my god!, I am sorry, and wish for you that this had never happened, and am sending the best love and strength and comfort I can to you.
The only reason that I can write this post is that I don't live on the west side of the river. I have some distance, literally and figuatively. And I hope that somehow you will come around to some of the points and ideas that I make later all on your own, in your way. I have faith that you will. That you will rise to this situation. Equally, I hope people in lots of small, nice towns, including mine will give some thought once the pain, shock, and anger wear off. But usually we don't, and that's why I'm writing this. That "usually".
I'm hearing on the news people in Kirkwood say exactly what people in my town would say if something this terrible, this bloody, this sad and wrong had happened here. "I just don't understand it / This is such a close-knit and safe community / Everyone here knows everyone else / People here look after each other / We're one community" and so forth. And we over here, in our grief and astonishment, and our perception of our community, we would mean every word of it just as sincerely and tragically as you do. Many of us, anyway.
I say tragically, because it's just not true. I don't like saying it, and you won't like hearing it. We're Midwesterners. We're upstanding, kind, generous, friendly, and concerned with the well-being of our communities. Good people. Americans. But, we do not, not one of us, actually live in Mayberry (which is part of the reason that my condolence has now taken on a political cast I'll discuss later), though we can convince ourselves of that. If we're white and comfortable.
As for you, to read my local newspaper is to get lots of updates on the high school teams, the school district, the city government, community and church sponsored events, local entertainment and culture, and local crime. People here hurt each other from time to time (domestically and not), property is damaged, theft and burglary occur, some folks drink too much and drive, some people abuse drugs and some people sell them. Recent memory tells me that a young man was tortured by pot dealers when his buddies took the pot and ditched, leaving him there unable to pay. The dealers burned him with fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies. Given that this is a small town, and the symbolism of the cookies, it was just surreal. While I was at the court house last fall to witness a couple of friends get married, I also watched no less then three women go into and come back out of the domestic violence court down the hall -- in about an hour. I'll grant you, it's the county courthouse, but every town in this county is a small or really small town. More recently, some college kids rented a tour bus, got drunk in their partying, and were arrested for underage drinking. Ironically they were an anti-fraternity/sorority group acting like stereotypical Greeks. More frighteningly, a Micheal Devlin might live in my town, work in a local eatery or drug store or bank or law office, seem like a pretty normal guy for a pathological child molester. I might interact with him sometimes. But I wouldn't know him. I've eaten at that Imo's, just down the street there from the municpal building in Kirkwood, where he worked. Statistically, it's entirely possible that sort lives here. We just don't know about him, don't know him, and can't help whoever he might be hurting. And someone might be just this side of the edge Thorton went over. Entirely possible.
I know people in places and high and low in this community, but I don't know everyone or what they're up to, or how they're being served and respected or not by the city or the community on the whole. On the most generous estimate, I might know or be aquainted with about 300 people here most only in the passing business of the day, out of 20-odd thousand. And I don't know everything about the people I do know well. I can assure you that they don't know every thing about me. People, people's, are just not transparent.
So this plaint that "we all know each other here" is one we need to get over. Your sense of security, and ours too, has been shown for the illusion it really is. Which, for those not personally affected last night, those of us who are not friends and family of the victims, the witnesses (who have been hurt too), the police, or the shooter, our problem is that we've been visited by reality. People go over the edge, they do lots of damage very quickly because they are armed. At high schools, at colleges, in restaurants, in churches, in libraries, in malls, and in municipal buildings. And every single time it's someone -- of any race, gender, class, our shooters don't have a reliable profile anymore -- who was cast-out, disrespected, humiliated, pressed too far, for a long time by lots of people, and who broke.
Responsible for their choice to murder and rampage? Oh, hell yes. Accountable? Absolutely. Mr. Thorton is responsible and accountable. Deserved to be shot on sight as he was. I am not forgiving him. Not one bit. I am reminding us all that this horror did not happen in a vacuum. Which is not to assign blame to the victims or to the community. All of this story sounds completely normal so far. And that's the problem.
Never, ever, has a person "just up and shot them." Always this person existed in a context, a set of situations and relationships. Always there is a history. And always, everyone in the history is a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and mostly obvlious and mostly sure it'll be fine, or if paying attention just not pressing hard enough to address the situation. Human, in other words. The angry, the mad, the cast-out can speak truth as well as those who belong. They are human too. Your city council had every legal right to maintain order in its proceedings. Mr. Thorton may well (we are not yet sure, but we all need to get sure) have had legitimate grievances and gone about addressing them in precisely the wrong way in those meetings, with his protests, his lawsuits.
I mean, really, if in representing himself he filed the suit incorrectly, he could never have won it or had it heard. And maybe he did make a legal mistake, and maybe he didn't understand that. The Law is a labyrinthine place. And that would not have calmed him.
When I hear his family interviewed, I hear an old anger gone cold in its force. When I hear his friends (white and black) interviewed on TV and the radio here, I hear a deep sense of loss and some very politic rhetoric that stays far away from saying that he might just have been done wrong and for some while. --- It is not unheard of for the governments of small towns to use little known or little enforced codes and laws to harass inconvenient members of their communities. I most fervantly hope that your city council did not engage in that kind of abuse of power. I hope that such action was beyond their ken and that Thorton was just all kinds of out of line. But, it might not be that way.
When I listen to Thorton's friends, between the lines of their grief and lines of their speech, that's what I'm hearing. Something was amiss on both sides of that long-running conflict. I'm hearing that he was a good man, grew up in Kirkwood, contributed to the community, owned a business, had a college degree, played nicely with others. I'm also hearing that he was a very public pain the ass. An embarrassment possibly, and a gadfly. In his grievances, he reminds me of some people I know and have known in the past, both locally and in other states. The difference is that he was much more public, and often agressively rude about it. And he went to court. Most of the folks I know just don't have the wherewithall to do that. They just eventually give in to being ignored, put off, (sometimes) harassed by their municipalities. They usually just shut up and move somewhere else. Which, while a defeat and an acceptance of being disrespected, is the safe thing to do. But, it is also defeat and giving in to being directly oppressed in the very literal sense of the word. One chooses between kinds of dishonor in that situation. It is not a comfortable choice.
I hope my little community will do what I'm about to suggest. Because, given our similarities, I'm betting it needs to, or will need to in the future someday. Because the world has indeed come to this, over and over again. We have another chance, greusome though its source, to reflect on and improve our communities.
Once you, Kirkwood, are on your way through your grief, and starting the healing process, please, please do not use your grief to justify aspects of your status quo that might not be ideal for the healing of your whole community and every single person in it. Don't be normal.
- Stop assuming that because everything's fine in your experience of your community, it is also just fine in everyone else's experience. It just might not be.
On several broadcasts (on channels 4 and 5), reporters were hinting and indicating that many of the people of Meacham Park feel very much disenfranchised from the rest of the city and its life, the reporter nearly pleading that the issue be addressed direclty and soon. Channel 4 even said that they would indeed follow up on that race/class matter. It can't hurt. It might be unpleasant, even inconveneint, but it can't hurt to do better on these points. In all that very politic rhetoric, what no one was saying out loud was, race relations are not all that good in Kirkwood. But, you're not alone there, we all know.
One report even stated that Meacham Park residents feel "occupied" by the police patrols in that neighborhood. This is one response to trouble in a community, but not the one that builds the kind of social cohesion we small-towners want to believe we have. And let's be clear, most of the good people who live in Meacham park are black, and not quite as affluent as that cadre of folk in Kirkwood who all know each other. Which is perfectly normal. There might be a race problem here, and it might be partly a matter of racism (though unconscious), and if it is, you do need to take a good hard look at that. Unconscious racism does just as much damage as the conscious kind. Most of the communities in this area do, in fact, have race issues in play. Our little towns don't get called on it much because St. Louis is always getting called on it. It just so damn obvious. But none of our little towns are shining utopias of racial harmony. Thorton's accusation of a "plantation mentality" in the council was certainly rude, even inflamatory, but that doesn't make it necessarily untrue. I hope it is, but only you can sort that through.
- To the local press: when the time comes, make good and damn sure that you do take a look at the several sides of this trouble.
I heard from one demographic in your reporting so far: white, elite. That's perfectly natural since the disaster just happened, the vicitims were of that class, and so it was their freinds and acquaintances who showed up to the scene. No problem. But, they are likely not the only folk done wrong here, and the questions of race and class and power that no one wants to bring up (though I quite rudely am) seem to be in play here. Kirkwood, St. Louis, every community in this region and country, none of us can address the race and class issues until we face them, and listen for a long time before we act. Do the good thing here: don't back off that story. Don't pick on Kirkwood. It's a perfectly normal town in this respect. But, let's not try, again, to ignore the problem as if that will make it all OK. I have a feeling that everyone has a share of it.
- Make double sure you are dealing fairly, and don't just dismiss the "crazy person."
Like I said, people don't "just snap" on a balmy Sunday when everything's going quite well in their lives. Several of Thorton's friends have been reported to say that he was perfectly well licensed for the contracting work he did, and that the city seemed to be targeting him for infractions of those little enforced city ordincances. If that's the case, stop that, please. Now, we don't have facts on this, so I'm just suggesting based on hearsay. But, if the facts do come in, and this reading is accurate, well then, stand up and deal and clean your house. One report I was watching interviewed a friend of the victims, a former council member I think, who mentioned the building of the new park "right or wrong" where all those people who know each other meet and drink coffee on pretty Sundays in good weather, walk their dogs, read the paper, visit. It's a small phrase that "right or wrong," but important. If the "wrong" is part of the feeling of the poeple in Meacham Park (maybe some application of the new emminent domain law? i'm totally guessing), then well, you need address that too. In future business, just make sure you're dealing fairly. Sometimes trying to deal fairyly doesn't quite get it.
- Be really incredibly brave. Be prolifigate with your kindness and your welcoming. Be abnormal.
One man in your town was interviewed rather late at night, and he had some heartbreakingly wise, temperate, eloquent things to say about the whole city needing to come together, and poeple on "both sides" needing to help each other heal. Listen to him. Real hard.
Do you see how what's not getting said here is always the same un-said thing? This is what makes my condolence to everyone a political statement. Even if I don't want it to be one.
Take some flowers to Mrs. Thorton, too. Offer her and her family your condolences. Reach out in all sincerity to listen and work to address the concerns of those people of your community whom you don't seem to know, in and likely also outside of Meacham Park. Make them feel -- not feel, KNOW -- that they are your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues, your peers in the life of your city. Take them seriously.
Because that will, really, make you feel better too. Maybe not right off, but in the long run. Because it's right. Because it is precisely not normal to do so.
And then, as I could say to countless small towns and big cities in America, you'll be on your way to healing and living in real, actualized, community.
May you be blessed and kept in this troubled time, and may you, and we, turn this tradegy, this mayhem, this anger and fear into inspiration for futher creating the lives and communities we all deserve.
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