Down With Slogans!

Make America Great Again! 
-- Donald Trump, 2016 campaign slogan and policy statement

I said a thing. 

It didn't go well. 

Or, on second thought, maybe it did. Days later, I'm still not sure one way or the other. 

It began, as it usually does these days, on Twitter:

Hang on. 

Just wait. Don't start screaming yet. 

If you let me explain, I'll probably give you even more reason to be mad and outraged. Won't that be nice? 

So, anyway, that's what I said. 

We don't want to defund the police.

We want to fund police training, de-escalation, community outreach, oversight, and especially police ACCOUNTABILITY.

What we want is to defund police brutality, abuse, racism, escalation, and militarization.

Fund protect and serve EVERYONE.

Outrageous, right? 

In my defense, Twitter is a lousy platform for political commentary. Tweets are limited to just under 300 characters, which doesn't allow for much in the way of detail or nuance. And sure, you can thread tweets, i.e. link them together into a longer message -- and I do that, a lot, and am in fact somewhat notorious for it -- but the truth of the matter is that not very many people read beyond the first tweet in the thread anyway.

And frankly, I thought this mostly a throwaway comment. 

I posted that at 8:35AM on a Monday morning. First tweet of the week, while I had my first cup of coffee and settled in to get a feel for what was happening in an America on fire, burning from both ends and right down the middle. 

But this was a Monday morning after two weeks of protests following the murder of yet another black man at the hands of police. 

This was Monday after a weekend of the president throwing gasoline on the fire from the safety of his bunker, under a fortress, behind a wall, surrounded by a brand new fence, guarded by an army. 

This was the day after police across the nation declared war on American citizens, a weekend of dogs, escalation, gas, tanks, and bullets -- some rubber, some not -- and yet more murders, more racism, more abuse by those who should be protecting Americans instead of killing them. 

I want to say this Monday was unusual, but, you know, it's starting to feel like it's not. 

Maybe that's where I went wrong -- if indeed I did. 

Rage has become the norm of American existence and this just seemed like more of the same.

Because it is. 

And that's the problem. 

See, on that Monday, my various social media timelines were full, tens of thousands deep, with people shouting "Defund the Police!"

Defund The Police?

That's the message we've settled on, I guess. The shouted slogan, the unifying narrative that has emerged in the wake of the protests, the riots, the rhetoric, the war on American citizens waged by those sworn to protect and serve and openly led and encouraged by those supposedly elected to support and defend the Constitution for all. 

Defund the police!

There were thousands of requests, demands, entreaties, for me to use my platform to push that message: Defund the Police! Come on, Jim! Join us! Use your voice to get others to join us! Defund the police! 

Sure, but ... defund the police? 

Defund?

What does that mean? 

The day before I saw a handful of people shouting this. Now? Monday morning it was thousands. Tens of thousands. 

So, anyway, I...

What? 

What's that? 

Oh. I see. 

You're mad. It was way before Monday morning, you say. You've been shouting it for years. Well, you know, maybe it was being shouted long before Monday. But maybe we don't all have the same view, the same input, the same shared experience -- and we're going to come back to that. So, for me, it was Monday when I really noticed the slogan "Defund the Police," when I realized it had become some sort of national movement, when people began demanding that I join up. 

You? Your mileage may vary. 

As I way saying: You want me to join you? You want me to push the message? 

I might, but I'm going to need more than a slogan.

Defund the police? 

What does that mean? Get rid of the police? Abolish the police? Or just ... don't pay the police anymore? What are we talking about here? 

I looked at what my readers were saying, over half a cup of cooling coffee at 7AM. 

I looked at the thousands of comments and messages, and I  listened to what people were shouting in the street, and it seemed to me they were saying they didn't really want to get rid of the police. 

Instead, again it seemed to me, they wanted to reduce the things which lead to institutional bias (such as, you know, racism, for example), abuse of power (like kneeling on a man's throat until he dies, for example), unnecessary use and/or escalation of force (like tear gas and rubber bullets used on peaceful protesters outside the White House), militarization, lack of accountability, etc. 

That sounds good. 

I can certainly support that, and in fact, I have been shouting that very message myself for more than a decade right here. 

And, again it seemed to me, they wanted to reward, fund, and/or increase the things which lead to better policing. Such as: community outreach to help cops and citizens see each other as people and not enemies, i.e. make policing local, community based and less like an invading army; programs which move some of the burden for non-policing matters (such as mental health intervention) away from law enforcement; increased oversight of police departments by community, state, and federal entities; significantly increased accountability of police officers and departments, training (which can be everything from de-escalation to civil rights to sexual harassment), etc.

That also sounds good to me. At least as a starting point. 

Again, since it seems I might need to repeat myself on this, I've been preaching exactly that message for more than a decade now, right here on this blog, and on my various social media feeds -- and I haven't been exactly shy about it recently either. 

I think "defund" might not be the best choice of words here, but you go to into revolution with the slogans you have and so I boiled what I was seeing down into a single summary small enough to fit into a tweet. 

Monday morning and a throwaway tweet of agreement and, even now, this doesn't seem like a controversial statement to me. 

But it only seems that way.

As it turns out, that's not what everybody meant. 

See, some people really did mean "abolish" the police. 

A lot of people, as it turns out. 

 

There are thousands more. 

Three days later, it's still going on. 

You can take a look at my Twitter feed if you don't want to take my word for it. And tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of similar comments on Twitter outside of my feed, and on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. 

Fuck you, defund the police. 

Fuck you, abolish the police. 

Fuck you, eliminate the police. 

Fuck you, defund means defund. 

Well, okay. Fuck me. Whatever. Not exactly the first time Lefty social media has told me to go fuck myself. I try not to take it personally. But about the hundredth "fuck you" from people who I'm supposed to be sharing a side with, well, like the man said, it kinda feels personal. 

Maybe I had it wrong. 

It happens.

I was once -- allegedly -- trained to hold a full cup of coffee, while standing in a canoe, in the middle a hurricane, without spilling a drop. Something about attention to detail and focus, or so Navy Chiefs would have you believe. But, this? This makes a hurricane at sea in a canoe look pretty good. There are one hell of a lot of moving parts lately. Lot of people yelling. Lot of rage. Lot of hate filling my feeds. We're still in the midst of a pandemic, record numbers of new cases, record number of people dying -- and here in Florida, I'm right in the middle of it. Meanwhile, there's an economic crisis, a looming recession, a collapsing energy sector, a trade war, an election. Right now, half my social media is lit up with very angry people yelling about the Harry Potter lady...

So, maybe somewhere in that tempest, I missed something. 

Unlike Trump, I don't claim every word I speak to be perfection. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe I needed to apologize. 

So I went to look. 

And there thousands of comments that say the same thing, nearly word for word. 

And huh? 

Defund the police doesn't mean eliminate the police, see? It means reduce the size of police budgets and use the resulting savings to fund community services, mental health, drug rehab, and so on. 

Again, you don't have to take my word for it, you can go look at the responses for yourself. Look at what protesters are saying, in the street and online. 

Which, not that I'm taking this personally, says pretty much what I said in the original post wasn't it?

So, who's right? 

Who owns "Defund the Police?" The Fuck You, Abolish The Pigs side or the Fuck You, Reform the Police side? 

I dunno. 

But I did notice that nearly every response I got from the Keep The Police camp talked about mental illness. 

They said Defund the Police is about reallocating money from the police budget to fund community services. The implication, it seems, being that if help gets to the mentally ill before the cops do, there will be less cops murdering mentally ill people. And that's likely valid, so far as it goes, but I'm not sure how it would have saved George Floyd -- who was murdered by the police for the alleged crime of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. I don't see how it would have saved Trayvon Martin. Or Tamir Rice. Or Eric Garner. Or made police arrest Ahmaud Aubrey's killers on the spot. Or... Well, again, it seemed as if I might be missing something.

It seemed to me this isn't about mental illness, or the homeless, or those with medical problems, or even overclocked police departments.

It seems that I recall this being about racism. 

And I can't see how reallocation of police funding addresses that fundamental issue right there. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing the idea. 

I'm not. 

I'm really not. I spent the better part of my adult life in the military. I can't talk about my job, but ultimately it was about killing people. That's what war is. Killing people. One at a time and in great big batches. Men, women, children, those who were our enemies and those who just happened to get in the way. That's what war is, killing people. It's terrible and there is no morality in it even when the cause might be just, but there it is just the same. That was my job. And I was good at it. 

You know what I wasn't good at? 

Peace. 

I wasn't a peacekeeper. It wasn't my job. It's not the job of the military to build nations, to synthesize democracy from the ashes of war, to grow a rational civilization and a functioning society. I don't know how to do that. I know how to kill people. But the part that comes after? That's not my job -- or it wasn't then. 

Yet, the military gets ordered to do that job all of the time. 

And we suck at it. We're not equipped for it. We're not trained for it. We don't have the right mentality for it. Human beings generally aren't killers -- as least not those who aren't psychopaths. You have to train them to kill people, you have to see the other side as less than human, a threat, the enemy. That's how wars are fought. Nation Building? That requires exactly the opposite mentality. How do you go from enemy to friend without some sort of transition? The human brain doesn't work that way. You go mad if you try -- and plenty of us in the military have. 

So, I get it. 

Believe me, I do. I get it. Cops aren't mental health experts. They're not doctors or social workers or animal control agents or childcare providers or any of the thousand things we demand of them. And when an increasingly militarized cop is forced into those roles, well, they suck at it. Because they can't shift from enemy to friend, from threat to nation builders. 

And people die. 

And we end up ... here.

So, I'm not arguing the idea that maybe we should remove those functions from the police and put them into the hands of people who are experts. 

That said, I think it's a lot more complicated than that -- speaking as somebody who's been sent to destroy countries and build nations more than once, and as somebody who trained with cops. 

I think the problems are bigger, and smaller, than just moving some money around. 

And I think it's about a lot more than just mental illness -- or any of the things we ask police to deal with. 

You don't become a racist because you had to deal with some homeless guy who needs mental healthcare. 

You don't kneel on a man's neck until he's dead, ignoring his cries for help, because a black man was selling loose cigarettes.

You don't shoot a black kid sitting on a playground because you had to get a kitten out of a tree.

You don't give a pass to vigilanties who gunned down a black man jogging on a public road because you didn't get a discount at the donut shop. 

You do these things because you're a fucking monster. 

And I think it's going to cost a lot more than just defunding some of the police budget. And I think it's going to require significant restructuring of entrenched mindsets in federal, state, and local governments, in the police force itself, and more than anything in the public -- cops end up doing jobs they're not qualified for because in a lot of cases the public calls 911 and asks them to. 

So, I asked my readers: What do you mean by Defund The Police. 

No. No. Not what does Stephen Colbert mean. 

Not what does the Minneapolis City Council mean. 

What do you mean? What do you think you mean when you say "defund the police?" 

Because it seems maybe we're making some assumptions here about what we all might believe this movement to be about. Because, if you can't explain "defund the police to ME" -- when I'm supposedly on your side -- how the hell are you going to explain it to somebody who hates Trump but will vote for him anyway because "liberals want to get rid of the police?"

Didn't you tell me we needed those people? Or some of them anyway? 

So, I asked. 

It didn't go well. 

Again, there are hundreds, thousands, more responses. 

Again, you can go look for yourself. 

Do your own research. Fuck you. This isn't your movement. Moron. Stupid. I shouldn't have to explain! And it's funny, the similarities of these responses to those when I asked Trump supporters to explain what "Make America Great Again" means to them. 

Then again:

Maybe the details aren't important right now. 

That said, I'm reflexively opposed to mobs. 

I'm cautious of movements based on slogans. 

The current government of America is a pretty good example of what happens when you don't demand the details up front. 

I sat there trying to make sense of two diametrically opposed interpretations of this movement:

Defund the Police means defund the police, abolish the cops, get rid of them, which part of this are you not understanding? 

Defund the Police means defund the police, keep the cops, but cut their budgets and use the money elsewhere, which part of this are you not getting? 

It seems to me that maybe Defund the Police means different things to different people -- even those who claim to be on the same side and part of the same movement and marching in the same protest and shouting the same slogan. 

And commenting on my Twitter feed. 

I don't know which one is right, maybe both, maybe neither.

I can, however, tell you who isn't confused about what Defund the Police means: 

This guy: 

And this guy:  

|And this guy: 

This is where I live, Milton, Florida, a backwater hick town in the Deep South of the Florida Panhandle. 

There are no riots here. No civil unrest. 

No much in the way of protests.

But, Defund the Police? White people here are scared shitless.

My god! Buy guns! Learn how to use them! The government can't help you! Black people are rioting. Liberals want to get rid of the police! Socialism! Communists! Antifa! They're coming for us! They going to burn our town and rape our women and loot our stuff and murder us!

That's not hyperbole. That's not exaggeration, that's the local politicians.

You loot, we'll shoot.

There hasn't be been a single case of looting anywhere in this or neighboring counties -- well, other than toothless white rednecks robbing each other's shitty trailers for money to buy meth. But, here's James Calkins, running for office on that very fear.

And it's likely going to get him elected.

Before the protests, before Trump started telling Americans how "Antifa" and "protesters, agitators, anarchists," and "others" (you know who he's talking about, you know), before Defund the Police, nobody knew who this guy was, James Calkins, Republican for District 3 County Commissioner. Now? The signs for his campaign are everywhere in Santa Rosa county.

Right next to brand new ones for Trump.

Defund the Police plays right to their racist, paranoid base.

If you don't live in a place like this, you don't really understand what it's like. The pervasive racism, the entrenched religious fanaticism, the lack of education, and the endless conspiracies pushed by preachers, politicians, and poltroons.

These people really do believe Hillary Clinton murdered four Americans in Benghazi and that she really was running a globe-spanning pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor basement in Washington D.C. They really do. And they believe Trump is a good Christian man. But, these people, these white Southern Conservatives here where I live, the pandemic showed them for the first time Trump's incompetence. This is one of the hardest hit states for the coronavirus. People they knew, people they cared about, those people died, some of them, are dying. It wasn't just black people, or Muslims, or "the gays," or liberals in some Northern city, for the first time, Trump's failure affected them personally. They lost their jobs. The stores they shopped at were closed. They couldn't get toilet paper or medications. Suddenly, conservative political pundits were turning against Trump and these people didn't know what to think.

Maybe Trump wasn't making America so great after all.

Does that mean they would have voted for Joe Biden?

No.

They'd never vote for a baby-murderin' demonrat in a million years.

But, they might not have voted for Donald Trump again either.

They might have stayed home.

Now? Now, they're firmly convinced that hordes of "Antifa" are on the way to pillage this shitty little backwater hick Southern town. COVID-19 might kill grandma, but Defund the Police means looters and rapists and rioters, you loot, we'll shoot, and God Bless Donald Trump! There are new Trump 2020 signs sprouting in yards across the Panhandle. The line outside the local gun store is twenty deep.

And they'll be at the polls come voting day, you better believe it.

So, what am I saying?

Don't protest? Don't demand a better nation? Better policing? Better communities? A better government? 

No, of course not. 

I'm not telling you how to protest. 

I'm not telling you to shut up because you're making white people afraid. 

I'm not telling you that your experience is invalid. I'm not telling you that you're wrong. Abolish the police, reform the police, whatever your position is, I'm not telling you anything. 

I don't know what the right answer is -- other than it's not Trump. 

I don't have a snappy wrap-up here, or some pithy observation. 

I'm trying damn hard not to take any of this personally -- not even that one person who called me a White Supremacist. I'm trying hard to listen. Hell, I went silent for a week to do just that. 

But I'm not listening to just you, my supposed allies, I'm listening to the opposition too. 

And I'm hearing what Trump is saying. And Mitch McConnell. And the local gun-waving politicians cashing in on white fear. 

This is politics and the message matters. Appearances matter. 

FEAR matters. 

Slogans matter and if you can't explain exactly what you mean when you say "defund the police" then somebody else will. 

Somebody like Donald Trump.