A terrifying prospect, blogging into the Cloud. As a Story Analyst for a major Hollywood film studio (see my novel, "Giving Good Hollywood" and discover the trade!), I write every day for executives seeking the next perfect potential movie, yet this blogging business is different. Instead of my synopses and comments on books and screenplays disappearing into the Black Hole of a studio executive's desk, this paragraph is to be shot up into the Cloud and disseminated into the throbbing electronic hive known as the Internet. Can I? Dare I? Will critics descend en masse and Twitter me into a bundle of quivering retreat or will this little foray simply fade among the ether of the many clamoring voices saying hear, see, feel me? Well, Ma, I'm doing it. A tentative post today on nothing really. Just a test. This is a test... Now, do I click "Save and Publish?" How terrifying! Here goes....
Tiny cameras
"The video puts you in the moment," writes James Poniewozik, chief television critic of the NYTimes, "but it disembodies you. You are this machine, picked up, dropped down, pulled back out. You are eyes and ears without arms and legs." And yet the tiny camera bears witness to an appalling evil: An innocent unarmed man, a black man, reaching for his ID upon an officer's request and shot dead by that police officer as his girlfriend and her four year old daughter look on, bearing witness for the rest of us millions, terrified for their lives.
Roxane Gay wrote yesterday, before this tragedy and yet in the aftermath of another that "I don't know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change. I don't know how to believe change is possible when there is so much evidence to the contrary."
With a justice system that fails to convict officers who kill innocent victims, I find myself wondering the same when asked to do jury duty in a case where, indicating my skepticism of an officer's testimony, I was immediately dismissed from the potential jury. So too were dozens of people of color, also potential jurors, who spoke of being pulled over by cops, beaten, threatened. If as citizens we are dismissed from juries because we are seen as "biased" against cops, how are we to ever convict these militarized killers?