Category: Social Issues

General, Social Issues

Dear Dallas: A Love Letter

During my first visit to Dallas in 2001, I made my way to Dealey Plaza, the site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I spent hours inside the Sixth Floor Museum, carefully inspecting the vantage point from the “sniper’s lair,” before moving outside to stand atop the grassy knoll, peer over the picket fence, and contemplate the place on Elm Street where an X marked the spot of our national horror. I traveled to Oak Cliff to see the rooming house on North Beckley Avenue, where Lee Harvey Oswald lived in 1963, and to West Jefferson Boulevard, site of the Texas Theater, where he was apprehended by Dallas Police for the killing of officer J.D. Tippit on 10th Street.

I ended my first visit to Dallas with a stop at the Kennedy Memorial, about 200 yards from Dealey Plaza, at Market and Commerce streets. The architect Philip Johnson designed the bone-white cenotaph in 1970, not as “a memorial to the pain and sorrow of death,” but as “a permanent tribute to the joy and excitement of one man’s life.”

The simple, concrete memorial is intended to be a place of contemplation. Its 30-foot-high walls, open in the center and along most of the base, create a space apart from the bustling city. At the center is a black granite slab, too square to be confused with a tomb, inscribed simply with the President’s name.

I mention all these places and names, familiar to many Americans of my generation, because they were my first impressions of Dallas. It was for me a place of enormous sadness.

In later years, I would work at The Dallas Morning News, founded by George Bannerman Dealey, after whom Dealey Plaza was named. Every day for nearly eight years I made my way to work, walking past the plaza with the School Book Depository looming over me like a monument to madness. I would settle in Oak Cliff, not far from Oswald’s last stand, and I would interview Marie Tippit for some banal article in the newspaper’s Seniors section.

I would eventually take a job in the Department of Radiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, which had clinical space in Parkland Hospital’s former Trauma Room 1, where President Kennedy was X-rayed by the department’s first chairman, Frederick Bonte, before being declared dead at 1 p.m. Had the assassination happened today, Abraham Zapruder might have live-streamed the event on Facebook, generating millions of views by 1:01 p.m.

To live and work in Dallas is an almost constant encounter with its ghosts. Every day, as I drive to work, I pass the grave of Clyde Barrow, a poor hillbilly from West Dallas who met his own violent end in an ambush that also claimed the life of his lover, Bonnie Parker. Their bank-robbing shooting spree made them cult celebrities of the early 1930s. One can only imagine how they would have trended on today’s social media, given their fascination with collecting newspaper clippings of themselves and their exploits.

To live in Dallas, you have to make room for its ghosts.

After a dozen years of living in the city, traveling its streets, passing its past, I’ve learned that you may be able to avoid reality but you can’t escape it. Despite the popular appeal of J.R. Ewing and America’s Team, the Dallas Housewives and The Bachelor, Mark Cuban and Ross Perot, Dallas cannot erase its association with tension, trouble and terror. The city’s racist establishment, corrupt political system and north-south bipolar disorder have all been well documented.

So why live in a place so fragmented, so divided, so haunted by past iniquities and enduring inequities?

Because Dallas is America.

Although historically predominately white, Dallas has diversified as it has grown. Today, about a third of the city’s 1.3 million citizens are white, 25 percent are black or African-American, and nearly 25 percent are foreign born. The largest minority groups in the city are Hispanics and Latinos, making Dallas a microcosm of the U.S. population.

To live in Dallas, then, is to live in America.

Throughout this vast and conflicted city, you’ll find localized populations of Chinese, Korean, Persian, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, German, Arab, Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Jewish peoples. Our neighborhood, in south Oak Cliff, is almost equally divided between black and Hispanic residents. This multicultural mix is the direct result of what Dallas has come to represent: It is a place of new beginnings; of continuous change; of limitless possibilities; of big ambitions.

The opportunity to make a fresh start brought me to Dallas, and I’m proud to call it my adopted hometown. I’ve traveled its roads, walked its streets, met its people, celebrated its triumphs, and mourned its losses. I have gathered with a jubilant crowd to cheer the nation’s first African-American president; marched with the LGBT community to demand marriage equality; thrilled to fireworks over downtown; rang in the New Year at a massive street party; enjoyed artistic and cultural events that are second to none, including symphony concerts, musical performances, ballet recitals, museum exhibitions, and stage plays.

The violence that visited our familiar streets last week may not have been unfamiliar to Dallas, but it was still a shock to the system. In a way, it was an assault on America itself. It struck at the heart of our great democracy. It does not represent who we are.

The peaceful protestors and the police who protected them — that’s who we are. We will not be defined by our bloody, racist past but by our multiracial future. Our commitment to healing our wounds and working toward greater understanding and appreciation of each other will be the way we build a more perfect union.

In the aftermath of the killings, Dallas Police Chief David Brown spoke in moving terms about how service and sacrifice are essential to democracy. He assured us that his officers would continue to put themselves in harm’s way to protect the great citizens of Dallas. That work, in service of democracy, is worthwhile, he said.

This, then, is Dallas: noble, proud, and strong.

Ethics, General, Social Issues

Guns Kill People

George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012. That single fact is undisputed. But did the Neighborhood Watch leader murder the unarmed teen? Did he act with such reckless abandon that his actions amounted to manslaughter? A jury unanimously said, “no.”

In U.S. jurisprudence, as in much of biblical history, there is a distinction between killing and murder. Murder is unlawful killing, an act that is premeditated, intentional and malicious. Killing is when someone unintentionally takes the life of another, or does so as an act of self-defense or in defense of others.

The jury in Zimmerman’s trial simply decided, based on the evidence and the law, that Zimmerman didn’t murder Martin. He killed him in self-defense.

The story is a tragic one, of course, and no one emerged victorious. Martin is dead and Zimmerman is a pariah. It’s likely that Zimmerman and Martin were both scared of each other that rainy night–Martin, because he was being followed by some “creepy ass cracker” with a gun (according to Rachel Jeantel), and Zimmerman, because he didn’t know whether this “punk,” “asshole” Martin was armed. Their mutual fear of each other’s intentions escalated into a physical confrontation that spiraled into a life-and-death struggle.

I would argue that this whole wretched event might have been avoided if their hadn’t been a gun.

I served as a Neighborhood Watch volunteer for years, and I never carried a gun. I never felt as though I needed one. My chosen method of self-defense was a cellphone and a call to 911. That was also Zimmerman’s choice, but when fear overtook him, he reached for his gun. What if he had been armed instead with Mace or pepper spray? What if he had used a Taser or if his gun had had rubber bullets? What if he had shot him in the shoulder or the thigh? It suffices to say, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog post.

I don’t agree with defense attorney Mark O’Mara’s claim that Martin was also armed, but “with concrete” instead of a gun. However, I do think that both Zimmerman and Martin were scared that night. And a gun in the hands of a fearful individual made all the difference between life and death.

Culture, General, Politics, Social Issues

Tyranny of the Majority

In a democracy such as ours, the judicial branch is uniquely charged with protecting the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. This, it seems to me, is at the heart of both same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court. In the Prop 8 case, the justices are weighing whether 51 percent of California’s voters (note, it is NOT 51 percent of California’s population) can reverse a right bestowed upon a minority. In the DOMA case, the justices are weighing whether the legislative branch can pass a federal law that refuses to recognize the legitimate laws in a handful of states. In both instances, a minority is in need of intervention by an independent arbiter (the judicial branch) to protect it from the majority. If this is judicial activism, then it is as it was envisioned to be.

Culture, General, History, Life, Love, Politics, Social Issues

History in the Making

Much has been said, written and blogged about the two same-sex marriage cases up for argument before the Supreme Court tomorrow and Wednesday. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, for Cliff and me it has been about the fundamental American value of fairness. We have always believed that, as American citizens, we deserve the same equal protections enshrined in our Constitution with the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

The amendment’s equal protection clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. The meaning of the clause, according to its principal author, John Bingham, was that it conferred upon Congress the power to ensure that the “protection given by the laws of the States shall be equal in respect to life and liberty and property to all persons.” That’s all that same-sex couples like Cliff and I are asking: that we be treated equally under the law. Our marriage, although it took place in Vancouver, BC, is nonetheless recognized by a handful of states and jurisdictions but not by others. Is it too much to ask that we be treated equally throughout the land, that our lawful marriage be recognized and that its benefits be conferred. Equality is not a special right. It’s an American value.