Self Destruction, You’re Heading For Self Destruction While The Band Played On
You knew it wasn’t going to end well. Maybe that’s why you avoided watching the news. The young man crying on the stand. The judge who had for his ringtone “God Bless the USA” which is a Republican anthem in Trump rallies. Yet when The View is interrupted when there is a verdict, you know it’s not going to be good. Yet even you are shocked when the young man is acquitted. Yes, one of the men served time in prison and did awful things. But you are reminded of what Gandhi said: An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind. You shouldn’t be shocked yet you are. But this isn’t new.
When you are six, a month away from seven, you are recovering from having Scarlet Fever a month before. A verdict is delivered in the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk. George Moscone was the mayor of San Francisco. You see pictures of him with his wife and children, their smiles big and wide. You see pictures of Harvey Milk with leis around his neck, holding a rainbow flag. You ask your grandfather what the rainbow means. “Oh, he liked The Wizard of Oz,” Grandad says quickly, then changes the channel.
Dan White was found guilty of “diminished capacity.” The news stays off that week. Your father who lives in San Francisco comes to visit you in your suburban town Pleasant Hill. Years later you find out your mother and grandparents insist he comes to see you where it’s safe. They did the same thing several months before when the Mayor and Supervisor Milk were murdered, when Dianne Feinstein announced the news in a blood stained suit. Days before in a far-off place named Guyana a Congressman, a mother, and two journalists were shot and killed.
Miles away, people take a potion they don’t wake up from. Oh yeah, their deaths become a punchline to a joke. You don’t try to understand it. Six years later when Dan White takes his final breaths of oxygen in his garage, You remember what your mother said about him years before: he was a sad man.
When you are nineteen, a month away from twenty, you are finishing up your second semester of college. You have classes in the morning so you can come home, write, then watch As the World Turns and Guiding Light, then go to work as a student shelver. On the last day of April, you are getting ready for work when you hear there are verdicts in the Rodney King case. You shouldn’t be shocked but you are when all four policemen are declared not guilty.
The next day you miss your English class and watch TV all day. On the radio, a talk show host says “Ray Charles could have seen that tape and found those guys guilty.” You call your mother telling her to come home, you are scared. She does but was delayed because of delays on the commuter train. The finale for The Cosby Show was delayed. The next day on MTV, the hosts of Yo! MTV Raps asks their fans not to riot tonight. The segment is ended with the white VJS singing “We are the World” while the Yo! MTV Raps hosts and Karyn Bryant sing Self Destruction, you’re heading for self-destruction. You are reminded of this when Rodney King dies twenty years later of accidental drowning with cocaine and PCP in his system.
When you are forty-eight, six months from forty-nine, you take a day off work. It’s slow, plus you want to watch the certification of Joe Biden’s win. What you do watch is chaos. You see a woman taken away from a gurney. You see angry white men storm Nancy Pelosi’s office. You worry about Jackie Spier, who was on the airstrip near Jonestown and was shot in 1978, then saw her mentor Congressman Leo Ryan die. You worry about Dianne Feinstein now in her eighties.
The next day, you work half a day at work. You have lunch. Then you get dizzy. You throw up in the bushes, then you go to the bathroom. When the nurse finds you half an hour later, you are there but not there. She takes your blood pressure then calls 911. You go to the emergency room. You tell the doctor it’s been a stressful time: you are an essential worker. COVID-19. You watched the insurrection on television. He tells you you syncoped, you fainted. He tells you to stay away from stress. You try not to laugh.
When you are forty-nine, six months from fifty, the young man in Wisconsin is acquitted of all charges. It’s a day after the 34th anniversary of the Jonestown genocide. Jackie Spier announced this week she will be retiring next year. On Twitter, people are thanking Jesus for the not guilty verdicts. The young man’s spokesman says he has lots of plans. You’re sure his victims Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum had lots of plans too. You can’t watch the news. You can’t risk getting upset and fainting again. You do remember the MTV Raps hosts rapping self-destruction/you’re heading for self-destruction. You also remember an old Temptations song that went; Evolution, revolution, gun control, sound of soul, Shooting rockets to the moon, kids growing up too soon.Politicians say more taxes will solve everything.
And the band played on.
