The Summer of Hate

http://www.alternet.org/visions/summer-hate



This summer, the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, has been a very bad season for any instantiation, anywhere, of Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.” From our immobilized Congress to explosions in Pakistan, from corruption in Afghanistan to war in Ukraine, from the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India to the ungoverned spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa, from the breakdown of negotiations in Gaza to deadly confrontations between police and unarmed citizens from Philadelphia to Albuquerque, a restless undoing boils across the globe.

As I write, I listen to a radio remembrance of the useless toll of World War I, with its millions of honorable dead. Following that, a spoken essay about the birth of the atomic age at Hiroshima. Rumination about the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is mixed with speculation about whether we are playing with fire on the dry-kindled brink of something like World War III.

“Chickens coming home to roost” is what a voice says about some catastrophe. It’s the aphorism—of which my grandmother was quite fond—that catches my attention. She always used it to describe the legacy of slavery: the way in which children are born full of light and joy, but later, when they’re old enough to work the fields, return at the end of the day with cruelty lurking behind their eyes.

My thoughts shift to the Blackwater guards who gunned down seventeen innocent civilians in Baghdad in 2007. Weeks before that incident, which proved a tragic turning point in the supposed quest to win Iraqi “hearts and minds,” the State Department had launched an investigation into the criminality and chaos for which Blackwater was already responsible. That investigation was blocked outright: Blackwater’s spokesman in Iraq told the State Department’s lead investigator that he should watch himself, because the Blackwater executive could kill him “at this very moment and no one could or would do anything about it.” The investigator was later ordered home for “disrupting” the American Embassy’s relationship with Blackwater.