Why The Police Shoot Young Black Men… And Other Stuff
Early on the evening of July 18, 2016, Arnold Rios Soto, a 23-year old autistic man walked out of the MacTown Panther Group Homes in Miami, Florida. He was carrying a toy truck. Arnold Rios Soto was a resident of the Panther Group Homes. He was not supposed to leave the facility unescorted. He might get lost. He might get in trouble. No one thought that he might get killed.
MacTown is a both a day training and residential care facility for people with special needs. They have been in business for more than 50 years, and they have an outstanding reputation for excellence.
As soon as the staff realized that Arnold had wandered off on his own, they sprang into action. Charles Kinsey, a 47-year old mental health worker employed by MacTown took off to find and retrieve Arnold. Kinsey had worked at the facility for just over a year and he had spent a lot of time with Arnold. He knew him well, and he felt Arnold would trust him, once he tracked him down. He didn’t think he could have gone far. He had not been missing for all that long.
Kinsey was the father of five children, a member of the local Circle of Brotherhood, a group whose mission is “Serving and Protecting out Community”; not all that dissimilar from MacTown’s mission: “Furthering the Independence of People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities”. It was a job he really enjoyed, and he was very good at it. This day, however, would prove particularly testing for Mr. Kinsey, in ways he never thought he would encounter working with autistic people.
Oh yes, and Charles Kinsey was black.
Fortunately, it did not take long for Charles Kinsey to find his missing ward. The young man had not gone far, only one block away, and was seated on the side of the road, cradling his toy truck. Charles sat down next to him to comfort him, calm him down and to ultimately accompany him back to MacTown.
They never made it.
Shortly after Mr. Kinsey seated himself and began to speak Arnold, the North Miami SWAT team arrived on the scene.
Seeing the heavily armed cops, Mr. Kinsey immediately lay prone on the ground, hands raised and began begging the cops not to shoot. Video clearly shows the entire incident.
“All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavior therapist at a group home.” Kinsey is also shown telling his patient, “please be still… lay down on your stomach.” He did not know how Arnold would react to all the noise, the cops, the guns, the massive stimulation. Anything might happen. And who had called the SWAT team about Arnold? That made no sense.
The team, had, in fact, not been called by MacTown at all, but had been alerted to a report of a man threatening to shoot himself. It had nothing to do with Charles or Arnold.
Kinsey’s entreaties were to no avail. Within minutes, Jonathan Aledda, one of the SWAT team officers fired three rounds, one of them striking Mr. Kinsey in the leg. After being shot, the police turned Kinsey on his back, handcuffed him and left him to bleed in the street for at least another 20 minutes. They did, however, pat him down for weapons. They did nothing to staunch the bleeding until an ambulance arrived and took Kinsey to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he was treated and survived the wound.
When asked why he had shot Kinsey, Officer Aledda responded “I don’t know”.
That may have been the most honest thing that Officer Aledda would ever say about the incident. But even if Officer Aledda did now know why he shot Mr. Kinsey, I do. He shot him because that was what he had been trained to do. Not trained by the Miami Police Department, but rather trained by his thousands of hours watching the media.
Officer Aledda was a graduate of the Florida Police Academy, as are all Florida police. The Academy program is six months long involving 960 classroom hours. Florida’s program is one of longer ones in the country. In Louisiana, for example, the Police Academy trains for only 360 hours. In Michigan, 594 hours. But those hours are devoted to a very wide range of topics, including, but not limited to:
· Enforcement of traffic and safety laws
· Investigation of accidents and crimes
· Arresting those involved in or suspect of criminal behavior
· Taking Statements from witnesses and gathering crime related evidence
· Conducting traffic
· Public relations
· First response in case of emergencies, traffic accidents, etc..
· Preparing for court cases
· Carrying out a service of court process such as warrants
· And so on…
That’s a lot to cover in 960 hours.
Ironically, to become a licensed barber in Florida, you have to train for 1,760 hours.
But let’s give the Miami PD the benefit of the doubt. Even though the Florida Police Academy does not list proper use of firearms and when to fire as a specific topic, let’s assume that the Academy devoted a full 100 hours of instruction just to this one topic. My guess is it’s probably closer to 10, but let’s say 100.
By the time the average American reaches the age of 21, they will have seen more than 30,000 hours of video, TV and movies.
That is a lot of ‘education’; a lot more than you get at the Police Academy. And, for those of us who have sat in on endless droning lectures, I am sure you can understand that those movies and TV shows and videos are a whole lot more engaging than a lecture, and that they no doubt leave a deeper impression.
Now, according to the American Association of Family Physicians, the average American child will, by the age of 18, have witnessed more than 200,000 violent acts on TV alone. That is a lot to absorb, particularly if you start at the age of 5 or so. 8,000 murders before they finish elementary school. And this is just TV. This does not include movies or online videos or music videos or video games.
That’s a lot of violence.
That’s also a lot of ‘education’, in the most persuasive form.
Because we know that stories are first and foremost tools of education. And what have we been educating people, over and over, hour after hour, day after day, for years on end since the age of 5? That cops shoot people. Stories, as you know, are an incredibly powerful educational tool for us. And how many of the stories on TV are police stories, or detective stories, and in how many of those stories do the police open fire on ‘the bad guy’ and save the day?
That is what they do in the movies and on TV. The shoot a lot. That would seem to be not just their job, but in fact the very purpose of their jobs, at least in the movies and on TV. That is what cops are supposed to do. They are supposed to shoot.
They take out their guns and they yell ‘freeze’ and then they fire. A lot. Not just one round, but repeatedly.
We do this on TV shows and in the movies over and over because it is exciting. It exudes danger, that ‘fat and sugar’ component of visual and aural stimulation. It’s what gets the ratings.
Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten myself in all this excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world that would blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’
That’s what cop Dirty Harry Callahan says. Note, he does not say, ‘Excuse me gentlemen, I am a police officer and how may I assist you today?’
He does not say that because that would NOT get ratings. And the media business is all about ratings. Shooting gets ratings. Killing the bad guys gets ratings. Cops who kill the bad guys are the heroes, that also gets ratings, and the objective of media, as we know, is to get ratings; not to educate. As it turns out, the education part is an unintended consequence, but one with enormous ramifications.
Now, Officer Aledda received, let’s say, 100 hours of firearms instruction at the Academy, but he also got 30,000 hours of instruction on an alternative view of what police are supposed to do in a ‘situation’. Which instruction do you think had a greater impact on Officer Aledda when the moment of crisis came that called for a quick decision?
The fact is that most police officers don’t fire a gun in their entire careers. When the Dirty Harry movie came out, Jack Ryan, a Queens DA who dealt in police shootings all the time was asked about it by The New York Times.
‘’Dirty Harry has more shootings in a movie’s half-hour than the New York City Police Department cop with the most shootings in his entire career,’’ Ryan told the paper. ‘’Cops, at least most of them, don’t like to shoot their guns. When I used to walk into a precinct, I could tell who the cop was who had just shot his gun. He looked like he had a terrible disease.’’
As it turns out, 95% of New York City’s 38,000 police officers have never fired their weapons. So the media education does not affect everyone, but clearly, our media training does have an impact on some more than others.
At 10:30 PM on February 9, 2019, Willie McCoy, a self-employed California rapper fell asleep in his car in a drive in at a Taco Bell in Vallejo, California. A Taco Bell employee called 911 to report that there was a man asleep in his car with the engine running and that although they had tried banging on the window several times and blowing horns, they could not rouse him. Maybe he needed assistance.
Six police officers responded to the call, arrived at the Taco Bell, and immediately turned on their body-cams. That is why the rest of this story is so well documented. The officers immediate un-holstered their guns and raised them at arm’s length, stood next to McCoy’s car and discussed what to do next.
At a later hearing, one of the officers involved said that McCoy had a gun on his lap, but no such gun is visible in the videos. In any event, what the video does show is that one of the officers says “if he reaches for it, you know what to do.”The video then shows McCoy waking up and lifting his arm to scratch his shoulder. The cops then start firing — 55 rounds in all, and all fired in 4 seconds. Among the police firing was Officer Ryan McMahon, who in 2018, had also shot and killed Ronell Foster, who resisted his order to stop. Foster was on a bicycle.
McCoy was, needless to say, dead on the spot. When the firing was over, one of the officers yelled out, “put up your hands.” A bit late.
The police officers who fired on McCoy fired 55 bullets in 3.5 seconds.
On July 6, 2016, 32-year old Philando Castile, a nutrition services supervisor at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School, was driving his car, accompanied by his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her four year old daughter. They were in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul, when they were pulled over, at 9PM, by a Saint Anthony, Minnesota, local policeman named Jeronimo Yanez.
Yanez asked Castille for his driver’s license and registration. Castille told Yanez even before he even reached into his pocket, that he wanted to make sure that Yanez knew he had a registered firearm with him. Yanez instructed Castille not to ‘reach for it’, and Castille replied that he was reaching for his license, not the gun. “Don’t pull it out”, Yanez yelled. “I’m not pulling it out!” Castille replied. Reynolds then added, “He’s not…” Yanez yelled again “Don’t pull it out!” and then Yanez shot Castille seven times.
What made this particularly interesting was that Reynolds began live streaming the event on Facebook from her phone. That’s how we have such an accurate account of what happened. Broadcast to the world, Reynolds watched in horror as her boyfriend was shot and then bled out and died on the seat next to her; her four year old daughter watching the entire thing from the back seat of the car.
“You just killed my boyfriend!” Reynolds says. Castile, still alive moans, “I wasn’t reaching for it.”
Because all of this was live streamed, (a bit surreal in itself) all of it was not only perfectly recorded, but shared with the world in real time.
“You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir” Reynolds also says, “Please don’t tell me he’s dead,” while Yanez exclaims: “I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hand open.”
At this point, another officer orders Reynolds on the ground, and still live webcasting, she is handcuffed.
So now we must ask the question: who taught Officers Aledda, Yanez, McMahon and the nearly 1,000 other police officers who shot and killed someone last year to act in that way? It was not the Police Academy. Most police never fire their weapons in their entire careers. But they learned to do that somewhere. Somewhere they had been educated that that was what a good policeman does. He un-holsters his gun, holds it at arm’s length, yells ‘freeze’ (or maybe not), and fires off and keeps firing until the bad guy is dead. No matter how many rounds it takes.
That, after all, is what Dirty Harry does, and Dirty Harry is the hero of the movie; he is not the bad guy. In Die Hard, Detective John McClane shoots and kills 10 people in 90 minutes. But in Die Hard 2 McClane has upped his body count to 13 kills. Die Hard With a Vengeance, 13 kills. A Good Day To Die Hard, 13 for John McClane but his son Jack gets to take out another 10. What a kid! What a cop! What heroes they are!
Of course, Rambo was not a cop, but he was also a good guy, doing good. In the first Rambo movie, First Blood, he only personally kills one person. But in the sequel, Rambo First Blood, part II, he personally kills 75. In Rambo III he personally nails 115; and by Rambo IV, he personally kills 254 people. In four movies, Rambo has personally killed 503 people, including his 59 confirmed Viet Nam War kills. Luis Garavito, the most notorious and worst serial killer in history only killed 138 people. He was no hero… at least not yet. Wait for the movie to come out.
When Edward R. Murrow said, in 1958, ‘this machine can educate’, he spoke more truth than he knew at the time. It does educate. You watch four, six, eight or even 11 hours a day, every day, day after day, year after year and it educates you. It trains you. It teaches you how you are supposed to live; what you are supposed to do a in clutch situation. How a REAL cop is supposed to act. A real hero cop, that is.
I have a friend, John Roberts, who is a senior pilot with Delta. He took me down to Atlanta once to their training facility there. They have mock-ups of the cockpits of all their planes that look and respond just like the real thing. He let me sit in while they put his through a few situations.
99% of the time, flying pretty much takes care of itself, he explained to me, but if something serious happens, some kind of mechanical failure, for example, your reactions have to be instant. You don’t have time to think. So the purpose of the simulator is to re-enact, over and over, potential problems so you can react instantly without really thinking.
To some extent, watching a never ending supply of movies and TV shows where the cops open up and keep shooting, and then come out as the good guys does the same thing as those flight simulators. It sets a patterned response in your brain, so you can react almost without thinking. The machine, as Edward R. Murrow noted, can educate.
In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves as computer programmer Thomas Anderson, AKA, Neo and Trinity walk into an office building carrying bags of guns and ammo. They open fire and kill everything and everyone in sight. They never stop firing, except to reload. They kill and kill and kill and kill. They are the heroes of the movie. They are saving humanity. It is very entertaining, but as it turns out, it is also very educational. By the time we get to the big shoot-out scene, we are deeply committed to Neo and Trinity defeating The Matrix. Their success, achieved through mass killing, fills us with both excitement and with joy. Clearly, that was the right thing for them to do.
Dylan Klebold and Eric Haus walk into a school building carrying bags of ammo and guns. They open fire and start killing everything and everyone they see.
James Holmes walks into a movie theater in Colorado; Stephen Paddock walks into a hotel room in Las Vegas carrying bags of guns and ammo; Omar Saddiqui Mateen walks into a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; Adam Lanza walks into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; Nikolas Cruz walks into a high school in Parkland, Florida.
Do you see a pattern here?
Keanu Reeves, nerdy computer programmer, plucked from obscurity, rises to the challenge, goes on a seemingly impossible mission to save mankind; has to carry out a very difficult task but in the end, against all odds, succeeds. Does this plot line sound familiar? Moses? Jesus? Spiderman? Star Wars? The plot line is plucked right from the pages of Joseph Campbell. It plugs into our most basic and fundamental connection with the enormous and all too often overlooked power of storytelling.
As Ed Murrow said so presciently, this machine can educate.
It was one thing when you could go to a movie theater once and see The Matrix one time. And it only ran for a few weeks. Then it was gone, unless you got it on VHS or DVD. But that took some effort. Now, however, you can watch The Matrix, The Terminator, Fist Full of Dollars, the violent shoot ’em up ending to Breaking Bad, Straw Dogs, you name it, as often as you want, and all for one low low monthly fee. And if The Matrix is not sufficient entertainment, 250 million people play Fortnite, where the concept is pretty much the same.
According to the gamers’ website Dedoimedo.com, who has taken the time to do the math, the average gamer ‘kills’ 100,000 people in 20 years of gaming.
“All right, two decades, 1 hour a day, 15 kills an hour, this translates into: 110,000 kills! And this is a serious underestimation. Most likely, people play 3–4 hours a day and manage up to 20–25 kills, depending on the game they’re playing. But let’s stick with the “official” figure. Hey, let’s round it. Juicy, solid, 100,000 kills!
Assuming that only about 10% of all computer users are gamers, this still leaves us with some 100–200 million people, each of which has committed 100,000 e-kills. Combined, we have killed some 1013 people. That’s the current world population, 3,000 times over and counting! Wow!”[1]
Watching violence on the screen once a week for 90 minutes in a movie theater may not be the best way to spend your time, but watching violence over and over, hour after hour for days, weeks, months, years on end clearly is not healthy. But that is where we are; that is what we have been doing for years. Are you surprised at the outcome? You shouldn’t be. It’s pretty predictable. Did you think you were inspiring your children to go to medical school with all the shot and wounded they see every day?
Now, educating our youth (and everyone else) over and over for years no end, that the best sure pathway to fame and success as a hero is to take a gun and shoot as many people as possible is probably not the best trait of our self-inflicted media world, but it is also not the most damaging. There are far worse results from our national habit and addiction.
One of the far worse results is that, watching this stuff, over and over, hour piled on hour, day after day educates you, in the most direct and yet subtle way, that in the end, everything always works out OK. No matter what, no matter how terrible things look, no matter how close we are to a terrible outcome, somehow, miraculously, and most often through the brave actions of a solitary hero, everything always comes out fine in the end.
After all, that is how every movie, TV show, video, you name it, ends. It always works out just fine, and YOU, the viewer, did not have to do a thing. All you had to do was sit there and in the end, everything did work out fine. You, in fact, never have to do anything, never have to lift a finger, and, no matter how awful things look, they always work out just fine without your having to do a thing. That’s educational.
This takes us back to the incredibly powerful impact that storytelling has on us as a species. Stories are there not just to entertain us, but also to teach us, and we are the ready and receptive students. And what are the stories teaching us? That over and over, no matter how terrible things look (“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die”), in the end, things are going to be just fine. The asteroid that was going to hit the earth and wipe out all living things makes a big splash in the Atlantic, a giant tidal wave washes over the east coast, but in the end, President Morgan Freeman says:
“Millions were lost, countless more left homeless, but the waters receded. Cities fall, but they are rebuilt. And heroes die, but they are remembered. We honor them with every brick we lay, with every field we sow, with every child we comfort and then teach to rejoice in what we have been regiven. Our planet, our home. So now, let us begin.”
-Morgan Freedman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact
Or, as Bill Pullman, playing President Thomas J. Whitmore says in Independence Day:
We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist and should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, ‘We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on, we’re going to survive.’ Today we celebrate our independence day!”
How incredibly inspirational! OK. A vastly superior alien race has crossed billion miles of interstellar space in ships the size of cities with weapons that can vaporize whole counties at the touch of a button (assuming the aliens have fingers); and all we have a few World War I vintage airplanes, but God we have spirit! (Do you recognize this plot from The Battle of Marathon where a handful of brave Athenians defeated tens of thousands of Persians? Do you recognize it from David vs. Goliath? It’s the same story line).
And in the end, who wins? Of course, we, the good guys do. And what did you, the viewer have to do to make that happen? Absolutely nothing — all you had to do was watch. So the machine that can teach is teaching you what, exactly? That if you do nothing but sit and watch, someone, somewhere will take care of it, make everything right and in the end everything will most certainly be all right, and you don’t have to do a thing. In fact, you are not supposed to do a thing.
And what happens to people who are taught this relatively simple and extremely comforting lesson over and over again, from the time they were five years old until the day they die? What is the take-away from the thousands and thousands of ‘classroom’ hours they spend immersed in this world? Are they encouraged to simply sit back and let the hero, who is sure to appear from somewhere, come in and make sure everything works out fine, because everything always works out fine? Someone is going to take care of it somewhere just before the end.
Is this why, according to a recent CBS News poll, an astonishing 40% of ‘young adults’ still live with their parents? 32% of those 18–32 were still living with their parents at home. Is this a case of arrested development for an entire generation that has essentially grown up in front of a movie screen; grown up in a home 24-hour a day movie, video and entertainment complex? What did you expect? Independence?
Watching movies and TV shows and videos over and over, ad infinitum teaches you over and over again that in the end, everything will work out fine, because it always does, even if it seems to happen miraculously and at the 11th hour and 59th minute, someone, some superior force, some superior being, some mommy or daddy figure, is going to come in and save the day. Hooray! And what better place to find them than, at home?
And how simple the solutions to the most complex problems turn out to be. When Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise has his ship taken over by Norman, the android computer and reconfigured to blow up if anyone messes with him, Kirk is able out wit the incredibly advanced computer android. Kirk tells the incredibly advances super computer who can run a whole galaxy, “everything Mudd (the evil but loveable nemesis character) tells you is a lie”, to which, Mudd tells Norman, “I’m lying.”
Suddenly, Norman, the seemingly most advanced and sophisticated computer android in the universe is flummoxed by Kirk’s sheer brilliance:
NORMAN: You say you are lying, but if everything you say is a lie then you are telling the truth, but you cannot tell the truth because everything you say is a lie. You lie. You tell the truth. But you cannot for. Illogical! Illogical! Please explain.
Suddenly, smoke pours of out Norman’s head and it’s all over. How simple that was.
Clearly, every major seemingly insurmountable problem can be solved, if only the right person were to come along… and they will. They always do.
So you can see that in fact, Global Warming is not really such a problem. OK, I admit it looks bad, but clearly, someone, somewhere, something is going to come along at the last second and save us. Because that is how things always end up. OK in the end.
Do we, personally, have to do anything about Global Warming? Well, not really. I mean, you can drive a Prius if that makes you feel better, or you can change your incandescent light bulbs to LEDs if that makes you feel better. Or you can hashtag #savetheplanet, which is about as good as the LED light bulb switch. That always helps. But it doesn’t really matter because you know, on some very basic and rudimentary yet certain level, that in the end, everything is going to work out just fine. You don’t know how, exactly, but some genius inventor will come up with some solution because they always do. That, after all, is how the world works, isn’t it? So there is nothing to worry about, really. This is a non-issue. It will be fine in the end.
Ironically, Global Warming, which may be the greatest problem that has ever confronted our species, gets scant attention in both the media and in Hollywood, which is really the best measure of media attention.
During the Presidential debates since we first became aware of the potential problem of putting too much CO2 into the atmosphere, there has not been one question about Global Warming. Not one.
When it comes to Hollywood movies, there have been more than 500 zombie movies made, not to mention TV series. Zombies are very popular fare in the movies. Not much chance of a Zombie attack coming any time soon. When it comes to Global Warming, on the other hand, the number of Hollywood movies are far and few between.
The only ones I can think of are Waterworld, in which, due to global warming, all the ice in the world melts and all the land is covered in water, and everyone lives on boats or floating island. This was not a documentary.
The other movie is The Day After Tomorrow, which starts as a kind of science based global warming but soon becomes global freezing, with glacial like ice covering New York, where the action takes place. How this happens is not really very well explained, but the why it happens is quite clear.
Ice and snow covering Manhattan is both dramatic and easy to film. It’s exciting to sledge across the frozen frontier. Heat, on the other hand, is not so exciting. All your main characters can do is say, repeatedly, “Good God it’s hot”, and then die. This makes for bad movies, even it if it is a bit closer to reality. No happy endings there.
Which brings me to the last, and to my mind, the absolute worst thing that the machine has taught us over these past fifty years; far worse even than the Deus Ex Machina happy ending religion.
And that worst thing is passivity.
Spending your life watching things, for that is what you are doing, whether it is the news or a Knicks game or a movie or YouTube videos or Netflix; but spending a good four, six, eight or even 11 hours a day watching things, as opposed to doing things, teaches you something. It teaches you, over and over again, that your job is, in fact, to watch. Your job is to do nothing. Because that is the very definition of watching — not doing.
Watching things is now the very foundation of our society, as once farming or hunting or building Cathedrals was. But no longer. Now we are a society based on watching.
And what does watching teach us? What does watching require? It requires passivity. Passivity is the very foundation of watching.
“Sit quietly and watch,” your mother no doubt admonished you as a child. We don’t like people who yell things out in movie theaters. We don’t even like people who rustle candy wrappers. We like people who sit as silently as the dead, who imitate a block of cement whilst watching. That’s great watching behavior. That’s what we have been practicing over and over since childhood. Good watching.
And we are all now, after fifty years, all very good watchers.
And let us remember that the very idea of spending your time ‘watching’ things, simply did not even exist more than half a century ago. Then, in those halcyon days of yore, people actually DID things. But those days are long gone. We don’t really trust people who actually do things — unless they are characters in movies or TV shows. We like people who sit quietly and don’t rustle that candy wrapper.
So spending your life watching teaches you (this machine can teach) that your job in life is to sit quietly and watch, and it also teaches us that if we do nothing (the very foundation of sitting quietly and doing nothing), everything will be fine in the end because someone, some hero, is going to come along at the last moment and fix it — all without our having to lift a finger.
Now, of course, we still do have a bit of the remnant feeling, somewhere deep in there, that well, perhaps we should do something, no?
And, so, yes, we do actually do something when it comes to really serious problems that might need our attention, that we might be able to actually change. So when Boko Haram, the Islamic Fundamentalist sect in Nigeria seized 276 girls and took them captive to turn them into Islamic wives for their warriors, we all felt we should do something,
And what did we do? Well, we all got very concerned for a day or two, and then, Michelle Obama sent out a Tweet with the hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls. And so we all followed suit. We all, (all of those of us who really care, that is); we all tweeted #bringbackourgirls. That was good!
According to The BBC, more than one million people tweeted #Bringbackourgirls, including such luminaries as Malala Yousafzai and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s #Bringbackourgirls was retweeted 11,000 times. US musician Chris Brown’s got 30,000 retweets.
I have no doubt that when the retweets really got going, the leaders of Boko Haram were shaking in their boots in their hiding places and quickly decided that the best course of action would be to bring back the girls.
Only kidding.
Of the 276 girls who were kidnapped, some escaped on their own, but 219 are still missing, and their school, The Government Girls Secondary School is a broken ruin, as is their village of Chibok.
Boko Haram, has, by the way, killed more than 20,000 people and displaced two million others.
Well, that was great. That was some real action. That was brave. That was empowering.
And then you know what happened? Angela Jolie retweeted the hashtag. Now THAT’S power!
I, for one, was quite astonished that half of Boko Haram did not come streaming out of the Sahara with their hands up and the freed girls ahead of them. “Please! No more hashtags! OK?”
If we had only had Twitter in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland to kick off The Second World War. #WermachtGoHome tweeted Prime Minister Winston Churchill. And the German army turned around and called off the remainder of the Bliztkreig.
When it comes to a really serious crisis, a crisis that really threatens the earth — you know like when that asteroid was going to wipe out all life on earth in Deep Impact; but in this case, when putting too much CO2 into the atmosphere means that we are going to drive the temperatures up so high that life will not be possible, and the oceans will swallow up the land (just like Deep Impact!!!), how do we respond?
How do we respond to the very real and present danger of Global Warming?
Well, it’s pretty simple. We have, after all, been pre-conditioned for the past fifty years both to be passive and to believe that ‘someone, something will come along and save us’, so we are inclined to do nothing.
Well, not completely nothing. That would be terrible. So we, um, change our light bulbs from incandescent to LED. That will help. And we drive a Prius, but I mean only if we are REALLY dedicated. That’s the equivalent of the hashtags. Makes us feel better. But to actually do something? Come on! What? We are the Passive People. We don’t do ‘things’ — we just like to pretend that we do. We are great cheerleaders from the sidelines.
“Let’s Go Knicks!!!” as we watch the game, with the emphasis on watch.
And what, after all, is Global Warming but another show, another game.
Banning plastic straws to ‘save the ocean’? I am all for it. #savetheocean.
In fact, you will be happy to know that Twitter tells me that #globalwarming, the #1 global warming hashtag, by the way, reaches 1.1 million people, has 27.4K unique posts and has, (get this!) 4.8K average likes. #Fashion, on the other hand, and just by way of comparison, reaches 711.4 million people, has 81.5 million unique posts and has 511.6 average likes. So the world may be coming to an end, but we are all going to look really good for it.
Now, it’s not that we are not aware of Global Warming. In the US, in a 2017 study, there was an astonishing 97.7% ‘awareness rate’ of global warming. That was surpassed only by Japan with a 98.9% awareness rate. That means that pretty much everyone knows about Climate Change. But is anyone doing anything about it? Not really. And why? Because, a) we have spent the past 50 years carefully teaching ourselves to be passive and b) because while we were doing that, we were also teaching ourselves that passivity is fine because in the end, someone is going to come along and solve our problem. Problem Solved!!
The really insidious thing here is that the media, over 50 years of assiduously educating us every day for hours on end, has taught us that our real role in society is to do nothing but watch things unfold before us. Just as it taught police officers to empty their weapons at the slightest chance to become heroes, it taught us that the best policy is to do nothing. And then, when doing nothing is the norm, well, sending out a hashtag or actually buying a Prius, well, that is really extending yourself; that is above and beyond. That is an exhausting day’s work for sure.
And, of course, in our world so circumscribed and built upon the double whammy of watching and storytelling, we do, from time to time, get a ‘hero’ who emerges from the murk to step up and save us.
As they said to Neo in The Matrix (you are the ‘one’). Of course, no doubt Dylan Klebold also thought he was ‘the one’. But, never mind. Someone will figure something about how to end all these mass shootings.
Let’s deal with another massive and seemingly insurmountable problem — The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Of course, this is not an end of the world as we know it problem. It’s just a canary in the coalmine problem. We can’t keep throwing our garbage, particularly our plastic, which was made for about a nanosecond’s worth of use but then has the unfortunately trait of lasting for a thousand years… we can’t keep throwing it into the ocean.
As of now, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a great whirling gyre of mostly plastic trash, is three times the size of France. That is, it is huge. It is 1.6 million square kilometers. Huge! Enormous. Almost incomprehensibly giant. And growing fast. It is sobering that one of the largest islands on the planet is in fact made entirely of garbage, and entirely of garbage we have made in the past 30 years or so. So that’s a real problem.
Now, we could, I suppose, ban plastic. That would be a drag, but we seem to have survived as a species for about a million years, give or take a few, without plastic. Probably could do it again, if we had to. Or, we could just kill the oceans. At the moment, we seem to be opting for the latter, but as we are a passive species, this should not come as a surprise.
However! As always, there is going to be a happy ending. There is going to be a hero.
Boyan Slatt, an 18-year old Neo, Spiderman, Luke Skywalker product of the mass media, a drop out from one year of college, went diving at the age of 16 off the coast of Greece, saw some plastic floating in the ocean and had an idea. Instead of trying to gather up the plastic, let the ocean’s currents take it to us, he said, as he has said in many many speeches he has given all over the world since then.
He dropped out of college after one semester and raised $2 million on a GoFundMe site. His plan? To build a giant kind of net built of out floating booms and skirt and go out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and gather up plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and send it back to shore.
The plastic that was gathered up would then be recycled into other plastic stuff, iPhone cases, furniture and such. Of course, after a few years, they too would be just more plastic junk, but let’s not let a few small problems deter us from ‘the one’ and the solution we have all been waiting for so we can continue to do nothing.
Slatt’s bigger problem was the scale of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch- twice the size of the State of Texas. Five times the size of France. Now, if you have ever been to either Texas or France, you know the idea of scooping up either two Texas or five Frances with a net, even if it was 2000 feet long, is about as realistic as moving the State of New Jersey across the country using a teaspoon. And about on the same scale.
Well, you could do it, if only there was enough will power — or as Dorothy is told, if you close your eyes and think hard enough about it, you can go home. And if Peter Parker could become Spiderman by being bitten by a radioactive spider, then why not this?
And so, based on this fantastic story, and who does not like a good story, Slatt was able to raise some $40 million online and from foundations, to carry out his vision, even though he had absolutely no qualifications to do this.
Slatt had told his donors and vast audiences to whom he spoke that if he was able to get the project going, he would be able to clear 90% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by the year 2040.
Now, just a bit of basic maths here, just for a moment.
The boom was 2000 feet long. It was going to be towed by two tugs in tandem, one on each end, forming a kind of U shape to scoop up the plastic. To simplify this, let’s say that the booms made a circle with a radius of 1000 feet. Thus, the area that that would encompass would be 3.14 million square feet. Now, there are 10,763,910.41671 square feet to a square kilometer. So let’s call it 10 million, just to make life easy. So more or less, it would take 3 complete passes with the boom and net to capture 1 square kilometer.
Let’s say, to make life easy, it takes a day to fill the boom and empty it to take the plastic back to shore to be recycles. So Slott figures he can extract one square kilometer a day.
The patch, as you will recall, is 1.6 million square kilometers. We will ignore the fact that it keeps growing daily, and for the purposes of this exercise, assume it to be static. So it would take him, 1.6 million days to clear 100%, but he says 90%, so that will only take him 1.4 million days. As there are 365 days in a year, this will only take him 3,945 years. So he is just a tad bit off on his finishing date.
Not that this deterred anyone, or at least a lot of people, from sending him money and putting him a lot of TV shows and TED talks and stuff like that. Well, why not. That is, after all, exactly what we are conditioned to in a crisis. He ticked all the boxes. Great story.
As it turned out, when he finally got the money, built his floating boom and skirts, got the ships to tow it all out to the Great Floating Garbage Patch, none of it worked at all. The booms fell apart; the vast majority of the plastic floating in the Pacific is micro plastic that no net can catch. What he could catch blew out of the enclosure.
He had been warned by engineers who knew what they were doing that the idea was ridiculous, but he had dismissed them for their ‘negativity. He did get, however, get 106,000 followers on Twitter. Meanwhile, there are now more than 5.2 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the ocean, much of it micro-plastic that finds its way into living things, into fish and ultimately back into us. It is a really serious problem. The simple solution would be to ban plastics. But that would be too unpleasant. Not right for a passive society used to happy endings. The world does not work that way, not at least if you get your impression of how the world works through your exposure to the media.
As Ed Murrow said, this machine can educate.
[1] https://www.dedoimedo.com/life/e-kill.html
This is derivative of my new book: Don’t Watch This: How The Media Are Destroying Your Life.
