Coils.
About a month ago, I was moonwalking (sadly not of the late Michael Jackson variety) near Haviland Hall on Berkeley campus at around 10 pm on a chilly November night. Now, mind you — I am a past Berkeley student, but not a current one. My beautiful wife (a Cal alumna) and I recently relocated to northern California in search of career aspirations — she to pursue her FNP at University of California, San Francisco, and I to conquer the world by first conquering Silicon Valley.
There I was, reminiscing of my dumb-and-stupid days while I walked this same campus more than a decade prior, when a white campus vehicle approached me. We had been near the wooden bridge that runs across the creek there and is beneath the wooden stairs that descends from University House. I had not yet realized that this was indeed a campus vehicle especially since I had been standing downstairs and was surrounded by a November night. So, when a woman emerged from it and walked towards the stairs with an apparent indication to walk down it, I naturally stood in attention and proceeded to make space so that the lady may walk past me. However, at this very moment; she too, stopped and turned back towards her vehicle. As she walked back, I with sure ears heard her speak the following sentence into her walkie talkie -
“It’s already coming off.”
With a gradual understanding that this had been a campus patrol vehicle and the woman had been an agent, I — a very imperfect man with an imperfect life — went into a fit of suppressed rage. I walked up the wooden stairs through the trees, but sadly the SUV had already left. As I stood then with my back to University House, I stared down the hills toward Wellman hall and towards the general direction of then-disappeared offending person. I let out a number of loud philosophical questions that I suspect would have brought forth no answer — should the target of those questions been there.
You may think that I overreacted, but I ask you to read the sentence again. That is not language fit on a public nor private campus. I pay for that person’s salary. I really do. Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) is absolutely wrong when he scoffs at the idea that his constituents’ tax dollars pay for his salary. They sure as rice do. It is our tax dollars that make possible the very infrastructure that create jobs like a congressman’s or a campus patrol officer’s.
There is an ongoing deterioration of the mind in our community right now. We are limited in our understanding of empathy, responsibility, and humility — while we glutton on perversion, hatred, and deprecation. A large percentage of us are unabashedly biased based on relatively superficial characteristics such as skin color and financial worth. Our children — our beacons of hope — show depressingly faltering signs. On that same fateful night when I had been likened to bad paint by a Cal patrol officer, I overheard a Cal student (I assume a freshman) complaining about “niggers” hanging out with girls and playing video games in his room, which I assume angered him because of the intrusions that was causing to his studies. That is a serious problem. However, he did not stop in his speech with just the utterance of the slur, but continued while I could hear him in a manner that worried me. Your perspective on the usage of words such as “niggers” and “malaun” notwithstanding — both of which have been uttered vilely during countless murders across continents — we should be able to agree that the two examples I provide here are symptoms of a greater societal illness.
The fabric of our society is based on something similar to what thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke laid out in their works regarding the “social contract”. This contract is what keeps us glued as a community and gives the community its purpose, or else we risk devolving into anarchy. Now, in year 2017 in nation United States, we have codified this abstract concept of a contract posed by an eighteenth century fugitive-from-blasphemy and a seventeenth century feminist into forms such as the Constitution, the United States Code, and state statutes. However, we must yet continue to harbor the original sentiments and needs that brought us together — that of common harmony and prosperity. Without the constant burning realizations of these original goals within our hearts like the burning “will of fire” (for “Naruto” aficionados) — our legal structure has been increasingly unable to withstand the growing absence of our moral support in its duty to uphold order. Our dependency on structural support systems that route monetary benefits from the taxpayer through the government to those in unfortunate situations — while such systems are necessary for any social constructs as complex as ours — has rendered our empathetic senses vestigial.
Think about it. In societies of yore, neighbors helped each other because that was needed for the survival of both. Now in the megapolis of today, we may hear the cry of a child at a neighbor’s home who has an auto-immune disease with a father who has no job prospects due to being out-priced, out-competed, and out-waged, but we seldom inquire. We should reverse the degenerating trends in our communities and return to the days when our grandfathers and grandmothers would spend their resting days reading books to our children. Whether that book is the “Bible”, the “Quran”, or “Sophie’s World” — that choice is with individuals.