America's Secret Police

[Labster]

Heinleins 'Crazy Years' have arrived.  The only thing he got wrong is the date.

Something Arthur C Clarke lamanted upon before his own death, that they were right about the whats, just wrong about the whens.

Remind me, are the Crazy Years before or after society decides incest is okay?

Honestly I'm starting to look at this all as a sign that people in general are becoming less crazy.  For four hundred years in this country, it was okay for an officer of the law to go out and lynch a black man.  Then, for the past fifty, it was okay if they did it, so long as they pretended that wasn't what they were doing.  Now, it's suddenly not okay.  This feels a lot like collective progress.

At first, the only people to march in the streets for blacks were the fringe religions, the Quakers and Shakers, and freedmen.  And then it became an army.  In the 1960s, it started in the churches, but then it was black sanitation workers, and then the whole black community, joined by college students and Jews.  But, fuck, man, look at these marches, and it looks like everyone is upset about it.  White, black, brown, young and old.  All in recognition that the social contract is broken, and has been for centuries.  This, to me, looks a lot like mass sanity.  An outbreak of sanity in an outbreak of coronavirus.

I think the speed with which this is happening is catching people by surprise.  A widely quoted paraphrase of Vladimir Lenin goes something like this: there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen.*  As a climate scientist, I have to tell you, tipping points are like this.  With a dose of 2020 hindsight, it's easy to see why these things are happening.  I hesitate to say that it's the last gasp of a dying breed of racism, but we have made a great leap on civil rights that can't easily be erased.

Case in point is that "Black Lives Matter Plaza" in Washington D.C.  You know that's permanent, right?  It's already on Google Maps and Apple Maps.  If you disagree with me, tell me how a mayor will suddenly decide to remove the sign with an electorate full of blacks, federal employees, Foggy Bottom boys, and military brass will decide to take that down.  Or tell me how demographics will shift in the next 20 years when they haven't in the last 100?  In fifty years, there will be a monument there with a plaque and everything commemorating how the President had peaceful protestors shot and gassed so he could make a make a photo op.  How he had them gassed in the middle of a pandemic of a respiratory disease, as a response to a strangling by police.  This will remain as a reminder to every president in the future not to overreach.

Is it going to be painful?  Sure.  But if you look at the history of race relations with the police, it's about time we share that pain.

So seriously, fuck Heinlein and fuck his air fee.  We all need to breathe.

 * Wikiquote has the original and it's a less poetic version, in the context of historians, but it's kind of a Beam Me Up Scotty and much better as popular culture rewrote it.