Worst Case

My son, Luke, copes hourly with a host of anxieties. Often, his go-to mechanism for dealing with the fears his imagination conjures is to repeat scripted talk tracks he pulls up. These are accessed like CDs from his memory and retold as if they had happened yesterday instead of, say, 15 years ago. By revisiting whatever the episode, he allays a current concern by relating to a comparable moment he actually lived.

Lately, he often repeats a script about a pre-school friend, who “couldn’t live at home anymore because he hit his mom…. he had to go to an institution.” He brings this up because, when he gets exceptionally frustrated and overwhelmed, he bites his mother. Now, this isn’t new behavior; he has been doing it for years, infrequently enough so it’s never become a preoccupation, but not such a rarity it can be deemed an aberration instead of a possibility stress can induce. Sue has always possessed the strength and fortitude to look past each episode, even while making clear how unacceptable such behavior is. What’s changed is he is now 6’ 5” and a 20-year old man, the act more an assault than annoyance, really a crisis if he doesn’t heed his mother’s screams to stop. It’s not lost on him that the matter is serious; and so he paces and reminds himself of his friend’s fate long ago, understanding it could be his if he can’t resist the urge to act out. Kind of a personal hell. Have I mentioned autism sucks?

It’s a mean joke God plays on control freaks by issuing them a son with behavioral issues they struggle to temper. The love and affection you feel is only eclipsed by the worry you shoulder as his safety and welfare become gradually harder to personally ensure. Luke’s lifetime has educated me about the best and worst society offers our intellectually disabled, and whatever hope and confidence the cream can provide fails to offset the ghosts conjured by the dregs too often on display. Sue and I have always been by his side to protect him; yet and still, the tender mercies we see all the time aren’t enough to beguile us from the sharks swimming outside our safety net. Sadly, much of my fear on that score emanates from those I’m supposed to trust most in the pinch of a mental health crisis.

To view police publicly torture and kill Daniel Prude on YouTube one is required to sign in and prove their age, a process reserved for sexual, violent and otherwise “deeply disturbing” content. Watching Rochester’s worst with badges casually laugh and abase a man as he struggles to survive, and whose brother actually called them to help, I see the monsters under my bed. This documented outrage is as bad as anything my insomnia can create at 4:00 AM., something that will haunt me until I go into the dirt.

Rochester Police responded to a taxpayer in crisis and murdered his brother. The primary focus of news coverage of the atrocity has been on when they got busy suffocating him, but from the start of the encounter Daniel Prude was afforded no humanity at all. It was raw and wet that night, actually snowing, and Prude was naked, yet it never occurred to any of the several officers present to try and find a blanket or some clothing for a citizen who had not hurt a soul. He lay naked on the freezing pavement as his tormentors laughed about his plight, casually chatting as he writhed about.

Naked with his hands cuffed behind his back and a bag over his head, the cops still weren’t satisfied he was benign enough for their liking, so they killed him without breaking their conversation. The whole thing resembles a mob execution, not an arrest, let alone “helping” to subdue a citizen undergoing a mental crisis. There are an infinite number of ways for a man to die; one could think all afternoon and not come up with one more vile and degrading than how Daniel Prude left this world. Whether his killers were “adhering to procedure” hardly matters when the lack of empathy is so overt, the indifference to an unclothed and unarmed man’s distress so pronounced. If they followed the book, it needs to be shredded because any excuse for this is less about policing than it is about subjugating and destroying.

My son is not so far removed from Daniel Prude, the potential for him to have a meltdown is always there. Mostly, Luke brings nothing but joy to all he encounters, but when he does something he knows was wrong, he gets highly agitated and requires consoling to distract him from his guilt and regret. He can’t modulate his feelings in those situations and without reassurance things can quickly get worse. Were Sue and I not present, or an empathetic teacher or therapist, it’s entirely possible he could become inconsolable and beyond reasoning. Certainly crisply responding to questions and commands would be out of the question. Were a cop or cops to treat him hostilely without quarter, there is no question he would begin to flail. At that point he’d be at the mercy of…. who? Rochester sadists?!

Nationwide, the odds of a mentally challenged person being killed during a police encounter are more than fifteen times higher than the rest of us. Moreover, incredibly, a number of states require police to first certify a person is dangerous to others before they can be involuntarily hospitalized. One shudders at what such “assessments” look like. So where am I to find consolation? A reed of hope my son will receive the dignity Prude was denied? What is available to reassure that my boy would be treated differently?

That obvious answer is why Black Lives Matter exists and why, for the sake of this nation, its mission must be embraced as synonymous with basic patriotism, a sensible adjunct for civic duty. The notion my son’s basic safety, let alone civil rights, may only be found in the luck of his skin tone confirms why kneeling, and marching, and confronting are essential aspects to what surviving MAGA and its retrograde nihilism looks like. That one could be tempted to seek consolation by embracing white privilege as reassurance their loved one won’t die like a dog on wet pavement is exactly the heart of it. Whatever racial progress has been made since segregation and legal lynching, expecting it to somehow assuage what video footage documents on a daily basis is absurd, the addled reasoning of one with different standards for fundamental rights in mind.

Trump and his nefarious poodle, Barr, are now all in with the premise BLM is a criminal enterprise bent on chaos and violence. They know bigots hear nothing but the sweet sound of rationalization, a justification to finally act on their hatred. The image of white cowards armed to the teeth confronting unarmed black protesters is as apt a portrait of our national brokenness as could be painted. The fact one police union after another endorse Trump illustrates clearly circling the wagons won’t end anytime soon, and not without significantly more pressure on all fronts. It is decent and right to help coerce such change. Nothing could be more American, more fundamental to our mission statement. The crossroads we are at requires nothing less. Do it for your country, your family, your own sense of honor. Do it for Daniel Prude….. and Luke. BC