Point of View: Lower the Flags

They go for Christmas in a big way in Palm Springs, where we’ll be at the end of the month, with lights and ornaments all around. Yet even if I weren’t jaded when it comes to the mandatory bonhomie of the season, it seems all the more ludicrous to submit this year given the recent baffling refusals of grand juries in Missouri and New York to try police officers who killed unarmed citizens, one who had been told to get up on the sidewalk and another who was placed in an outlawed, and fatal, choke hold for selling single cigarettes.

Hardly tidings of comfort and joy for a nation that purports to value fairness and has declared its citizens to be free and equal. What lives were protected, what property, by these deaths?

We’re always lowering flags to half-staff, and for good reason, though one wonders if they oughtn’t to have been lowered for the nation in the wake of these cases, so that people could reflect on what we’ve become — a house gravely divided, with liberty and justice for some.

“We’re the good guys,” a local policeman said to my wife, after she’d gone some time ago to investigate the source of raised voices she’d heard on a street at the boundary of our property, as if she, who was simply wondering what all the shouting was about — it was a traffic stop — needed reminding.

And, by and large, the police here have been good guys, wielding power with restraint and responding admirably to crises whenever they arise, which I guess is pretty much daily. I would like to think that here a certain equanimity exists that might not be found in other places, where mutual distrust reigns rather than fellow feeling. But that may be a rose-colored view.

All I know is, power’s a heady thing, especially if firepower underwrites it.