Smooth Criminals

It has been said that a Neo-Conservative is little more than a Liberal who has been mugged. As someone who has myself endured street violence at the hands of criminals, I too have struggled to come to grips with the chasm between the youthful ideals I once so held so confidently, and the stark realities of life on this Earth.

In my case, I was attacked by a gang of African-Americans on a winter afternoon, a little over twelve years ago. They cornered me on the side of a busy street, and attempted to kill me, but in the end made off only with my belongings instead of my life. And I asked all the questions a victim would normally ask: "Why Me?!" "What did I ever do to deserve this?!" "Where do I go from here?!" For months I felt very much like a discarded piece of garbage. And I finally realized why: it was because that was what my assailants' lives were like. They were themselves like garbage, and interacting with them made me feel what they felt inside.

The depression proved only a transitory experience, but like the venomous sting of a scorpion, the resentment towards my would-be murderers lingered. It festered and grew, blossoming into a profound hatred that bordered on racial bigotry. In trying to make sense of their nonsensical actions, I found myself taking the intellectually easy route, and believing in simplistic generalizations. All blacks were criminals, and could never be trusted... or so I told myself.

But at some point I was struck by the age-old adage: that which you cannot forgive, you pass on. If I was unable to find some way of letting go of what had been done to me, I would eventually commit an even more heinous act of criminality, driven by pure vengeance, and I would prove worse than they. So I had to embark upon the difficult path towards forgiveness.

In this case, history was my greatest ally, for it explained how humanity in general, and America in particular, arrived at the despairing state it currently finds itself in. And when one approaches the problem of African-American criminality in the historical context of the brutality they as a people have been subjected to, a completely new and contrasting image emerges.

History is replete with acts of aggression. At various points in time throughout the centuries, as many as one in every fifty people were killed by one vicious warlord or another, from Alexander the Great to Ghengis Khan. And the threshold to satisfy a casus belli has for the most part been extremely low. World War I, as an example, destroyed tens of millions of lives, and was begun by a single assassination of a fairly low-level official, which triggered a complex web of international treaties and led to one of the most costly conflicts to ever befall humanity.

So for African-Americans to have endured centuries of slavery, segregation, pervasive racism, and police violence, and to not have resorted to full-scale war against the rest of America, in my mind makes them one of the most resilient, dignified and moral people on the face of this Earth. It is an unprecedented example of collective pacifism on behalf of an occupied people. And it is an example which the rest of the world should pay close attention to, because African-Americans have not just survived the last half a millennium in a hostile environment, but have thrived, surpassing entire nations in overall wealth and productivity.

As for what happened to me, it is but a drop of rain in the ocean. It is of so little importance in this weary world that I went an entire decade without hardly mentioning it to anyone. And I may just go a decade more, because as bad as my experience was, it could just as easily have happened to anyone else, black, white, rich or poor. In the words of Ecclesiastes: "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."